At FB I make about $5k a month take home and every quarter 8k in RSUs take home. I work about 80 hours a week, 50 at FB and 30 on my own app (I work all day on weekends) My app just hit 30k in monthly revenue and 29.6k of it is profit. I’m thinking of quitting and spending full time scaling, marketing, and building an Android version of the app. At the same time I just started my career out of college with about 9 months experience so I’m worried leaving will hurt my career. I made the app my senior year in college so before my tenure at FB, have been working on it for 16 months now. Since I’ve started my job at FB, obviously haven’t been able to tend to it. Also do I tell FB the reason I’m leaving? They don’t know about the app, but I did tell my manager about it before joining the team, so it’s documented I worked on this IP before joining.
Is majority of your app income based on in-app purchases or initial app purchase?
In app purchases
I'd suggest to go pursue your app. Even if you can grow your in-app purchases by atleast 15% in 1 year of full-time commitment you'll be earning you fb base pay in your own business. The reason I asked for in-app vs initial was because app growth can stop at any time (initial purchases) but in-app purchases usually out preform (even through growth stoppage) so you're safe if you have a large active following of the app currently. But before you decide to resign make you you have a well defined plan on your goals and full-time commitment. Good luck! You're more than capable of making this a career.
I think you should quit and scale but after maybe 6 months. Congrats!
Agree, determine sustainability.
Quit!!!
You are not going to hurt your career but how big your app can grow? If 10x in a year, it’s very easy decision to leave. If it can about double after Android version and no much further, strategically, it would better to stick to FB and learn as much as you can from other people for your next app
What’s he going to learn from other people?
Hardly anyone is successfully doing something like this
Here is an idea. Why not focus on your already successful app full time?
Did you not even read it
How is a SWE, even at E3 making $5k post tax?
It does sound too low for an E3, maybe not a SWE?
118k base salary post tax is 5K a month with 401k contributions
This is a great problem to have. Congratulations OP! I would think about this in terms of the ROI on your time. Here’s what I would do based on my own biases, and you can use the framework to make your own decision: 1. Spend a fraction of my FB money to get someone who is really good at marketing to do the promotion for the app. 2. Spend the time freed up to work on the Android app, but keep the FB job until it takes off. At that point evaluate whether you spending more time maintaining/promoting the apps will generate more than paying someone to do it for you so you can focus on other things. 3. Work on new ideas and try to repeat this success.
I have 15 apps. Only this one has taken off, so I’d rather just focus on one app
DM once you need marketing/social for it!
I’ve never been in this situation before but what I have seen are that apps can easily die if they are not scalable. Can you see your app succeeding next year? next 5 years? next 10 years? How many more features can you add? What is the retention time like? What is the age demographic? These are all key questions I think you should consider before quitting a nice gig like FB. If you can’t say yes to its success in the coming years, then I wouldn’t do it, but if you can, then you could be building the next hot thing. I would consider something like this akin to being a popular YouTuber. A lot of YouTubers gain popularity very fast but those with an unloyal fan base or stagnant content eventually fall off. I’m sure you’ve seen it, a YouTuber with millions of followers only get 5k-50k views each video. That’s not enough to match what you get and will potentially get at FB. Just something to consider.
Quit of cause.
Congrats, wow