In many things: focus helps.
If you’re all-in on growing one product, if you can move mountains to make this one thing go, then you’ll probably grow it faster.
But if that’s the case, why are more and more bootstrappers taking a portfolio approach?
After all, we did it too. We bought ViewExport, then we started DemandBird for social media, and we’ll launch SaaSPulse soon. Not to mention a few MacOS App Store apps.
Oh, and we run a monthly bootstrapper mastermind call series, too.
A couple’a iconic Twitterite bootstrappers, Levels and Lou, have a portfolio approach as well:
Why so many things? Why not grow just one thing?
The Case For A SaaS Portfolio
There are two main reasons for working on more than one thing at a time:
Different marketing channel mix. For us, we tried a few things to grow ViewExport but just could not figure out any meaningful way to do so apart from organic search. And there’s not a whole lot left to do on organic search. Not that we’ve completely maximized SEO there… but there’s diminishing returns from continuing to focus on it. So we built the product, built up its SEO, and don’t spend additional time marketing it. That leaves time to market something else. Effectively, it’s become passive on the marketing side, with occasional product updates, and being available for occasional customer service questions.
Claude takes a while to execute tickets, and there’s “intra-session downtime”. Literally just, you’re using AI to code, and quickly realize that you can have more than one CLI window open at a time (if not 4-8 or more), and - if you can handle the mental load of task-switching - you can build 2 or 3 products at once actively. Just by maximizing the tokens within your $200/mo Claude Code plan limits. The alternative is, sometimes you’ll wait for 10-60 mins while AI codes some stuff. What do you do? Sometimes, just go take a walk and have a coffee. But often you want to keep going. You just can’t feasibly do more on the current branch while something complex is being built. So you turn to another product in the downtime.
The Case For Focusing On One Product
If you’re working a full-time job and doing this on the side, or are otherwise time-constrained? The above probably doesn’t apply to you. You probably don’t have time to build more than one thing, because you’re not hammering away at AI coding and marketing all day.
Alternatively, if you’re venture-backed (not our core audience, I realize, so this is unlikely), you’re going to need to be all-in per your agreement with your investors. Probably.
How We’re Playing It
Despite us taking a ‘portfolio approach’, we spend probably 60% of coding effort and 85% of marketing time, on DemandBird.
The SaaS bootstrapper mastermind is a Slack channel plus two calls that I facilitate (one per subgroup of 6-8 founders, per month).
So despite us having a mix of products, most of them don’t take much of our time. The one that has a huge TAM and tons of growth potential - our social media scheduling and analytics product, DemandBird - takes the bulk of our focus, and that’s on purpose.
(And this has only become possible, with AI coding. Pre-2024, there was no real way a team of 2 of us working full-time could ship as much as we are.)
All this to say:
Take a portfolio approach if you can maximize the advantages associated with it. But you’ll still probably want to have one product that is your primary focus.
Have a great week of shipping code & revenue!
-Alex & Mac