Seven in ten German founders in 2025 started alongside a job, and full-time founding has been flat for three years. Research finds hybrid work helps or wears you down based on how you frame the job, not the hours: a placeholder mindset until you go full-time builds a gratification crisis, treating both roles as equally real builds gratification balance. The other thing that cancels the benefit is rigid hours in the job, not their number, plus caring responsibilities. Stop measuring your side business against the day you quit, turn it into a pact with a fixed duration instead.
Seven out of ten people who started a business in Germany last year did it alongside something else. The KfW-Gründungsmonitor 2026 counts around 690,000 founders in 2025, of whom roughly 483,000 kept a main occupation. Full-time founding has been flat for three years. The growth is all on the hybrid side.
Most advice treats that as a stage you pass through. Save six months of runway, hand in your notice, go all in. Two recent studies in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice suggest that framing is the problem. Whether hybrid work leaves you better or worse off has very little to do with the hours and a lot to do with what you think the job is for.
The two paths a German research team watched happen
Nadine Albrecht and her co-authors followed 11 hybrid entrepreneurs in Germany over two years, from January 2024 to December 2025, with 49 interviews and more than 39 hours of recordings, plus separate conversations with people who had already given up hybrid work. It is a small sample and a deep one, which is the right shape for a question about identity.
Two groups came out of it.
Six participants put the entrepreneurial identity at the centre and pushed the employee role away. They told themselves the job was purely instrumental, a means to fund the real thing. Reward was postponed to the day the business could carry them. The venture, being a side project, kept not getting there. The researchers describe what builds up as a gratification crisis: strain that accumulates because the payoff keeps being deferred and the employed part of the week never counts as a win.
Five participants held both roles without ranking them. The job gave stability and structure, the business gave autonomy and growth, and neither was framed as a waiting room for the other. The researchers call the result gratification balance, and it supported well-being rather than eating it.
Same setup, same hours, opposite outcome. The difference was the story.
Why "just until I can go full-time" is the expensive version
If you say the job is temporary and mean it as a plan, fine. If you say it every year for four years, you have built a machine that turns half of your working life into failure.
That is the mechanism worth taking seriously. In the delayed-gratification group, every Monday at the day job was evidence of not having made it yet. The business stayed small precisely because the energy went into resenting the arrangement rather than working inside it.
Alessandro Pedori built a whole Freelance Unlocked session around the internal argument that produces this. He is an AI engineer who lost a career to machine translation around 2010, rebuilt himself in natural language processing, and now coaches other people through the same kind of turn. His method asks you to imagine several plausible five-year futures instead of one: the safe one, the one where money and ridicule are not a factor, the one where you have to reinvent yourself and it works. Then you notice which parts of you veto which future.
The line that lands hardest is the one nobody expects from a career coach:
"Sometimes we need the permission not to reinvent ourselves. It's okay if next year I do the same thing as this year. Maybe my priority is growing my garden." (Alessandro Pedori)
That is the German study's second path in one sentence. Permission to keep the arrangement you have is what separates a portfolio career from a delayed one.
What actually erodes the benefit
The identity story is half of it. The other half is measurable, and it is not the one people expect.
Johanna Kuske, Matthias Schulz and Christian Schwens used the UK's Understanding Society panel, 1,737 entrepreneur observations, of whom 101 had been hybrid the year before. They found no direct effect of prior hybrid experience on later well-being. What they did find were two things that reliably cancel the benefit:
- Rigid hours in the employed job (β=−.30, p=.021). Not the number of hours. The rigidity. A 30-hour job you can move around beats a 20-hour job you cannot.
- Caring responsibilities (β=−.34, p=.002), with a clear split by gender: care duties weigh heaviest for women (β=−.68, p=.006), rigid employer hours weigh heaviest for men (β=−.25, p=.040).
For entrepreneurs without those constraints, hybrid experience explained 31% of the change in well-being when they later moved to full-time self-employment. In other words, the practice run works, but only if you had room to practise.
The practical read: if you are choosing between two employed jobs while building something on the side, take the flexible one even at slightly lower pay. And if your calendar is already full of care work, the honest version of the advice is a longer runway and a smaller side project, not more discipline.
Sometimes nobody chose it
There is a third group the studies do not cover, and it turns up constantly at freelance events: people who did not decide to be hybrid at all.
Vanessa D'Souza is a learning experience designer who moved from India to Berlin and now runs workshops and trainings. She was two years into freelancing when she took the Freelance Unlocked stage, and she was clear about how it started:
"I came here as a full-time employee on a contract, and then freelancing just hit me. So it wasn't a choice per se. It just happened to me." (Vanessa D'Souza)
Her answer to the drift is a small one. When everything feels scattered, she asks what the 1% is that she can do today, and she keeps a running document of the skills and strengths she brings, so that a bad month has something to argue with. That habit is the same protective factor the German study describes, arrived at without the vocabulary: a way of counting the current arrangement as real work rather than as an interruption.
