When It's Time to Go All In

Do you have a side hustle? Do you want to make it a full-time hustle, and escape your 9-to-5 job? Blavity founder Morgan DeBaun has some advice: Do it carefully, but steadily.

- NICOLE LAPIN

Want to grow a side hustle into something bigger? Morgan DeBaun knows something about that.

Back in 2014, she was working full-time at Intuit when she started a side hustle. It was called Blavity - a media company for a Black audience. "It wasn't an immediate, 'OK, I'm going to quit my job to pursue this'," she says. She had bills to pay, after all. But she started plotting her way forward, and eventually went all in.

Today, Blavity is very much her full-time job-along with employing 150 others. DeBaun has raised $12 million, the company reaches 100 million millennials and Gen Zers each month, and now it also develops technology to help companies recruit diverse employees. Here, DeBaun lays out her path from side hustle to full hustle - and why you should think differently about what makes you "wealthy."

You started Blavity while at Intuit. Was there a catalyst for quitting to pursue Blavity full-time? 

It was a few things. I started Blavity with friends from college. We launched a minimum viable product in July 2014, and it was doing OK. Like, people were reading things, watching things on the site. Then Mike Brown was killed a couple weeks later, and that's when I decided there is a unique place for me in this space, and this is something I'm really passionate about.

So that was the beginning of saying, "OK, now I need to build a pathway to quit my job." But I did not quit immediately. I waited a couple more months, and then I took on a consulting gig so that I could pay the bills.

I'm assuming you walked away from a nice salary.

It wasn't quite six figures 10 years ago, but the equivalent of six figures today.

Are there any business milestones that you would recommend someone reach before they commit to their business full-time? 

There are different phases of commitment.