How do you manage multiple projects as an Indie Hacker?
I started my journey to go from $0 to $100k in revenue by building multiple projects (all while Live Streaming) and I was wondering...
Do I have to create an email marketing account for every project or I can have them all under one account? How do you do it?
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You don't have to do anything. This is all about strategy.
Is your plan to test various ideas until something sticks, or to strategically build a diverse portfolio of products?
I’d love a diverse portfolio of projects 😄
Cool!
My take is to use every advantage I have to build new ones for the next thing I'm working on. That can include business infrastructure of all kinds.
In many cases, I will use the same business entity, bank accounts, and software tools that I already have to help me get something new off the ground. As long as it's not compromising security or compliance in some way, I'll treat any asset I have as an advantage to help my next thing succeed.
This approach is especially useful when there's a common audience across multiple products, which is the best way to build a portfolio of products since every product is a potential on-ramp for a customer and a potential upsell. It's MUCH easier to sell something to someone who's already bought from you.
And since your original question was about email marketing, when you build a business where someone in your audience is likely to buy multiple products across their customer lifetime, I think of my email platform almost like a CRM. It's where people enter into my business universe, where I earn their trust, and I use the email platform not only to reach them...but to know what they have/have not bought yet.
If you sell so many different kinds of products that solve different problems for the same core audience people, every bit of success in one product is likely to compound into the success of the others.
And since my email list is one of my most valuable assets (reliable distribution to people whose trust I have earned) I have to think really hard about why I'd do anything to give that up!
There are two cases where I'd split up an ESP account across products at the very beginning of a new product:
1 - Extremely divergent core audiences. It's possible to share an account and use the segmenting tools, but it's gonna get messy quickly.
2 - If I have a very high degree of confidence that the new product is going to be profitable right away, or have actual business partners/collaborators.
And if/when you get to either of those points AFTER launching a new product by borrowing from your existing infrastructure, it's not hard to migrate subscriber data to the new platform.
Like most things in business, none of these are permanent decisions. I've moved newsletter tools so many times it's not even funny.
Hope that helps!
It helps a lot! Thank you 🙏
I create one account for all of my projects. For example, I currently have 3 sites in my Netlify account, lots of different (unrelated) domains in Namecheap, etc.
I would never share databases or servers though, mostly for security reasons.
Noted! Thanks 🙏
All separate:
This way you'll be able to identify growing/unprofitable projects. This would help to take strong and quick decisions
What are the benefits of separate servers and IPs?
Yeah I'm curious too, those are extra costs that I don't see a reason for. You can host your projects on a single server and containerize them, and set up up nginx/whatever to route hostnames to the appropriate container.