Ask HN: How many side-startups do you own? How many side-startups (with actual users) do you own? Especially asking folk who have a main startup they run. In your practical experience how much of a distraction is adding one more web app (be it side hack) to your arsenal of internet properties. The startup bug brings me down really hard and so far my best defense is giving a good idea away soon as I get it. |
For example, my illustrious virtual assistant firewalls me from about 90% of the support load for Bingo Card Creator, which is good, because after doing it for 7 years I was starting to lose sanity points with every passing email. This frees me up to be 90%+ devoted on any given week to whatever my current priority is.
I would emphasize that when my friends and I do this sort of thing its for businesses not fun little hacky projects. Businesses pay taxes, have payrolls, etc, and don't tolerate options like "I have a simple solution for decreasing our support load. It is /dev/null all support email." all that well.
Automate all the things, have someone handle those you can't. Gotcha, thanks again.
Then there is a website with a couple of small website tools like formmail, tell a friend, news, blog, and guestbook that can be downloaded. It doesn't do too badly but could do better with some effort from my side. But after 12 years, motivation is pretty low.
I also run a couple of disposable email and short URL websites that generate decent revenue via AdSense. Doesn't require much attention apart from disabling the odd spam or malware URL.
Right now I do mostly programming work, either creating web applications from scratch or adding features to existing ones. It's pretty lucrative but doesn't scale well. My time is pretty much split between programming for clients and doing work for the appointment scheduling Saas.
Using the 80/20 rule, 20% of the time you spend building the project will achieve 80% of the use case. The rest of the 80% time is spent on closing the 20% use case gap.
Great gem there. I've noticed the same but hadn't had it stuck in my mind that the building stage is the most involving but after that (for most products) there is usually little to do.
Once I have the third project up and running, I plan to focus on freelancing or a full-time job, and grow these on the side.
I think it's better to focus on one thing that do many things at the same time.
But even with one web site there is problem with focus: there are so many features that I'd like to incorporate and so few hours in a day to actually implement them.
PostJobFree generates $20K+/month revenue (gross, not net) and allows me to work full time on it.
Great job you're doing with PostJobFree. From my experience you're right, one startup is more than handful if you need more features to stay competitive. Two? They've been breaking me to little pieces although one is about to reach feature-completeness.