Ask HN: How many side-startups do you own?

[ihatehandles]

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.

[patio11]

I run either three or four businesses depending on how you count them, comprising 7ish things which are separate products. I have friends who have 7 distinct businesses. At a high level of detail, the big takeaways are a) automate the #%(# out of everything, b) have procedures in place such that a large portion of the day-to-day work can be done by people other than you, and c) to the maximum extent possible, only work on one thing at a time rather than slicing your attention on a minute-to-minute basis throughout the day.

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.

[ihatehandles]

Thanks for that. I have about 3 running. 1 for over a year with growing revenue and big customers (relative to small me), another enterprise one which is going extremely well for a 2 month old startup revenue-wise and last one is 6 months in with growing traffic but no revenue model yet. So yesterday after being bit hard by the startup bug I was working on a quick prototype of an idea I've had floating around for two years and decided to stop and ask before going further if this was a smart thing to do at this point. As you've seen it's only been a year running a profitable startup so I'm by no means experienced, and I wondered if at this point there was still room to tinker and toy with ideas.

Automate all the things, have someone handle those you can't. Gotcha, thanks again.

[NameNickHN]

I run five side projects/startups with revenue. First there is this appointment scheduling Saas that I hope will become full time some day.

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.

[ihatehandles]

Wow, five. Yeah it's a strain juggling client work and a startup, I decided a few months ago to die of kwashiorkor if that was what it would take for my startup to show me some (revenue) respect - because juggling that with client work was going to kill me anyway

[_august]

I'm just getting started, but I currently have 3 side-startups (more like side projects) I'm working on. I found that I needed focused, full-time work in the initial stages. Once the website reaches MVP, and has a user base building up, I am able to improve it on the side.

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.

[ihatehandles]

Do you live off of them full time?

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.

[_august]

Not yet. They're profitable but not enough to support me.

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.

[ihatehandles]

Sounds like a plan. Well best of luck with Flickseeker, Fitloop & Wanderdash :)

[_august]

Thanks! You as well with your plans.

[dennisgorelik]

I run only one startup: www.postjobfree.com

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.

[ihatehandles]

Focus is key definitely, but isn't there elbow room a bit if you build (usually) SaaS products where it addresses some nichey problem so much there isn't much to be done feature-wise save for a few ad campaigns?

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.

[getshadowband]

I'm working on 3 side projects that I hope will all work together. Most folks will tell you to focus on one, but in my case I felt I had to build the smaller ideas first to validate the main project idea.

[ihatehandles]

Interesting. I guess like patio11 said it's key to build up one then automate as much as possible and then move to the next. Thanks for the answer