I did it, well sort of.

My wife and I own a digital agency (deerdigital.com). We found a pain within the agency, built a product around it, and 6 months later we have a new start-up that has a few hundred paying customers and is growing about 7% week on week (gathercontent.com).

We decided to continue with the service business by giving more responsibility to employees, and having one of them buy in and becoming the CEO. We're no longer involved in the day-to-day ops and meet once or twice a year for high-level strategy planning. Best decision ever.

James, great! Those are stories I'm looking for. I'd like to blog post about your story on my blog (http://blog.eerlings.com/), would you mind an email interview?

37 Signals did this, and they've written lots about their conversion. Check out the book REWORK by Jason Fried.

Thanks, I obviously did read all of their books :-)