Three first-time founders in Canada, all of us between 45 and 55: business/product, marketing, and me on the technical side. We're building an AI tool for creative work. About thirty testers have been on a pre-production build for a couple of months. Feedback is good, and importantly is not from friends, but actual target users who we sourced through our networks, which I'm treating as encouraging signal on product-market fit.

We're bootstrapped with CAD $25k initial commit and an additional up to $100k available, though we'd rather earn the right to spend each additional dollar than commit it up front. All three of us still have day jobs, cleared with our employers. At current near-zero usage we could run the service for ~18 months without revenue — that number obviously falls as real users arrive, which is part of the problem.

So our constraint isn't the usual one. The company has runway; founder time doesn't. I built the platform, I'm the one who has to go full-time first, and I'm also the highest-paid person on the team with family obligations that rule out a sudden income cut.

For those who started companies in their 40s or 50s: when did you know it was time to leave the day job? Did you wait for revenue to cover you, cut to part-time, build personal runway first, or raise specifically because founder availability had become the bottleneck?

Not naming the product — I am looking for advice, not a launch thread.