How to overcome the challenge of not making money, working full time on your startup.

By AJ Picard — founder of Chad

For those who don’t know, my name is AJ Picard I’ve been working on a new social media app called Chad for a year and a half now. In January 2018 I took out my life savings and then later sold my car so that I could continue to work on Chad full time. More importantly this allowed me to stay as far away from corporate job as I could.

For those who do work for a company no hard feelings at all, I just can’t stand it. I love having the freedom to do what I want and the best part about each day is that it’s always different.

On this journey you realize a lot of things, for one the market doesn’t give a shit about what you’re doing in life and what you’re working on. You have to convince the market that what you’re working on has value. Building an app takes a while, but to bring in money from that app takes even longer, so what can I do for some cash so that Chad and I can stay afloat?

I absolutely love designing, and it’s something about designing apps and websites that I can’t get away from. The best part about designing in my opinion is adding animation to bring them to life. When I first started in January, 2018 my design skills were awful.

FLAT OUT AWFUL.

I continued to work on them over the course of the year, by asking designers I came across on Dribble, Behance and Instagram, what programs they…