Here's my story:
I went to university and finished my undergrad. Music Composition was my field of study, so as you can imagine - getting steady income was quite difficult. Luckily, I managed to land a job after school at a private music conservatory where I taught and held lectures, and played bars regularly for some spending money. I stayed with this routine for almost a year and a half, but something just wasn't right. Money was coming in regularly, but I knew I was not satisfied with what I was doing. Why teach when you can do?
So I left my job and took some time to "find myself". I left my country, and wandered around Europe for about 6 months - networking with really interesting people, and absorbing all of the music, artwork, culture, and beautiful architecture I could.
After coming back, I met up with one of my close friends (who happened to be a developer) and we started catching up and reminiscing about the past. We were talking about all the great games we used to play together while we were growing up, and all those fun memories we made together doing so. Then we started talking about the game we wish we could play now, and realized our vision was quite similar in what we wanted.
It was at that moment we decided to start our project, Dragon of Legends. (progress can be found here if you're at all interested:
www.dragonoflegends.com )
The two of us have been working in the music and game development industries for at least 5 years, so we decided to take a leap and try to do something great.
Next month is going to be our first anniversary. It's so amazing to see the progress we have made as a studio over such a short amount of time. We originally started with two people, now our team is up to 9. The amount of knowledge accumulated over this year is incredible, self education FTW!! The whole project is bootstrapped by the founders, and the majority of the people working are doing so on a volunteer basis. We have yet to bring any revenue in (as our project is still in development), but this was an amazing experience I would do again in a heart beat.
So are you thinking about quitting your job and going indie? It's what I did and I don't regret it for a second.