Why and how I build and maintain multiple products simultaneously
I rewrite and extended the original short post
into a new article.
Share my reasons and experience of running multiple products at the same time 😄
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I rewrite and extended the original short post
into a new article.
Share my reasons and experience of running multiple products at the same time 😄
great share @fangpenlin!
as someone who's neurodivergent, I find that working this way is so much more fruitful for me. I love how you pointed out that time-based context switching didn't work for you. It didn't for me either! And like you, I found milestone-based switching to be so much more fun and effective. I think, especially for indie hackers with adhd, this approach is inline with how motivated we are by hitting a goal, or being able to give ourselves that pat on the back.
Hitting a milestone and then switching also allows me to feel excited when I return to the project next time around, I think mostly because I like that feeling of starting "fresh" and having a "new" goal to work on.
It's the same for me. I need the freedom to arbitrarily switch once I've reached some sort of milestone.
Overall, time-based switching seems to be ineffective at any scale.
I once tried to do a strict daily schedule in which I'd meditate for 15 minutes, then immediately switch to reading a book for 15 minutes, followed by immediately switch to reading another book for 15 minutes. There were a few other activities like this, packed into a 2-hour period.
After a few weeks, I realized that I was not having much long-term success in any of these activities. I'm a deep reader and a deep meditator.
There's actually a neuroscience concept about how it takes 15 minutes of uninterrupted concentration to get into the roll of any activity (learned this from Dr. Sandra Bond Chapman). So imagine that... It's like I was paying the cost of building focus for the activity, then cropping out the time that would have been the most effective for it.
So, I decreased the activities and increased the book-reading time to 30 minutes each. And it was better, but still not that great, as I found myself trying to race to reach my usual type of milestones (read to the end of the chapter, read x-amount of pages, and the like).
Glad to know that you have similar experience as I do 😄
Why more products? Why not create more OFFERS? An offer can be a simple landing page with 3-4 sentences and a headline. You can then embed a Stripe 'pay now' button and ask people to pre-order.
For ideas on how to do this, see this PDF on how different companies "pretotyped" (yeah, pretotyped, not prototyped, it's not a typo) different products by testing an offer first. For example:
IBM tested if and how people would interact with a speech-to-text computer by simulating the actual hardware and software using a hidden typist.The users, were given a microphone and a monitor but no keyboard; when text appeared on the screen they thought that their commands were being processed by a computer, not a person.
Airbnb founders created a simple website in which they offered an alternative to hotel rooms:An air-mattress + simple breakfast for $80/night (a bargain in San Francisco.) Much to their surprise, 3 people signed up very quickly and they collected $240 on their first night.
Would people buy used cars online (in late 90s)? Bill Gross bought some ads in a newspaper advertising CarsDirect, a new way to buy cars online. He had no car inventory, but created a simple website to see if people would actually go for it.When people clicked on a “buy” button, he bought the car at retail and delivered it to the customer. Over a week-end he sold a few cars. He lost money on every transaction, but validated the business model for his idea.
I know it's a popular approach to sell first then build later. I think it's great approach and I know many successful stories based on this approach.
For my case it's a bit different, I build tools which I want to use badly today. I will literally use them immediately as soon as they are usable, and the tools I built are meant to make my life easier. The theory is to build for your own, and the rest of the problem is to find the people who encountered the same problem with you and sell them the tools you have built.
Yeah, I had to do that not long ago due to dishonest (and/or super careless) practices by other app developers. Then I realized that I could put the apps to work. (I'll post about it sometime soon.)
That PDF is great. I'm really likin' the pretotyping techniques.
I'm a huge proponent of the 'build tools you want' ideology.
Really cool to see someone else living by this.
I think you're totally right about marketing growth taking time especially for things like SEO. I'm currently running two products and will be kicking off my third soon. An unexpected advantage is that while I'm working on one product I'll think of or discover improvements for the other!
Is literally everyone doing this? I thought I was special... What's going on here? lol
But no, I frameworked an app and built multiple with the same framework. So when one app discovers a problem, then the rest can technically face it as well. And I only need to fix it once, then update each one.
Yup, that's brilliant. We have a true coder here.
Code is meant to be reused and repurposed.
I really like the idea of having multiple projects simultaneously. As you point out, context switching can be inefficient, but it's also helpful to step away from ideas and projects and revisit them later. Our (...my 😂) perceptions can very wildly from day to day and mood to mood, so having more time for processing and reflection can be an advantage. I also like the way you minimized the inefficiency of context switching by switching after milestones instead of time. That's a clever idea!
I would also say that generally, the idea of NOT rushing is way more attractive to me.
Having one egg in one basket and trying to turn it into a golden egg through herculean focus and work in some highly compressed schedule... 🫠. I know some people make it happen, but it sounds like a very stressful way to approach building... Especially when you can predict that most of your projects will fail!
Thanks for sharing! Lots of good food for thought in here!
