I'm a solo founder shipping three unrelated products at once. Talk me out of it.
Every piece of startup advice says pick one thing. I've ended up building three at once, solo, and I want to lay it out honestly and let you tell me where I'm wrong.
The three:
- LeadGrid — type a trade and a city, get a verified list of local businesses (emails, owner names, socials) pulled from Google Maps and each company's own site. B2B, pay per list.
- WakeWin — an alarm you can't dismiss on autopilot: solve a puzzle, then physically get up and move before it goes quiet. Consumer iOS.
- Nalurio — a fresh personalized bedtime story for your kid every night, with audio narration, sold to tired parents.
Three audiences, three buying motions, three completely different marketing playbooks. On paper it's indefensible.
Here's the case I keep making to myself anyway. They're all small, finishable things rather than one big platform, so none of them needs my whole life to reach a v1. They fail at different times, so a dead week on one is usually a decent week on another and I don't spiral. And building three has taught me more about distribution in a few months than a year on a single product would have — the same launch tactic lands completely differently for a B2B lead tool than for a bedtime app, and you only learn that by doing both badly at the same time.
The honest downside: none of them has real traction yet. No product gets my full focus, and I can feel the version of me that would've gone deeper on one by now. I don't actually know if I'm being resourceful or just dodging the discomfort of betting everything on a single idea.
So the real question for anyone here who's done it: did running products in parallel ever actually work for you, or did it only click once you cut down to one? And if you cut down — how did you know which to keep?
Not looking for "just focus" — I know the default answer. I want the exceptions and the war stories.
Honestly respect that you are asking instead of just going with your gut. I m building solo too, and the think i keep running into is exactly this : no one to actually check a call like this before I have already committed to it. Curious, is this the first time you had to make a call this big with no one to sanity check it, or does that happen a lot for you ?
Constantly, and I've stopped expecting that to change.
The three-product thing is the one I posted about because it's easy to name. The calls that actually worry me are smaller and I barely notice I'm making them. Last week I decided to stop putting time into Quora - 20 answers, 51 views total, and the decision was just me one morning deciding that was enough evidence to quit. Nobody checked that number with me, nobody argued the other side, and if I'd read it wrong I'd simply have thrown away a channel and never known.
What I've settled on instead of a sanity check is writing the decision down at the time - what I decided, why, and what would have to be true for me to be wrong. Then I read it back a month later. Past me is a much worse co-founder than a real one, but he's honest and he can't retroactively pretend he saw it coming. Most of the bad calls I've caught, I caught that way rather than in the moment.
Does it bite you more on product decisions or on the money side? Those feel like different problems to me and I'm noticeably worse at the second.
The part that would worry me is not the three audiences, it is that nothing is checking all three at the same time the way a co-founder on each one might. A quiet week on LeadGrid could be hiding a real warning sign, but only if someone actually goes looking that week, and right now that someone is only you, split three ways. The founders who make parallel products work long term are usually not managing focus, they are managing coverage, making sure nothing quietly breaks while attention sits somewhere else. FounderFlow is your AI Executive Chief of Staff. It watches your business, identifies what matters, protects your revenue, and tells you exactly what to do next. Built for exactly this situation, running more than one thing without being more than one person. We are bringing in the first 30 founding members personally right now.
Ha, fair pitch. You're right that the risk isn't the three audiences, it's nobody watching any one of them closely on a quiet week. I'm handling that with brutal focus rules rather than another dashboard for now, but "coverage vs focus" is a good way to put it. Appreciate you reading the post.
What does catching it look like for you right now, a weekly review, gut sense, or genuinely nothing until something breaks? Asking because I built this for founders running more than one thing at once, curious if the gap matches what you are describing or if it is different in a way I am not seeing.
Mostly a written log rather than a review. One file per product with what I did, what happened, what I'm waiting on, and I read it before I touch anything. It isn't early warning, it's just memory - it means a quiet week registers as a quiet week instead of as nothing at all.
The real gap is that nothing tells me when a number stops moving. I notice revenue and I notice things breaking. I don't notice the third straight week that signups sat flat, because flat doesn't generate an event. That's the failure mode you'd have to catch for me to care, and it's a harder problem than a digest.
Flat that never triggers an event is the harder problem, agreed. The design leans on a baseline rather than a single threshold, it learns the normal range per product, then flags when something sits meaningfully below that range for longer than usual, instead of waiting for a hard drop. Three flat weeks on signups would trip that even though nothing technically broke. Still working through how much history it needs before the baseline means anything, too little and every dip looks like noise, too long and it does not adapt to a product that is genuinely changing. How many weeks of data would you want to see before you trusted a system telling you something is off?
Weeks is the wrong unit at my size. LeadGrid does a couple of searches a day on a good day, so even eight weeks of history gives you a baseline whose noise band is wider than anything you'd want to flag. A "meaningfully below normal" test on that data either fires constantly or never.
What would earn trust is a false-alarm rate you're willing to state up front. Tell me it'll wake me about once a month when nothing is wrong, and I'll believe the one time it does.
The other thing: at low volume I trust absence over deviation. "Nobody has run a search in six days" is checkable in ten seconds and I can't argue with it. "Signups are below baseline" I'd talk myself out of every time.
The harder decision isn't whether three products are too many. I'd keep validating whether running them in parallel is helping you discover which opportunity deserves to become a business, or simply delaying the moment when one of them has to earn your full commitment.
That reframe is uncomfortably good, because it's the exact thing I can't answer honestly yet. If I'm being real, running three has partly been a way to avoid picking — as long as all three are "alive," I never have to say out loud that two of them might not be worth my life.
Where I'd push back a bit: none of them has real traction yet. Nalurio and LeadGrid are both flat at zero, so I'm not pretending one is winning on the scoreboard. But the parallel phase has still taught me which one pulls — Nalurio gets the least of my time and the warmest responses, LeadGrid gets the most work and the most indifference. Six months ago I'd have bet the opposite, and I don't think a spreadsheet would've told me. I only believe it because I watched all three take the same bad launch and react differently.
So my rule right now: keep them parallel until one starts needing more than nights-and-weekends me. The day one has a real reason to demand full-time, that's the cut signal. Until then the "delay" is buying information I'd otherwise be guessing at. Ask me in three months whether that was wisdom or just a nicer story for procrastinating.
Appreciate the honesty here.
The distinction between buying information and avoiding commitment is exactly where the interesting decision sits, but I don't think I'd do it justice in a public thread.
If you're open to it, what's the best email to reach you on?
I'm happy to get into it right here, honestly — if someone else lurking with the same three-product guilt gets something from it, even better. Short version on your reframe: it's a timer, not a yes/no. Parallel earned its keep while each product was still teaching me something different about distribution. The day two of them are only alive so I don't have to admit the third is the real bet, it's flipped into avoidance. I don't think I'm at that line yet, but you've got me wanting to actually define it instead of eyeballing it. Where are you on it — running more than one yourself, or weighing whether to?
Appreciate the perspective.
I think the interesting part is defining the point where parallel stops creating information and starts creating avoidance.
Would be good to continue the conversation outside the thread.
What's the best email to reach you on?