The Monster polyworking poll from June 2025 suggests how large this group is. Among more than 700 US workers, 47% held multiple jobs. Of those, 51% called the extra monthly income absolutely essential and 68% needed it for basic living costs. A quarter, 26%, said they worried about what it was doing to them. Choice is not evenly distributed here, and a piece about identity framing should say so plainly.
Design it as an experiment, not a countdown
The way out of the waiting-room trap is to stop measuring the side business against the day you quit, and start measuring it against a question.
Pedori is unusually good on this because he thinks like an engineer:
"The cool thing, at least in science, is that experiments never fail. The idea is that the experiment is a question. Is it true or not? Does it go up or down?" (Alessandro Pedori)
His advice on scale is worth repeating: keep the stake small, a few percent of what you have and a few hours, and define what counting as an answer looks like before you start. He gives his own example of an experiment that "worked" by telling him no. He tried direct consulting work with small and mid-sized companies, solved their problems well, and learned that he did not want to be the person talking to them while doing it. That is a finished experiment, not a failure.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff's Tiny Experiments gives the format a name. Instead of an outcome goal, she proposes a pact: I will [action] for [duration]. Write every weekday for six months. Pitch two clients a week for eight weeks. You either did it or you did not, and either way you end the period with data instead of a verdict on yourself.
For a hybrid setup, a pact reads something like: for the next twelve weeks I will spend Tuesday evenings and Saturday mornings on client acquisition, and at the end I will look at how many conversations that produced. That question has an answer. "Am I ready to quit?" does not.
Starting is the part that gets skipped
None of this survives contact with the evening you actually have to open the laptop. Which is where Eileen Liebig comes in. She is a four-time founder and speaker whose own start was about as hybrid as it gets:
"I was employed at American Express Business Travel. I booked business trips. At the weekend I danced in clubs. I knew I was deeply unhappy with my life as far as my job was concerned. I knew that standing still was no longer an option." (Eileen Liebig)
The agency that grew out of that started with a client asking whether she could supply service staff for a thousand-person Christmas party. She had none, no idea where to find any, and said yes anyway. She borrowed staff through a friend of a friend at the Deutsche Oper, ironed her dancer stage name onto homemade neckerchiefs and ran the event. The company she now runs still carries that name.
Her two rules are the ones that matter for anyone building on the side. First, perfectionism is what keeps hybrid businesses hybrid forever:
"If you want it to be perfect, you don't start at all." (Eileen Liebig)
Second, act inside 72 hours. Her argument is that if a new intention does not turn into a scheduled action within three days, it will almost certainly stay an intention, so she has audiences open their calendar in the room and put in something tiny: ten minutes of research, one email. Not the goal, the first move. Whether or not the neuroscience she attaches to it holds up in detail, the behavioural point is the same one Le Cunff and Pedori make: shrink the unit until starting is trivial.
If you want the wider version of this argument, our piece on why copying successful freelancers backfires covers what happens when you borrow someone else's timeline, and surviving your first year has the practical scaffolding for the early months.
What to do on Monday
- Write down what the job is for, in one sentence, without the word "until". If you cannot do it, you are in the waiting-room pattern and that is the thing to fix first, before the pricing or the portfolio.
- Check the flexibility, not the hours. If you can trade two hours of pay for the right to move your afternoons, the research says take it.
- Turn the side business into one pact for the next twelve weeks. An action and a duration, not a revenue target.
- Decide in advance what would make you stop. An experiment with no possible negative answer is not an experiment. Write the stopping condition down while you are still calm.
- Put the first move in your calendar today, not the project. Ten minutes. Liebig's 72-hour window is a low bar and most intentions still fail it.
Hybrid work is not a lesser version of self-employment. It is how most businesses in Germany now begin, and the research says it can be the healthier arrangement, as long as you are living in it rather than waiting it out. Our piece on the psychology of successful freelancing goes deeper into the mental traps that come with working for yourself.
When you are ready for the client side of it, create a free profile on 9am. You can state exactly how much capacity you have, which is the one thing part-time freelancers usually leave out and then get punished for.
Freelance Unlocked is co-organized by 9am together with Uplink and freelancermap. This article draws on the sessions of Alessandro Pedori and Eileen Liebig at Freelance Unlocked 2026. Watch the full talks above, and join us at the next edition: freelanceunlocked.com.
