How do you split your business building time?

For my side-hustle this is what I did

Idea stage: Ran the idea with few potential customers
Talking to customers (100%) | Building (0%)

Idea to Product:
Building (75%) | Talking to customers (25%)

Post Launch:
Building (5%) | Talking to customers (95%)

It's really hard. I like to create, to build, so it's difficult for me to stop development and get into marketing stuff or talking to users, although I know it's necessary for product to succeed. But there's always that one more feature to add :D

So it would be like 90%/10% development/talking to users. Not great I guess... :)

At VReel we're quite lucky in the sense that we're two co-founders - one who is great at building the product and one who is good at people. So with that equation I'd say that we spend our overall time 50/50 between the two :)

But with that said, the platform equation is always quite tricky in beginning (we still haven't fully mastered it) and we probably spent too much time at first trying to acquire customers rather than just building our library to increase the value of our product.

i love this! it's such an important and useful of an exercise to think through!

for starters, i'm always talking to customers, every single week, at every single stage of the business. i count how many i do a day and then in aggregate per week and per month.

but, the amount of customers and community members that i talk to depend on my focus for the next season / stage of the project and business.

for instance, in pre-product stage i'm spending 100% of my time building community. this includes activities as creating original content, supporting content, and doing customer interviews in a variety of different mediums and tools. some of these folks may end up following me on twitter or youtube or here on indie hackers but the goal isn't to get a following, it's to become "data rich" with customer insights and finding the patterns and opportunities in the market.

along the way, some of these folks stick around and become part of the growing community around the project. these folks help validate the early concepts and prototypes and become alpha customers.

after that, i'll usually find a natural cadence to how i spend my time, usually alternating between product design / development and content production / outreach. for instance, right now, i'll spend one week focused on product and do very little in terms of outreach, content creation, or other such things (outside the daily vlogs and blogs that i've been doing for years).

the next week i'll go back into content production mode, writing original posts here on IH and elsewhere, spending a ton of time connecting with potential customers and doing customer interviews.

then, i'll swap... and rinse and repeat.

i hesitate to try to break things down too clinically because these early-stages are precious in that you want to be flexible to adapt and design your approach on-the-fly. if, for instance, one week i spot an opportunity to focus more on product because of a large and necessary feature that i'm trying to ship... i don't beat myself up by thinking that i couldn't "keep my schedule"...

... i mean, fuck. i'm building a startup so i can follow my own path and live my life the way that i want to! the schedule and the pace and the timing of all this... was made for man, not man for the schedule.

:)

love this shit so hard!

i did a vlog on this! here!

Ive always struggled with this question of splitting time because for me, it’s never been static enough for a measure of proportion to be meaningful.

A more apt analogy feels like playing an instrument, dancing, or driving a car where there are LOTS of distinct tasks need to happen but there isn’t a single static “proportion” that’s correct for more than a moment.

So for me and the folks I work with, I focus more on understanding or tightening the feedback loop for when you need to switch, how hard/fast/long to switch, etc.

I am currently in Idea > Alpha stage and it's a split between product and community.

For BuildFaster.io:

60% - Code and design themes
20% - Get Feedback
19% - Work on reputation of it on IndieHackers and Dribbble
1% - Sleep (Haha not really 😉 I get 9hrs every day)

Focus on the important before the urgent.

I have a few different projects: (atlistmaps.com, sitebuilderreport.com, itsgiftology.com, itsonvillage.com) and I usually split my time by focussing on each one individually for a couple weeks as they need it— I'm not good at doing two things at once.

I do the same thing when it comes to splitting time between building and marketing. I'll focus on content marketing for a few weeks and then move back to the product. Just going back and forth.

I think a lot of this comes down to self discovery. This is how I work best. I can't advocate for anyone else to work this way and I try not to shame or guilt myself into working other ways. The right way is the way that works for me.

It's a good question Rosie— got me thinking!