Three years to startup
patio11: Three years into opening my business I'm at the point where, if I wanted, I could go full-time with it and not worry too much about my ability to put food on the table and a roof over my head.  I suppose if I wanted to I could apply to a seed-fund, although candidly speaking taking other people's money is not something I see doing in my future unless it is in return for providing them goods or services.My suggestion for you and any other person who wants to work on nights and weekends: above all else, ship something fast.  Most people throw in the towel because they can't get into the positive feedback loop, it seems like it will take forever until they can get there, then ork gets busy and the baby gets sick and...  and then they've forgotten about it.Nothing replaces paying customers for giving ongoing motivation, feedback as to how to make your application better (via asking directly and reading the data about how they actually use it), and giving money to fund buying the things that you can't produce yourself (like, in your case, managed hosting).Incidentally: although I'm definitely on the quick side of the bell curve, I took money for a product which was written (including the website to sell it and everything) in eight days.  There is nothing wrong with taking six months to write something, but if you could have broken that into Phase 1: 1 month and Phase 2: 5 months you'd have money coming in, a website collecting links, customers giving suggestions, and MUCH less risk of building something no one wanted.