I've gone full-time on my small business twice — and came back to a day job twice. On purpose. Here's the math, the crying, and why I now keep both.
Something has shifted in the past two years. Friends used to look at The Little Red House and say, "Wow, good for you." Now, the same people — many of them laid-off tech workers — say, "Damn, I need a small business. There are no jobs out there."
I get it. But I want to gently point at the crack in that foundation: every real business solves a problem for a customer. "I need income" is a problem, yes — but it's your problem, not theirs. A business built only on "I need this to pay me" starts life carrying a weight it was never designed to hold.
I'm not here to talk you out of it. I'm here to show you what it actually costs, because I've run the experiment. Twice. I quit to run The Little Red House full-time in 2016, and again in 2020. Both times, I eventually went back to a day job — and not because the business failed. Today I'm a Staff Designer at Ello, an ed-tech startup, four-and-a-half days a week, and I run TLRH on the rest. Most people assume that's the "before" state, the thing you do until you can quit.
For me, it's the strategy.
Experiment one: 2016, the year I learned what runway really means
TLRH debuted at the National Stationery Show in 2016. By then I'd already decided this wasn't a hobby — I had a real case, and the dream was that one day TLRH would be my income, and I could be a full-time mom running it. (Spoiler: that version never happened.)
I had a year of savings. I went aggressive — including expanding into the Japanese market through trade shows that cost $12,000–15,000 each. I did three that year. Not one of them made back its money.
By the tail end of that runway I was hanging on by my fingernails. I rarely cry. That year, I cried — not from sadness exactly, but from confusion. How is this so hard? What didn't I do right?
Here's something nobody tells you on the show floor: a lot of the stationery brands you're comparing yourself to are quietly subsidized. A partner covers the rent, the insurance, the health plan. They're playing a different game with a different scoreboard. My then-boyfriend (now husband) offered similar support, and I'm grateful — but my immigrant spirit couldn't let that go too far. Spending money I didn't earn doesn't prove I have a business. It proves I have a sponsor.
Experiment two: 2020, the year it actually worked (and I still came back)
The second time, I left a job I was deeply unhappy in. I freelanced — helping founders set up their products, doing game art for small studios — and ran TLRH full-time. Then the pandemic hit and every craft show on my calendar evaporated. Every shop closed. Zero trade shows.
So we pivoted into everything I was uncomfortable with: Instagram Lives, YouTube videos, online live sale sessions.
And here's the part that surprises people: it worked. That year, TLRH covered my needs — my insurance, my rent, my studio, all of it.
It also cost me this: I worked seven days a week, roughly 11am to 1am, sometimes 4am. By the end, I had no new art ideas left in me. None. And when I realized we wanted a kid — possibly through IVF, which is its own financial mountain — the math changed. I accepted a job offer, and got pregnant right after. A kid is expensive. A solo founder income with no floor was no longer the responsible bet.
So when I say "keep your day job," it's not because the full-time dream is impossible. I'm saying it knowing the dream is achievable — and choosing both anyway.
The cons nobody posts
| What the internet says | What it actually looked like for me |
|---|---|
| "Be your own boss, set your own hours" | 11am–1am (sometimes 4am), seven days a week, working craft shows alone to save on help |
| "Do what you love every day" | About 10% of my time was making art. The other 90% was admin, marketing, planning, shipping, the website |
| "Unlimited upside" | Every life decision became an ROI calculation. Should I travel? Should I eat this omakase? Which insurance? Everything routed through the business |
| (They never mention this one) | Corporate pays you whether you had a great week or a mediocre one. TLRH can return exactly $0 on a 12-hour day |
That last row is the real difference. It's not about effort. In a salary job, your downside is capped. In a small business, you can pour in everything and the market can simply shrug.
And the pros are real too — I'd be lying otherwise. The schedule flexibility. Building something fully aligned with your own mission. Getting to decide what you make to earn your money. Those things kept pulling me back twice. They're just not free.
The passion trap
Here's the one I most want artists to hear.
