I'm probably near the higher end of the distribution to this among my Internet buddies: about 4 years. Partly this was due to it truly being a hobby, partly because bingo cards are not the most renumerative thing in the world, and partly because my skill level at the time was rather low.

A more typical number among my SaaS buddies is about 18 months of sustained effort until you hit $10k in MRR, which typically is enough (after expenses) to keep a solo founder in the field indefinitely.

The fastest I've ever seen it done is about ~6 weeks for SaaS. Even shorter for infoproducts, although depending on the dynamics of the business that might be "launch one, get relatively flush with money, buy yourself enough time to launch a second one" until you figure out some not-too-obvious things about how to sell them repeatedly.

A consultant, naturally, can hit day job equivalent levels of revenue virtually immediately after hanging out their shingle (if they've got a client lined up). A fairly common pattern is "Inform day job of intention to quit; immediately go back to working for day job as 1099 during transitionary period; start building pipeline while delivering for Client #1."

28 months a mean of 2~3h per day. Now It's my full time job and 3rd Start-up. The most time consuming part until now, finding good partners, product definition, market research.

So far so good, but it confirms me that Europe is slower for firing up a project.

If side project == freelancing, i just had my first (and only) month $1k. This was though Upwork. I negotiated hard and got 75% more than the initial offer. It felt more like negotiating a commodity (my day-job) than a specific skill set. I won't knock Upwork too much though, as I got my first freelancing gig through them without much effort.

https://officesnapshots.com here -- I'd say it was 5 years of being a hobby before I decided to try to make it into my full-time job. Was a history teacher when I started the site.

Another 2 years or so of temping, miscellaneous web work, and anything else to pay the bills.

It has now been 2 years where the website is truly my full-time work and I'm looking to hire my first employee in the next few months. Pretty excited about that!

Probably unusual, but about 10 weeks. It was a niche market paid iPad app, written and deployed in 6 weeks, and we saw immediate sales so we left off iOS contracting and began working on it full time.

That was a little more than 6 years ago and it has continued to be our full-time project. However we did add versions on most other platforms and a cloud sync service, and I'm not sure that we would've continued to generate good revenue without those additions.

18 months until I reached $4k in MRR. It wasn't enough to pay the bills, but I had a couple of years of runway.

I ended up not using my savings as the business started to grow 1k/month after I quit my job.

9 months, started interfering with day job, quit, worked out the notice month. That was 5 years ago :-)

4 years. It was successful, but my previous job was pretty good also.

I eventually switched getting paid for my side project because, it was open source, better management, and I got paid better. And I love doing it.

For me, about a year. I'm doing cloud design & deployment. Nervous because I know these contracts will not last forever. That, and I am the business. If something happens to me, I go from good money to $0 in no time flat. I got the work solely by word of mouth, and I'm not sure how to sell, to get more work.

I have a problem where I get distracted way too much and now have several side projects at 50% completion. And now looking at them, I wonder why anyone would pay money for them. So...I guess the answer is infinity.

It took me 9 months. In two weeks I'm quoting a day job. I hit $2k MRR (after expenses) and finished contracting. I'm planning to use the runaway money from contracting at the beginning.

For me, the worst thing is siting at the office, doing job for someone else and not being able to care about my project and customers. Doing it full time is a huge relief.

Back in 2006 I was making apps for SecondLife virtual world, it took six months to make the first $1000 in sales, then 3 months later it had grown to $5000/month so i quit my day job as a tech support rep. I did it for 4 years, now i'm back to consulting mostly because sales took a nose dive around 2009.

I've been working on my side project since the back end of 2014. I've had at least a couple of 3-4 month breaks from it during that time.

It's only just getting close to something that I can share with people, so I won't be working on it full time in the near future (if ever).

I'm not there yet. For me 'side project' is more a way of living, than a one-time effort to quit a day job. Even if my side project becomes main occupation some day, I'll come up with another side project to learn new things.

I don't really believe in deciding whether to go full time based on how long you've been working on a side project, but rather based on its traction.