When should you start a second product?

Start a second product only when the newest paying one has settled. Settled means 3 things: its weekly look fits a slot you could name, nothing in it has needed you outside that slot for a month, and its customers' questions have become repeats you can answer with a page you've already written.

The worst post of my life

I wrote it at 11 o'clock on a Wednesday night, after answering the last email from a landlord. The landlord tool had been running for 3 months. I'd charged for it before building it, and it looked like it might last. Its customers were still finding their way round it, and they wrote in most evenings. Where do I put the gas certificate? Why does this house show twice? I answered every one, carefully, because they were paying me and I couldn't quite believe it.

That same week I was launching another product, a tool that explained a database's structure in plain words. By Wednesday I'd reached the one place that mattered, a forum where people knew my name, and I had nothing left. I wrote the post in 5 minutes. It was flat. (Flat is generous.)

That product died 5 months later. The energy it needed had gone to the landlords.

The first one eats first

A new product's demands peak in its first weeks, then settle. Launch the second during the first one's peak and the second gets your tired hours. The first product that pays will always win that fight, because it has customers writing to you tonight.

Wait for the settle

Waiting can take 2 or 3 months, and in those months the new idea feels urgent. Write it down. If it's still good when the first one has settled, it'll still be good then. Most of my best products were built from ideas that had waited.

The Second Product has the chapter, with a worked example of the settle.