I’m a startup guy. I have plenty of ideas. Too many ideas, probably.
They distract me, they get in the way. They are Sirens drawing me to crash my ship into an island of distractions and low revenue.
11 years ago I started a screen printing business, and I grew it over the years from a basement to a real shop. And then I read “4 Hour Work Week” and I fell for the “dropshipping is so easy” nonsense in that book and started creating muses selling all sorts of dumb stuff on the side.
But I should have just focused on the screen printing business.
About 6 years ago I had changed the business model of the screen printing shop so that I was just a middleman broker, and I got rid of my own shop and just focused on sales and marketing. 2 years after that, I changed the model again and focused on just marketing, and let my business partner handle sales/customer service as well as production.
The idea was to free me up to focus on just marketing.
But I fell into the startup world instead with this new found freedom.
And don’t get me wrong, I totally love the startup world, but I could have just focused on growing the screen printing business, and I’d probably have more money today if I had.
But I didn’t, and here I am now, not rich, but I do have a huge knowledge of startup methodologies, marketing techniques, etc etc. But the screen printing business grew slower than it should have. Because of me.
I started my first startup, and ignored the screen printing business that provided my income. The startup provided feedback on dating profiles, and I spent about two years trying to get it to live, but it never worked so I killed it.
But that startup wasn’t even my main focus, no way, jose, I’m a hot blooded entrepreneur and I have a ton of ideas so I get distracted and I built other stuff, like startupresources.io, and it was popular, but I also built another feedback service, but one that is focused on websites and business ideas.
Oh and I had other ideas too! So I would build waiting pages for them, and dream about launching them and building them out and, you know, just making real good money! Startup life! I planned a SaaS for training pilots, a SaaS for checking for broken website assets, an alternative to Betalist, a 30 day growth club, and a bunch of other stuff.
But all that time, the business that provided my living, the screen printing business, it just sat mostly idle. I’d work on it some, but never full time all the time, and it quit growing.
I built a conversion checklist to try to promote the website feedback service more. I built a directory of feedback tools. I built a website to list all my own projects, and it was always out of date because I had new projects coming often.
I had more ideas and I would make little plans and buy domains and whatnot.
The startups never individually got a ton of focus so they never made a ton of money. They made some money. So I needed more money and now I’m helping a local business buddy bring his company’s internal tool to market as a standalone SaaS, and it’s a steady part time gig with salary and equity.
But it’s all too much, because having multiple projects is kind of awful.
I think you can have maybe two projects and handle them. Trying to juggle several gets quite stressful and feels stupid at times.
Because…
Things break
You know that dreadful feeling when your website is messed up and something needs to get fixed ASAP? With multiple projects, you can have multiple projects messed up at the same time. And that’s really just no fun.
Everything needs marketing
How are you going to push multiple projects at a time? You can, but it’s hard, and you won’t have enough time to just promote stuff, because you also have to fix problems, talk to customers, etc etc.
When you have multiple projects, you’ll have multiple fires pop up.
Passive projects will lose revenue over time without focus
My project userinput.io can take and process orders passively, but I watch the revenue slowly decline the longer I stay away from focusing on it. Startupresources’s daily visitors has slowly declined over time.
You have to water the flowers for the garden to grow…
You aren’t going to get funding for a startup if you have a lot of projects
I’m a bootstrap guy, so I’m not trying to get funding for anything, but you can bet you won’t get funding if you’re not focused 100% on your 1 project.
You have way more to worry about and think about
There’s a weird sort of guilt knowing you have viable projects that you should be working on, but you can’t, just because you have too many projects.
And besides that weird guilt, which also includes a feeling of obligation to projects that you have planned but haven’t created yet, you only have so much brain resource to give to things.
When you have a bunch of projects, they’re in your head, they’re weighing you down, and you can’t think as clearly because you have too much going on, too much decisions to make, too much processing.
I’m learning with time that focus is a tool like none other.
You’re working more than you have to
This is sinking in with me more and more lately. If I only had one or two projects, I could focus on them and end up with MORE INCOME and also more time to go read in the park, because honestly I really want to go read in the park. It’s so nice out today! But I’m in the office from 8am to 5pm (and that’s really not even that bad for a “startup guy”) because I’m juggling tasks for 3 different projects today.
You could be making more money than you are now
Working part time on several things won’t yield you as much income or revenue as going 100% on one project would. It’s just true. I’ve been giving more attention to my screen printing business and now I’ve figured out an additional business model for it and I think I can really grow it. But if I had been focused on other new projects, the business would still be stagnant.
And here I am writing this stupid article about all this instead of doing my next task of adjusting the email series for a project because I went outside for fresh air and decided to come back in and write this little rant because I have been thinking about the too-many-projects quandary recently A LOT.
So what’s the solution?
Kill a project! Or two or three or whatever! Offload them! Let them wither on the vine! Sell them!
I killed my startup that provided feedback on dating profiles because it was the hardest to make money with. It was still really hard to actually put it down, because emotion gets wrapped up in all this, but I had to do it.
Instead of just killing a project, see if you can sell it off. But if you can’t sell it off, and it’s not your best, more promising project, shoot it in the head behind the barn, cry a little, and move on.
And if you have a bunch of domains for future projects you want to get to sometime, just let them expire. Free yourself. Focus on just a couple projects at most.
And if you still want to be a parallel entrepreneur, just be realistic with yourself that it kind of sucks honestly and figure out how to keep yourself from losing your mind and be able to also make multiple projects work.
Then shoot me an email and tell me how you do it because I want to know how, too.
Stuart Brent is a parallel entrepreneur who currently splits his time between growing Vacord Screen Printing and working on MapPlug. His other projects include startupresources.io, conversionchecklist.org, and userinput.io. He lives in Nashville with his lovely wife, who was right all along about how he had too many projects.