"Herculean focus." lol! I like that. That's funny.
yeah, part of the reason is also to have more eggs in the basket.
thanks for the kind words 😄👍
I almost don't think you go far enough. A lot of great psychology research says we thrive and succeed when we not only take on multiple projects in a particular professional category (in your case, software projects), but also just take on a lot of projects in general.
For me this means mutliple public contribution projects (e.g. indie hackers, flexbox defense, underhead), relationship management projects (e.g. I approach my relationship with my partner as a project), health and fitness projects (e.g. I make a project out of exercising and meditating regularly), etc.
Yeah, totally agree. Sometimes I found some small offline projects are also pretty helpful, could be as simple as like cleaning up my backyard. It gives you time to breathe and think about things outside of the professional realm.
Oh, and actually, by the way, one of the project I built LIVELYBG is a hobby project I have
https://livelybg.com/
I think it's pretty cool to have different kind of infinite looping video for zoom video calls, that's why I built it. I think they can be great conversation starters, people might ask
"What's the thing in your background? It looks so cool"
But since nobody uses it at first, I had to create content myself. So I learned how to edit video with Adobe Premiere Pro, recorded a bunch of videos from video games and upload many of virtual backgrounds. I found myself pretty much enjoy doing it, haha 😆
That is often undervalued. I also really enjoy learning new stuff by building on an idea. You are following your goal and during that process suddenly you find yourself learning new things. That virtual background website is quite cool actually. Do you plan on developing it any further? I noticed the latest submissions were from one year ago.
Yeah, I have plan for developing it further. Just however, since I don't know if there's a business model I can grow on top of it, so the only time I could spend on it now is my own spare free time. Mostly for fun right now.
And there I was -- thinking that my relationship problems were rooted in my tendency to turn the relationship into a project.
But you know -- going off on a tangent here -- at some point, you want to do another project. Right? Like, for example, less relationship project, more software project. And your partner is used to receiving all of that attention from you.
Yet, projects aren't supposed to emotionally-suffer and burn everything that's around you down (figuratively, hopefully) when you start to give them less attention for prolonged durations. (Unless, it's a successful round of AI or something...)
@fangpenlin great insight! What is your opinion about the maximum number of product should we handle at the same time?
good question. in theory, you can have as many products as you want in the same time. but the only problem is, the more product you have in the same time, the interval between each product update will be longer. and you also need to consider the situation of hiring people to help you run the product. if you can manage to earn enough income to get people to help you, it won't be a problem then. how many you can handle also depends on how fast you move. personally, I am thinking about keeping the active product in under 5, before any more them are taking off and hiring people to take care of some burden off me
make a lot of sense,
and another way is to sell one of the 5 before adding the sixth
This was a great post! Fang-Pen. I've recently begun experimenting with 2 products too -> Famewall & Mailboat for the very same reasons. Tuned to see how this turns out
It's easy to get burnt out trying hard on one product without giving it enough time. I realized, I was getting frustrated when I couldn't see visible results on a single product while also fearing the opportunity cost.
Both of my products above are focused on the user onboarding space. That makes it easier for me to enable integrations & cross-sell as well :)
Also it's easier to create stories surrounding the product this way :)
Personally this doesn't work for me and the ADHD context switching just results in me getting nothing done.
In contrast, in the physical world we don't naturally do this. Noone starts washing up for 5 mins then goes to read a book and then back to washing up, we work till the task is done. Only in the digital world are folks coding, writing a book, searching for vacations, managing their stock portfolio and building 5 separate apps all while tweeting .
I also don't know any large successful businesses which are built this way. Steve jobs wasn't building 25 different companies, he was focused on apple.
well, as I said in the article, it might not work for everybody 😅
and yeah, someone needs to be the first person eat the crabs, I would be happy to be that person. I think Steve Jobs probably got tons of people telling him he was wrong about countless things. I believe in my own way of doing things, but you could be right, I could fail, and it's fine. I learn from my own mistakes and improve base on that, and maybe I can write another article sharing the mistakes I made so that others don't make the same mistake 👍
Haha yes. Well I sincerely hope that you don't fail!
I think the milestone based context switching may be key as the time based never worked for me either which is why I eventually gave up trying to work on so many things. Seems like you get a lot done tho and ship real work so you will do well and you have a positive growth mindset too.
I struggle with context switching too and it's definitely hard to focus on a single thing, too many ideas and problems to solve! Thanks again for sharing the article 👍
I tried that in 15-minute intervals every day, instead of 5 minutes... And it sucked.
Great post! I approach projects with a very similar mindset. Something about switching context to a totally different product, built with a similar architecture, helps keep me thinking clearly.
Have you seen @dvassallo talk about this? His Small Bets course makes some great points about how diversifying projects is a more sustainable strategy as a solopreneur.
Thanks 😄
Never seen the talk before, but will check it out 👍
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This article helped me a lot! Thanks!
Glad you find it helpful 😄
Share your experiences here. The idea of Indie Hackers is to share information, no links.
Is it though? So many links everywhere. And I kinda appreciate it. Reddit is massively against links, especially self promo, indie hackers feels like it’s for creators and I expect them to work on their own platforms… so totally fine with me as long as it’s not spamming and gives value.
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