When income is the goal, you take work you wouldn't otherwise take. During my full-time years, I took commissions — custom portraits, gift pieces. And the drag was real. I'd already spent a decade-plus as a commercial artist in games, making art for other people's needs. TLRH was supposed to be the place my art was finally mine. Instead, I was back to serving briefs — except now the clients were people who don't know art, commenting on my art. For an artist with factory-default imposter syndrome, that is ego-crushing. One commission could send me spiraling: Am I even a good artist? Is this worth it?
Custom commission work from the full-time years — every stamp lovely, every brief someone else's.
It leaked into the products too. You see a trend, FOMO kicks in, you make a little of it — and you hate what you made. That happens so much more when the business is your only income.
To kill an artist's business, all you need is an uninspired, burnt-out artist. That was me. And mind you — art is the craft I'd invested half my life in. Art school, then ten-plus years in the game industry. This wasn't "engineer who likes to doodle finds joy in a side project" (which, by the way, is also a wonderful path). This was watching the thing I'd built my identity on turn into a dread.
The reframe: your business's passion should be making money
This is the whole post in one idea, so let me be blunt.
If your passion is drawing, and your plan is "I love to draw, let me earn money from it" — that plan usually struggles to land. Because you'll spend 90% of your time on things that aren't drawing, and "I just love to draw" pays you nothing in a small business except the warm glow of followers. (Which, honestly, goes a long way. I am genuinely fed by someone seeing my art and smiling. But I need to eat first.)
If, instead, your passion is the operating — forming a hypothesis, setting up a test, running it, iterating, watching a number move — then art becomes your tool, and your idea will probably land no matter what business you pick. That's the part of me that makes TLRH work. I love the experiment loop.
And here's the paradox: this reframe gave me more artistic freedom, not less. When the business's job is to make money and the art is the tool, the subject matter of my art gets less restricted — I can actually draw what I want to draw. And when something flops? It's not my art that was wrong. It's my business plan. Do you know how much lighter that is to carry?
(If you've read my other posts, you know I'm a trained artist who picked a style — a style didn't pick me. Same energy here.)
Why two jobs is the answer (for me)
People hear "two jobs" and picture a holding pattern. It's actually a symbiosis.
What the day job gives TLRH: stability — the kind I genuinely need now that I have a kid. And after I have stability, then I can be creative. I deliberately chose a startup over a big company because I wanted room to grow the exact skills I care about: design systems thinking, getting close to problems, solving them. If a job offered me more money to do boring design with no problem-solving, I wouldn't take it. The day job isn't the thing I tolerate to fund the dream. It's a thing I chose carefully.
What TLRH gives the day job: a safety net that lets me be picky. Hard requirements: small company, close to the problem, room to experiment, children's ed-tech only. TLRH is also my live laboratory — SEO experiments, growth optimization, funnel work — things you rarely get to run end-to-end in a day job, that I test on my own store and bring back to work.
My actual week, if you're curious: Monday through Thursday, I lean fully into the day job — 8 to 10 hour days, sometimes 12. TLRH gets maybe an hour of email at night, ramping up Thursday with event planning. Friday is mostly Red House: show prep, setup, shipping. Show weekends, I have help now, so I'm there 1–3 hours a day. Before my daughter, TLRH got 20–25 hours a week. Now it's 8–10, max. The business is smaller than it could be. It is also healthier than it's ever been — because it doesn't have to feed me.
Will I ever go full-time?
Honestly? I don't know, and right now I don't see it. I love my day job — the learning, the speed of a startup, a problem space I have real passion for. And I'll never give up TLRH, because it's my first child. I still have a whole world inside my head that I want to share, and I'm still fed every single time someone looks at my art and smiles.
So if the layoff has you sketching a logo this week, here's my only homework for you: write down what problem your business solves — besides your paycheck. If you have a real answer, welcome to the hardest, most interesting thing you'll ever build. And if the answer is "I need income"… maybe the business you need first is a job, and the small business gets to stay what mine has become: not a backup plan, but a second life I refuse to give up.
Aggie runs The Little Red House and works as a Staff Designer at Ello. Both, on purpose.