The Pros and Cons of Multiple Products
The Pros and Cons of Multiple Products
The Serial Micropreneurship Model of owning multiple products offers several significant advantages, but it also comes with its own set of challenges.
The Advantages
- Ability to Choose Small Niches: You can target small, underserved niches that would not be viable for a traditional business, but can still provide a healthy income.
- Income Diversification: Multiple streams of revenue reduce your risk and make your business more resilient to market changes.
- Attention Diversification: You can explore new ideas and avoid the boredom that can come from working on the same product for years.
- Economies of Scale: You can reuse systems, processes, and knowledge across multiple products, which reduces the time and cost of launching new ventures.
- Focus on What You Enjoy: You can focus on the parts of the entrepreneurial journey that you enjoy most, whether it's the initial idea phase, the build phase, or the marketing phase.
- Experience Transfers: The knowledge and experience you gain from one product can be applied to all of your other products, creating a powerful feedback loop of learning and improvement.
The Pitfalls
- Task Switching: The biggest downside is the inefficiency that comes from switching between multiple tasks and contexts.
- Outsourcing and Automation are Crucial: This model is not sustainable if you are not willing to extensively outsource and automate. You must be willing to let go of control and to delegate tasks to others.
The decision to pursue a multi-product strategy should not be taken lightly. It requires a high degree of organization, a commitment to automation, and a willingness to let go of the "do it all yourself" mentality.