about launching concurrent projects
yes, I have a couple of them that I do not want to give up any. Supposing they all got very positive feedback from very initial surveys, I would like to request your views on the possibility of their further "sane" execution, since, I am passionate for launching these services, but I dont want to end up in hospital.
early funding that would enable hiring as a solution? keeping tight grip on the realization of the vision, yet delegating daily operations to hired talent?..how did things evolve in your hands-on experience or witnessing?
Funding Founder Hiring Growth Product Launch
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if the projects are of similar nature, perhaps you can re-use pieces across them (depending on your contract agreements) and start with those pieces first? – Random Us1r 11 years ago
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thank you for your point. I'm really considering this wherever the technologies, users or the future contract partnerships coincide. – Menesa 11 years ago
2 Answers
Choose one and drive it until it's dead or done.
With any new project, the Vision, requirements, understanding of the customer, etc are probably only in your head. Building out something like that is hard. Unless you've done this numerous times, expressing those ideas to someone without the same understanding is just plain hard.
Now multiply this by each of your projects.
From the outside, I would be hesitant to buy any of your products if I knew about the others.. not because they're bad or multiple products are bad but it says to me that you don't believe enough in your product to devote your time and energy to it. If you won't do that, why should I invest my time, energy, money, and potentially risk my business operations using it?
A good example of this is Delicious. I used to be a voracious Delicious user from the earliest days. When they sold to Yahoo, I was hesitant but hopeful. When they started removing people from the team (corp-speak: deprioritized it), I moved my stuff out.. their announced closing/sunsetting was inevitable at that point. Even after someone else picked it up, I'm hesitant to touch it.
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thank you sincerely for your points, Casey. meanwhile I've found this post; http://bit.ly/jXZ6V0. your first reference on understanding seems to me depending also on the nature of offers, like being self-explanatory, intuitive, immediately of use, with a low learning curve..like being designed with ease for hardest-adopter in mind. As for the trust issue, I agree certainly that dedication to excellence in each project mustn't be affected, but can we generally speak of the impossibility of this? my start point with multiple projects (and source of my passion) is to offer excellent services. – Menesa 11 years ago
If you have funds to hire a few people, go out and hire one person that can be dedicated to each project. This way, you can oversee the development/growth of each project and be involved in each of those, while offloading the daily follow-up/must-do tasks to the dedicated project lead.
I would suggest looking for someone well-organized, and experienced with administrative/managerial responsibilities. In a nutshell, they'll be the "product managers" for their respective products, but you can retain control of strategic decisions until you're ready to delegate to them (or someone else). There is a pretty decent book i came across on this topic and you might want to check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Product-Managers-Desk-Reference/dp/0071591346 (i have no affiliation or interest in the sale of this book).
The other approach would be to partner with a "co-founder" who can share the workload with you in a way that you stay involved in the areas you're good at, and the co-founder focuses on the areas he/she is good at. This will keep initial investment low, but you'll have to share equity with the co-founder.
