The real threat posed by taking on consulting is not what it does to your time; seeking funding would eat up lots of time as well. The threat is what it does to your determination. When the startup seems hopeless you can easily drop it and make consulting your focus.
If you're determined enough, you'll come up with a plan to maintain that determination even if consulting goes well and the startup goes terribly.
This is doable, you need to be able to at least get your application developed and maintain hosting for it, but work also for others so you can have an income. This is what I have done at least.
I thought my system would develop revenue right away, but the number of sign ups it took to create a paying customer cost more then what I could afford and natural search traffic was just not coming fast enough.
So I gave it away free so I could figure out the money part later. Not to mention the system wasn't very mature, it needed a revision to bring the quality up and then what seemed like months of bug fixing.
Out of my biding my time, putting out incremental improvements, and building good repore with the users I have discovered instead of putting out a generic product, success will come from taloring very specific products out of my generic product. Using my application as sort of a platform of generic parts to build a system for a particular market.
Having kids, wife, things have still worked out fine.
We gave up a lot financially to be here. If you have kids and a family it does take a lot more work, but it is not impossible. Just work it out with your wife.
I don't think most startup founders with families are looking at the same picture of success as those right out of college.
> We're taking on some consulting projects, but we're going to keep working on the startup.
All good if you're single, but what if you've got a wife and family and just need the cash? (Okay, feel free to say you shouldn't start a startup with a family, but it's too late... :-)