[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.