Do not index
Do not index
As you probably know, I don’t run just one project. I run several projects, you might say I run a portfolio of tech startups.
When running multiple projects it’s easy to just add more of them to your business and not simplify. That’s why I recently changed the mission of my company and set some guiding principles.
A great method for knowledge management is the rhizomatic approach, which I described in part 1.
There are more reasons as to why I keep shipping products instead of scaling one. It has to do with discovering who I am and what I am good at through the process of building something.
This is important because of product/founder fit. People are obsessed with product/market fit and they forgot about product/founder fit.
Product/founder fit for me is simple: the product has to adapt to you and your lifestyle, not the contrary. I see many founders who are slaves of their products trying to chase growth instead of a happy life.
I want to consciously decide how my business and my products will work for me. The ultimate goal of a business is to serve the entrepreneur.
In the process of building software I discovered a few things about myself:
- Going 0 to 1 is easier than 1 to 10 for me. I brought several products from no revenue to some revenue. I don’t care about what the revenue is as long as they are profitable. Not all products are going to make revenue but that’s ok – it’s natural selection.
- I want to focus on music, too. Thereby, if the products sustain me and my music and my lifestyle, I’m happy.
- I’m fast at building, good at scraping and collecting data
- I don’t want investors or other bosses
That’s why my approach is to ship a lot more products and see how they do, instead of focusing on just one and scale it to the moon.
That’s why I specifically don’t focus on growth but I look at number of profitable softwares as a good metric to measure success.
Growth is not an actionable KPI, number of profitable software is.
Keep in mind that this approach works for me, but another approach might work for you. For example, you can have a software that does 100k/month instead of 10 that do 10k/month. I’m also sure there are other founders who enjoy working more or harder than me on their products, maybe they like having investors and more money to work with. Each scenario has pros and cons. No choice is wrong but make sure that it works for you.
Thanks for reading.
