##Footnotes

¹ Consulting realities: Most of @ASmartBear's post focuses on the difficulties / painful realities, but he ends with this quote:

Most consulting companies don’t make much profit, and it’s one in a thousand that has the discipline to launch a successful product during off-hours. If you’re going to make it happen, you yourself need to be serious, disciplined, and relentless.

But you can do it.

And if you do, you’ve just self-financed a startup, made a nice living, mitigated much of the risk of product-only startups, and built a great team in the process.
Jason Cohen The unfortunate math behind consulting companies

² Founder salaries: I have heard some gripes recently that barely funded companies are having their founders take home a "regular" salary of that $5K / month mark, or higher. I agree that that's too high, barring special circumstances. Your payoff from a successful startup should be a lot more than a couple of thousand per month. With two founders, dialing back your take home pay means you can pay another person to be full time.