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Ask HN: Your experiences building several startups at the same time

22 points by zeynalov 15y ago

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. 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?

rokhayakebe 15y ago
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?
- zeynalov 15y ago
  I know, it would be surely better to work only one of them. But I think I didn't explained the issue very good. It took 6 month to make the first startup to work, 1 year to automate it fully, to be able to work on other projects. Even it's fully automated, I have to control everyday how it's doing, what problems project manager has etc. and it takes my time and I can't concentrate me on the next project. Maybe the problem is in automation, or I have to find a good CEO for my first startup?
yuvadam 15y ago
Most people cannot do more than one full-blown startup at the same time. 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). But more than one 'real' startup? Don't go there.
- flippyhead 15y ago
  Most people can't event do one full-blown start-up at a time.
- philwelch 15y ago
  I can't think of anyone who could do more than one--guys like Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs might be able to pull off two mature businesses or one mature business and one startup, but I haven't seen anyone do two startups at the same time.
seanmccann 15y ago
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. 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.
JayInt 15y ago
Interesting question. 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. 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... 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). Another consideration is how you work... 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) 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.
- zeynalov 15y ago
  yes I'm going to write a blog post about the progress. second startup is not a big idea, it's a ui/ux design bureau. The reason why I get an office and empleyees for that rather than working online, I need professional web design/developer team for my startups. Having a team, made me think why not to open a design studio?! And also sometimes I get big orders like website of State oil company Azerbaijan Republic. They pay for a website 50-120k euros. So I founded A ui/ux design (which I am expert on) bureau. My third startup is a software, which also will need some team to develop it. By starting second and third, I thought that I already automated the first one, which was not true and my Project Manager cannot handle with the issues like I did. Everyday he asks stupid questions and takes my time which make me tired of it.
hmahncke 15y ago
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. 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.
inestyne 15y ago
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!
fatalerrorx3 15y ago
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
- fatalerrorx3 15y ago
  Like others have mentioned also, by spreading yourself out onto too many projects you limit the chances of success that any one will get..Find the most intriguing/interesting project and give 110% to that, drop the rest until you exit the first (hopefully successfully), then you can re-explore your passion projects with less pressure (that is, if you get a nice money cushion from the first venture)
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  What problem are u trying to solve?
playhard 15y ago
Jack Dorsey is the right guy to answer this. http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-does-8-hours-at-twitter-8-hours-at-square-daily/ http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-do...
- loceng 15y ago
  It's very different when you have completely different environments (eg: contexts) to pull your mind into a different mode. Your mind will very quickly switch. Like most starting up multiple startups though you have one space where you work, and therefore you need to figure out other queues to create context for what you're working on - and try to eliminate other distractions from unrelated things. This is very hard for me, which is why the alternative is to work on only 1 project. Of course life itself includes more than 1 project.
exess1 15y ago
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
- AznHisoka 15y ago
  which 3 of them?
hsuresh 15y ago
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.
glimcat 15y ago
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).
biznickman 15y ago
I wrote a post on this last night (published this morning) http://nickoneill.com/the-most-common-way-entrepreneurs-kill-their-business-2012-01/ http://nickoneill.com/the-most-common-way-entrepreneurs-kill... ... 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.
ww520 15y ago
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.
zwadia 15y ago
It's doable, but you need momentum on the first play to even think about executing on the 2nd eventually parallel play. It is very easy to cite the Jack Dorsey example but you must note that Twitter was his PRIMARY focus all they to mass-market adoption. Only THEN did he divert attention to Square and making that baby hum. It is extremely difficult to incept two nascent start-ups and make them both successful simultaneously when you haven't already got a position of power+influence. Note: building two nascent start-ups is different from the "labs" mentality where you play with a bunch of ideas, execute conceptually on a few and deploy some into the market to see if they work. That's a very different mental model. Even in Labs land you have guys like Kevin Rose deploying one thing at a time into the wild (OINK).
shailu76 15y ago
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 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. 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. my 2 cents.
ithought 15y ago
I like Aaron's post on this topic- http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity 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.
- zeynalov 15y ago
  I read his motivational articles like years ago. I am not sure but I was 22 I think, and it was really great article. Absolutely will read it one more time.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
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. 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. There's only one Jack Dorsey. Remember that.
- zeynalov 15y ago
  I want to automate my first startup and make a better one. With the first startup I can't make more than 70k euros/month. It's in Germany, noone would buy it. So should I kill it? Because I have better ideas. P.S. I didn't say I'm Jack Dorsey. I really appreciate what he does and did. But I and anyone else can be better than him, if you ask my opinion.
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    First off, don't take offense to the Dorsey comment. I was kidding. There was an article about him working 16 hour days at 2 startups that I was reminded of. You should have mentioned these details originally. If you can automate it and it really doesn't require too much attention from you then I'd say keep it running and pursue other options. Doesn't seem like a problem to me. When you say you can't make more than 70k euros monthly I worry. 70k each month is a lot of money. Is that in your pocket or what the business is making before expenses? If that's your pay then I hope you're not in it for the money. Doing anything for the money is a sure way to fail in the long run. But all things considered I can't see a reason why you shouldn't go for 2 at a time in this particular situation. Good luck.
    - zeynalov 15y ago
      70k is monthly net profit. I know working for money is not good, but my business model is limited. It's local. It can't grow anymore. For example, Google can grow, Facebook can grow, etc. they can invent interesting things by the time. But my first startup gets already boring and I seek something more interesting. I dont want to stuck in an office working whole the time on it.
petervandijck 15y ago
Dries is running Acquia and Mollom, 2 startups in effect, started around the same time. I think he delegates really well.

