It's a general belief that Entrepreneurship is about "jumping from a cliff and assembling a plane on the way down", but if probability and statistics make any sense, that is too much risk to take. Not just the number of years, but personal relations, psychological effect of failing continuously, health etc.
So... do you think it's a good idea to get involved in multiple startups ideas simultaneously? Have your say.
It's not a terrible idea to work on a few projects simultaneously, but you should focus on one when/if it shows promise. Also keep in mind that building a successful startup isn't just a statistical game in which 1 out of every 100 startups necessarily succeeds. As in, a startup might only succeed because the founders put in the extra work.
But how about recruiting the right people for the right job (well, this wouldn't be possible for startups with meager fund though) in each of the startups so that the ideas get implemented as they should, and the founders, rather than actually developing the projects ground up, merely act as project managers, monitoring the progress and validating the results against their vision.
It might work for smaller companies, but eventually you'll either have to focus on one, or zoom further out (and essentially become a VC).
It could definitely work, but you'd need established teams that can basically function on their own. At this point, you're a general, not a soldier.
Entrepreneurship is about building stuff to make you money. Whether you want to include cliffs or planes is entirely up to you.
Lots of things that make money start off small and ramp up slowly. It might take months before your new thing is bringing in even $100/month in revenue. But that's calendar time, not necessarily labor time. So you might find you have room in there to build a second thing while you're waiting for the first one to take off.
You'll find people here with a half dozen SaaS products on the market, all building on themselves every month, all in some state of active development. You'll find even more people here with one or two products out there who are still working 40 hour weeks either contracting or as an employee.
Sure you can follow the 90-hour-week, VC-backed path if you like. And if so, you probably won't find much time for anything else. But you don't have to. It's a wide spectrum, and that world is a very tiny slice at one edge.
I remember listening to a guy talk to Jack Dorsey. This guy said "I'm working on 3 startup ideas." Jack said "that's two too many."
You might think that some people can pull it off: Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey come to mind. But keep in mind: Elon Musk started two successful startups (Zip2, then X.com, x.com later merged with paypal) and he did both of those one-at-a-time. Only after he had lots of experience doing startups was he able to work on multiple startups at a time. Are you a veteran entrepreneur known for working 12 hour days and who has already started two successful startups? No? Then don't think you can do what Elon Musk is doing. Same for Jack Dorsey. He started Twitter, and only after getting forced out did he start Square. Later he returned to Twitter (under its new CEO, Dick Costolo).
Also note that Steve Jobs did not really do anything at Pixar while he was at Apple. His role was closer to that of an investor/advisor.
Running a startup requires focus and tremendous effort. Investing requires due diligence, sure, but after you sign that check you don't really need to do much work.
What you might be able to do is to work on several side projects; when one of them starts to get traction/users/attention, then you'll need to focus on that one product.
More often then not building a product that is capable of success requires a lot of commitment emotionally, mentally, and financially. Realistically being able to provide this level of commitment across several companies is not possible for the vast majority of people, and not giving each company enough attention will spread you too thin and will likely end in all of them failing.
Ultimately if you can create multiple products capable of success at then same time then for sure, go for it. But most people can't do that, and in the long run one company that produces a really good product people want is a lot more likely to succeed then 20 that have ok products that people may or may not even want.
I guess if you have help with those projects, and you are contributing to them maybe it could work? But I doubt it.
A founder needs to put in at least 8 hours a day for a single startup.
There are slight variations of this model where you can create an ‘incubator’ of companies which is what was started by IdeaLab (I think they were the earliest tech incubator in 1996) and what the likes of Obvious, Rocket Internet, Science etc are doing.
However, in terms of doing 1 startup vs. 20 startups as per your example – if any of them become successful you are going to need entrepreneurs to run the startups in your ‘incubator’ (and you’re going to have a problem even attracting them unless you have $$$) – and you have far better chances of having 1 successful startup than 20
The reason why you have a better chance of having 1 successful startup over 20 is easiest to explain with an example, so let’s pretend that you want to make $100/day from these startups. You may think that if you have 20 of them that’s only $5/day compared to 1 earning $100/day and getting 20 to $5/day may sound easier than 1 to $100 especially as, you can “spread” out your chances of success and income sources – it’s not. The reason why it’s not is because:
Bigger sites make more money – advertisers like to work with large sites because it’s the same amount of paperwork to advertise on a site with 100,000 pageviews as it is for one with 10,000,000 pageviews – which is why advertisers prefer to do 1 ad buy on that 10,000,000 pageview site than 100 deals with sites with 100,000 pageviews.
Bigger sites get better deals – when you’re generating a ton of traffic you get great deals from advertisers. Likewise, bigger sites open doors as most companies aren’t interested in working with small sites until they have a considerable amount of users – having 20 sites with 1M users each isn’t as interesting or valuable as having 1 site with 20M users. Why? Well 20 sites x 1M users each = 20M right? NO! Every time a member of one of your sites is member of another – it reduces the total number of users.
Bigger sites are easier to promote which makes them stickier after all the average user only visits a handful of websites.
