Splitting focus is generally seen as something founders shouldn't do, and rightfully so. It's hard enough getting anywhere with one product.

With that being said, I've decided to go against that common advice for now and have found some benefits to making multiple, smaller bets.

Time is on your side

Once your product is launched, it starts to accrue some SEO and brand benefits. If it's a product with recurring revenue and you've managed to get even a couple of customers, it will also continue to bring in some cash, even while you're not working on it.

If one product is your sole focus, you might give up on it after a lack of early traction, but as it's one of many, you can just let it sit & breathe for a while. When you go back to work on it, its domain authority will have improved, more people might have heard about it, and you will have more information and knowledge about how you could improve & grow it. 

Switching between products is motivating

You'll hit hurdles when trying to build & grow any product. A few cancellations, a negative response from a customer, self-doubt etc.

These challenges are draining, but switching between products can be refreshing when it happens. After a while, the negatives that caused the switch fade and you get excited to get back to it. Most of the time the event that caused the decrease in motivation didn't even matter and all you had to do was step back.

Expanded learnings

Different products require different strategies, but sometimes, your experience with one product can be super helpful with another. For example, while building the navigation, search, and filtering in Screenlane, I realised it was much better than the setup on Page Flows, so I made it work in the same way there too.

More likely to catch a wave

So many founders attribute luck as a large part of their success. With multiple products, there's more chance that you'll catch a wave. If you happened to have a product that helped remote teams, it would have been wise to focus on that once the pandemic hit. It would have been much easier to gain some market share in that situation if you already had something in the market, even if it wasn't your core focus and didn't have much traction. Starting from scratch to try catch the wave would be much more challenging.

There are, of course, downsides to working on multiple products, which I'll talk about in a future post.