Six Sites

In the month since I relaunched sixsites.com I’ve already posted 12 new ideas (visible only to my trusted collaborators. If you are interested in becoming one, then direct message me), built a couple of rough prototypes, not to mention a couple of ideas I haven’t got around to posting yet. This is on top of the committed Signal, Leaflets 2.0 and Mobile Design products.

On my first day back from the holiday break my primary motivation is to get organized and start planning out the year. I want to lock down dates, features, collaborators, etc. I’ve started by creating a big schedule for the year and have begun to pencil in dates, but the key problems become cash flow and prioritization.

With no shortage of product ideas or talented people ready to create some cool new products, the biggest challenge becomes cash flow. To successfully bootstrap products income needs to start rolling in within a few months of launching the product. Revenue will need to reach a break even point in 2-3 months and produce sustainable revenue in 6-9 months to warrant future development. With the current economic climate, that will become increasingly harder to do.

Of course there is no way to predict what will break through and what won’t. Of the list of current ideas, the ones with the greatest revenue potential are the revolutionary ideas that will need to time to percolate and build a solid foundation of users, not exactly ideal for bootstrapping. So I have to devise a plan to simultaneously create short term revenue opportunities for me and my collaborators while also committing time and resources to long term product opportunities.

I know for many people a multi-pronged strategy seems like creating distractions, from my experience it certainly can be. The trick is creating ideas based on clearly defined user or market needs, but share similar technology. In other words, build multiple products from the same core application. To developers I know this sounds like a pipe dream, but I’m convinced it can work. Actually not just convinced, but I believe that in this climate it is a necessity to view each of your products as multi-dimensional, meaning shape wildly different ideas into one core technology.

In doing this you can release a product, see if it takes hold, if not, create another one, quickly. Ideally for each core technology you create you can release 3-4 unique consumer products from it. It is like taking an investment model and applying it to products: always be working to minimizing investment risk while simultaneously maximizing your market opportunity.

Over the next few weeks I will do my best to create a realistic plan for 2009 and share it here of course.