22 points by zeynalov 15y ago

rokhayakebe 15y ago

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?

zeynalov 15y ago
I know, it would be surely better to work only one of them. But I think I didn't explained the issue very good. It took 6 month to make the first startup to work, 1 year to automate it fully, to be able to work on other projects. Even it's fully automated, I have to control everyday how it's doing, what problems project manager has etc. and it takes my time and I can't concentrate me on the next project. Maybe the problem is in automation, or I have to find a good CEO for my first startup?

yuvadam 15y ago

Most people cannot do more than one full-blown startup at the same time. 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). But more than one 'real' startup? Don't go there.

flippyhead 15y ago
Most people can't event do one full-blown start-up at a time.
philwelch 15y ago
I can't think of anyone who could do more than one--guys like Jack Dorsey and Steve Jobs might be able to pull off two mature businesses or one mature business and one startup, but I haven't seen anyone do two startups at the same time.

seanmccann 15y ago

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. 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.

JayInt 15y ago

Interesting question. 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. 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... 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). Another consideration is how you work... 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) 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.

zeynalov 15y ago
yes I'm going to write a blog post about the progress. second startup is not a big idea, it's a ui/ux design bureau. The reason why I get an office and empleyees for that rather than working online, I need professional web design/developer team for my startups. Having a team, made me think why not to open a design studio?! And also sometimes I get big orders like website of State oil company Azerbaijan Republic. They pay for a website 50-120k euros. So I founded A ui/ux design (which I am expert on) bureau. My third startup is a software, which also will need some team to develop it. By starting second and third, I thought that I already automated the first one, which was not true and my Project Manager cannot handle with the issues like I did. Everyday he asks stupid questions and takes my time which make me tired of it.

hmahncke 15y ago

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. 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.

inestyne 15y ago

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!

fatalerrorx3 15y ago

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

fatalerrorx3 15y ago
Like others have mentioned also, by spreading yourself out onto too many projects you limit the chances of success that any one will get..Find the most intriguing/interesting project and give 110% to that, drop the rest until you exit the first (hopefully successfully), then you can re-explore your passion projects with less pressure (that is, if you get a nice money cushion from the first venture)
AznHisoka 15y ago
What problem are u trying to solve?

playhard 15y ago

Jack Dorsey is the right guy to answer this. http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-does-8-hours-at-twitter-8-hours-at-square-daily/ http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2011/11/14/jack-dorsey-do...

loceng 15y ago
It's very different when you have completely different environments (eg: contexts) to pull your mind into a different mode. Your mind will very quickly switch. Like most starting up multiple startups though you have one space where you work, and therefore you need to figure out other queues to create context for what you're working on - and try to eliminate other distractions from unrelated things. This is very hard for me, which is why the alternative is to work on only 1 project. Of course life itself includes more than 1 project.

exess1 15y ago

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

AznHisoka 15y ago
which 3 of them?

hsuresh 15y ago

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.

glimcat 15y ago

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).

biznickman 15y ago

I wrote a post on this last night (published this morning) http://nickoneill.com/the-most-common-way-entrepreneurs-kill-their-business-2012-01/ http://nickoneill.com/the-most-common-way-entrepreneurs-kill... ... 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.

ww520 15y ago

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.

zwadia 15y ago

It's doable, but you need momentum on the first play to even think about executing on the 2nd eventually parallel play. It is very easy to cite the Jack Dorsey example but you must note that Twitter was his PRIMARY focus all they to mass-market adoption. Only THEN did he divert attention to Square and making that baby hum. It is extremely difficult to incept two nascent start-ups and make them both successful simultaneously when you haven't already got a position of power+influence. Note: building two nascent start-ups is different from the "labs" mentality where you play with a bunch of ideas, execute conceptually on a few and deploy some into the market to see if they work. That's a very different mental model. Even in Labs land you have guys like Kevin Rose deploying one thing at a time into the wild (OINK).

shailu76 15y ago

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 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. 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. my 2 cents.

ithought 15y ago

I like Aaron's post on this topic- http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/productivity 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.

zeynalov 15y ago
I read his motivational articles like years ago. I am not sure but I was 22 I think, and it was really great article. Absolutely will read it one more time.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

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. 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. There's only one Jack Dorsey. Remember that.

zeynalov 15y ago
I want to automate my first startup and make a better one. With the first startup I can't make more than 70k euros/month. It's in Germany, noone would buy it. So should I kill it? Because I have better ideas. P.S. I didn't say I'm Jack Dorsey. I really appreciate what he does and did. But I and anyone else can be better than him, if you ask my opinion.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  First off, don't take offense to the Dorsey comment. I was kidding. There was an article about him working 16 hour days at 2 startups that I was reminded of. You should have mentioned these details originally. If you can automate it and it really doesn't require too much attention from you then I'd say keep it running and pursue other options. Doesn't seem like a problem to me. When you say you can't make more than 70k euros monthly I worry. 70k each month is a lot of money. Is that in your pocket or what the business is making before expenses? If that's your pay then I hope you're not in it for the money. Doing anything for the money is a sure way to fail in the long run. But all things considered I can't see a reason why you shouldn't go for 2 at a time in this particular situation. Good luck.
  - zeynalov 15y ago
    70k is monthly net profit. I know working for money is not good, but my business model is limited. It's local. It can't grow anymore. For example, Google can grow, Facebook can grow, etc. they can invent interesting things by the time. But my first startup gets already boring and I seek something more interesting. I dont want to stuck in an office working whole the time on it.

petervandijck 15y ago

Dries is running Acquia and Mollom, 2 startups in effect, started around the same time. I think he delegates really well.