After my first successful startup I get too much cofounder suggestions and some of them are incredibly amazing projects. Now I work on 2 of them, and today got a brilliant idea to work with. But I'm so busy, I can't even manage my first startup, legal and bureaucratic issues takes too much time.<p>Do you have any experiences/advices about building several startups parallel at the same time? Do yo prefer to work one by one or with several at the same time?
It is almost always better to work on them one after the other. I am currently bootstrapping my startup through consulting/freelancing. Even though i try to restrict my consulting work to about 20 hrs/week, there is always spillovers. But the biggest problem is that of a context-switch. It is just not easy, at least to me, to quickly switch from a consulting gig to my own startup effort. One of the 2 always suffers.
Interesting question.<p>As someone who is working full-time and working on 2 start-ups (one with far more commitment) I know what it is to take one too much as an entrepreneur.<p>The first thought is a warning! Burnout! If you choose to go full-time and a startup you're going to hit a wall. Naturally if you do more than one startup you just hit it faster...<p>So the issue is commitment. My advise would be to divide your week into blocks of commitment for each project. In my case Mon,Wed,Fri,Sun using 4 hour blocks per dsy for startup A. Tues, Thurs of 4 hour blocks on startup B (Saturday is a much needed recovery day, normally resulting in a much deserved hangover).<p>Another consideration is how you work...<p>For example I am an 80/80 person. I work 80% and play 80%, the important part is that i'm never 100% at one time so have that buffer to avoid burnout... you have to find a balance between the minimum required effort to have a successful company and your own personal space (even work-a-holics sleep, generally on the keyboard)<p>As you have experience with startups i'm surprised you've so easily embraced another two projects. However that intimates that you know how to divide you time between them... It would be interesting to see a blog post from you in 6 months to discover if you were able manage both and how the progression/success of each respectively influenced your commitment in them.
Most people cannot do more than one full-blown startup at the same time.<p>What I personally find myself doing is dealing with several different projects on varying levels of intensity. So I have one startup that takes most of my time, and then some side projects that are either limited in time, or fall into the weekend project category, or just projects I like dealing with in my spare time, with no time pressure (and no ambitious goals).<p>But more than one 'real' startup? Don't go there.
You answered your own question - if you're too busy to manage the issues around your first startup, adding more startups will contribute to making the first one fail.<p>As many HN threads point out, ideas are easy, but building companies, finding customers, and product/market fit are all hard and need a team's full focus.
Totally understand the temptation of working on various ideas and solving interesting problems. I dealt with this in my past life. Its hard enough to do 1 start up at a time. Doing 2 or 3 takes a lot. Though i see this with positives and negatives<p>Pros:
working on multiple ideas will keep your creative flowing. it helps to connect the dots that you may not even realize. Keeps you going on mandane tasks on 1 start up because you may have something interesting going on the other project.<p>Cons
you cant give your best to any of the ideas. all ideas may suffer from your lack of energy. You may keep working on interesting stuff and put off uninteresting stuff forever. and we know there is plenty of "uninteresting stuff" in any project.<p>my 2 cents.
I'm currently working on a startup that's attempting to solve a very big problem, and it sucks up all of my time at the momment.. I wouldn't even begin to think about taking on anything else at this point. I also want the project to succeed as well, and I know that in order for that to happen (I'm currently the only developer) I need to be working on it almost all the time -- I even work on it on weekends because the work is intriguing...we haven't yet launched but it takes all my time developing what basically can be considered a brand new web platform from scratch
I wrote a post on this last night (published this morning) <a href="http://nickoneill.com/the-most-common-way-entrepreneurs-kill-their-business-2012-01/" rel="nofollow">http://nickoneill.com/the-most-common-way-entrepreneurs-kill...</a> ... my main conclusion is that running multiple startups at the same time is a great way to kill your startups. Yes, there are always exceptions to the rule (e.g. Jack Dorsey) but until you have a company that has a massive team that can support your business on an ongoing basis, it's not likely to work.
Unless you have a lot of capital, it's not about preference, it's about reality. The more you work on, the more you spread yourself thin. The more you work on, the less likely anything is going to succeed. If you want something to really take off, you need to pick one.<p>There should be one idea that really jumps out at you above the rest. If not then maybe you haven't found anything big enough yet. In that case it may be helpful to simultaneously explore multiple ideas. But pick only one eventually.
I like Aaron's post on this topic-
<a href="http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity" rel="nofollow">http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity</a><p>I currently work at 6 startups, 12 hour shifts, over 24 days per month. The 2 main startups I spend 48 hours per week at. The other 4 take up 36 hours per week. One is very profitable and I use it to fund the others. However, I don't think this is a smart strategy at all. I'm just wasting money but having fun intellectual pursuits.
It's not really the workload but the brain overload. Right now I have a paying gig which I try to work on but not think about maybe a 3rd of the time. The rest of my time and mental energy goes into my one startup. I had a couple side startups but I had to let them go. My mind was trying to think about all of them at once!
Starting on multiple help if they are similar and you can share resources between them, like design/arch/code/services/hardware. It's difficult to context switch between project/product with the same efficiency. I found it easier to devote one week or two weeks on one and then switch to another.
Jack Dorsey is the right guy to answer this.
<a href="http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-does-8-hours-at-twitter-8-hours-at-square-daily/" rel="nofollow">http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-do...</a>
The "log jam" effect tends to mean that your inefficiency goes exponentially with the number of projects you're trying to juggle (where "projects" are anything which regularly requests time).
How much work did it take to make your first startup successful? Now what do you think the outcome would've been had you only invested half or a third of your time, ressources into it?
Im currently working on 3 concurrently. The main thing is that I have good teams surrounding me on all 3. If you have QUALITY people surrounding you, you can accomplish a lot
Who do you think you are? Jack Dorsey? If you like 16 hour days and have a chip on your shoulder then go for it. But in all seriousness here, I wouldn't advise you to do this. One is more than enough. I'd hate to read about you here in a few years in an article about you snapped under all the pressure.<p>Focus. We all have a million great ideas but it's incredibly rare to be able to execute on more than one of them successfully let alone a single idea successfully. One is enough and if you have some extra passion to burn off well then that's why god created side projects. I won't give you advice on how to get through more than one startup as I believe it would hurt you (or anyone) more than it would help.<p>There's only one Jack Dorsey. Remember that.