11 posts
Running more than one product
When to start the next product, where it comes from, and when to grow, hand over or close.
- How do you keep small products from being forgotten?
Give them one shared weekly page: what changed, what's waiting, and a line for every fault that once reached a customer. A dashboard only shows what you thought to put on it.
- How do you review a portfolio of small products once a year?
One sheet of paper in January. Every product down the side, with its slot, its year in a line, and one word: keep, grow, hand over or close.
- How do you run several products without several times the work?
Build every product on the same machinery, so a new one only adds the part that's new. My first rebuild drill took 6 hours and 20 minutes and found 3 things that lived only in my head.
- How do you shut down a SaaS properly?
One email with the reason, the date, a full refund for the current month and an export you've tested yourself. Then one line at the end, for anybody curious about what's next.
- How many products can one person run?
As many as you have named slots in your week. I run 5 in about 3 evenings, and I've stopped there, because a sixth would need a slot I don't have.
- Should you grow your first product or build a second?
If anybody paying you is asking for something you haven't built, build that first. 3 landlords asked for the same thing in one month; it took an afternoon and became the best feature the tool has.
- What do you do with a working product you no longer care about?
Look for somebody who cares about its customers more than you do, and hand it over properly. I closed a working fees tracker for language schools, and its customers went back to paper.
- What happens to a one-person SaaS if you're ill?
Mine ran for 2 weeks of flu with nobody looking, mostly by luck. Now each product has one page, written while I'm well, saying where it lives, what runs, what needs a person and what to tell customers.
- What should you check before buying a micro SaaS?
6 things: the inbox, the price, the stack, the dependencies, the customers and the slot. I walked away from a dog walkers' booking tool that failed several of them at once.
- When should you start a second product?
When the newest paying one has settled: it fits a slot you could name, it hasn't needed you outside that slot for a month, and its questions have become repeats.
- Where do good second product ideas come from?
From your cancellation replies. Read them all in one sitting, on paper, for the sentence that goes past the question. The same paragraph from 3 strangers is a product.
Questions
- What does "Running more than one product" cover?
- When to start the next product, where it comes from, and when to grow, hand over or close.
- Which book goes deeper?
- The Second Product: What comes next: growing past the first product without running out of evenings.
- How long are the posts?
- A few minutes each. Every one answers its question in the first two sentences, then gives the decision and what it costs.