How Tim worked on side-projects for 10+ years, and finally went full-time (with kids)

This podcast is hosted by transistor dot f m. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Build Your SaaS. This is the behind the scenes story of building a web app in 2023. I'm Justin, and today I've got a guest, Tim Leland. Tim, how's it going, man? It's going good. Great to finally be on here. I've been listening to you for feels like years. I don't even know how far back. Yeah. When did we start the show? We started in 2018, so it's been going going for a while. And, you reached out. Actually, I got I got a message from your wife and a message from you. So I I I got doubled up. You you doubled up on, feedback on the Aaron Francis episode, and you said, hey. I think it'd be fun to have me on and talk about your experience bootstrapping on the side, and you've just recently gone full time. Is that right? Yep. About a month ago. About a month ago. And the product is t dot l y, which is a URL shortener, which I think we can get into that too. That's that that seems like a competitive category. But maybe just for the folks at home, describe what you've been doing, you you know, for the past while, what you've been working on, and how you kind of built yourself up to going full time a month ago. Yeah. It's it's a long story. I'll try to tell you the, short version, but, you know, it really goes back to college, graduated college, and just got a job working, you know, software developer and started building websites on the side. And then eventually, that turned into small apps. And then I got and got into, like, the Chrome extension space and started building a few Chrome extensions. And then, it's kinda led me to where I'm at now to where, you know, I had a a weather extension that grew to, like, 250,000 users. Didn't make a ton of money, but it was nice side income. And then I built a link shortener extension, and that actually is kinda took off and has 450,000 users. And then that led me to TDI l y. Wow. Okay. And, and you've you've also got a family. You've got you've got kids as well? Yep. Yep. I have a eight year old, five year old, and three year old. All all boys. Eight year old, five year old, and three year old. All boys. Three boys. Okay. You're similar to to my setup, except our we have four, and our oldest is a girl. So we now she's at college, and we've got three boys at home. And and my wife is, like, sad because there's there's no girls around anymore. Just just us four boys. You said, okay. I wanna you said, I wanna pitch you on the idea of coming on the pod and sharing my journey of building side projects for …