Brian Casel: [00:00:00] Hey, it's Open Threads. It's my podcast. I'm Brian Casel. Welcome to it. Back on the show today is Dan Rowden. He is the founder of multiple products. That might be the thing that he's known most for these days is having a portfolio of products. We'll get it all linked up in the show notes, but he's got a bunch of products built around the Ghost cMS ecosystem.

He's got a, a great tool that I like to use called ilo.so. He sells some, some themes for Ghost. He's got an analytics tool, you know, as Dan and I talked about in the previous episode, he's, he's really well known on, on Twitter. He's grown an audience there and that's where he shares most of his stuff.

one thing that caught my attention in the last few months. Is this ongoing debate, Dan is part of it, but I've seen some of it in [00:01:00] my own history and work and this debate between should you focus on multiple products and build and launch and maintain multiple products, especially SaaS products versus focus on one product and focus on growing that into a larger business.

And, you know, along with this debate comes like, well, 1 needs to come at the expense of the other. Like, you can't grow 1 product unless you shed all of your other products, or you can't enjoy, uh, building a business. If you're only focused on a single product, you have to get that enjoyment out of jumping around.

And obviously, I don't think that it's, you know, it's so dogmatic 1 way or the other. And I think Dan is a great example of that. You know, he's been able to, to really build and enjoy his, his life and his work life balance and his creativity by growing a portfolio of subscription businesses. So we talked about those trade offs.

We talked about why it has played out that way. We talked about the [00:02:00] fear of, of doubling down on, on one, also the fear of, of not, and I mean, in my history, I've, I've gone between running a portfolio of products for over 10 years into later on. You know, shifting into focusing on one with, with my product ZipMessage.

And we talked a bit about some of the reasoning and the mindset shifts that happened for me in this more recent part of my career. But anyway, I think it was a really good chat, a really good topic that, you know, a lot of people have different approach and different stance on, which I think is great. I think for each person, everyone has a different preference in how they approach their own career trajectory.

So really good conversation here. Let's talk to Dan about portfolio of products. Versus focusing on one,

I did want to like turn our focus over to something else that has bubbled up on Twitter a little bit, because looking at your portfolio of products, they're very different products, but they remind me a lot of where I was at in [00:03:00] the early years of my career and being an entrepreneur and building things.

And that is like working on lots of products simultaneously. Versus focusing on 1 product for an extended period of time and just trying to grow that. And I've seen this debate come up several times between myself and a lot of friends in the industry. I've seen it come up in your tweets. I've seen it come up with others.

And I don't have a firm this is 1 of those things where I don't think that there's any right or wrong approach to it. I tend to see this as like phases of a career. Like for me, working on multiple things was actually a huge benefit for 10 plus years in my career. And then I got to a point for various reasons where I just felt like it was time for me to try to focus on one.

Why don't we start with, give us like a rundown of the main pieces of your portfolio where you do spend time, at least partial parts of your year working on these products, like what are those products? And then we can get into like your thoughts on, on working on a portfolio. [00:04:00] Yeah.

Dan Rowden: Okay. So I have five or six things going at once.

So Subsail was the first kind of major web app or paid web app that I launched back in 2017, which is a magazine subscriptions tool. I don't tweet about it much because it just kind of runs in the background and I'm not really focused on it at the moment, or I haven't really worked on it much recently.

And then the other than this cove, which is the ghost commenting tool, gloat, which is a ghost hosting. Platform super themes, which is my ghost theme business, um, yellow, which is the Twitter analytics. Yeah, then I built something called tolta, which was a kind of metrics tracking dashboard type thing, which I then sold very soon after lunch and refer mo is the latest thing, which is a referrals tool for paddle, which kind of started and then I didn't get too far into because I got busy with some other things.

And then I have codelet, which I just launched a few weeks ago, which is like a ghost agency [00:05:00] consultation, theme development, little business, which is my newest thing. Yeah. And then Twitter is a big part of my day. Maybe that's one of my projects as well.

Brian Casel: Yeah. Yeah. Just being present on Twitter. So obviously there's a lot there.

Several of those are obviously built around the ghost ecosystem, right? The ghost CMS. Which makes a lot of sense. And I've got to imagine that there's some cross selling opportunity, like ghost themes to those commenting systems and things like that and hosting. So of all of those products, which one seems to be taking most of your time?

I mean, I know that you shift your focus from one to the next, but is there one that has sustained more of your time and effort over the last two, three years? Then the others.

Dan Rowden: Uh, no. In any given week, I don't have to work on any of them apart from like customer emails that might come in, but even that is quite low most of the time.[00:06:00]

So I'm basically, I can pick and choose what I work on. There's nothing that needs to be done every single week. The ghost hosts, I have to keep sites updated when there's ghost releases. So it's kind of like the only outside pressure that I have. Yeah, I think it loads the biggest earner. So I like to think of that as like the main project and yeah, I think it has maybe the quite a big potential, but at the same time over the last two years, I think it's obvious that maybe Twitter analytics on its own is not a big.

Product and it won't ever reach maybe 20, 30 K at Mara, even if I focused on it full time, um, even like as much as I want it to, maybe that isn't something that would ever happen.

Brian Casel: Yeah. You mentioned that it was the biggest earner. I did want to ask, like, is there a large. Gap in terms of like our earning potential or current earnings across the portfolio?

Or are you seeing like relatively even split among revenue, but Illow just happens to

Dan Rowden: be on top? Yeah, there's not [00:07:00] much difference between them. They're all under 4K MRR. They're all, well, they're all between one and a half to four basically. So they're all kind of in that kind of

Brian Casel: patch. And then add them all together.

You're above 10 KMRR, like across the portfolio? Yeah, I think

Dan Rowden: it's about nine. Nine something. That's great because there's only four that, uh, have recurring.

Brian Casel: Oh, okay. Yeah. Some of them are like one time sales. So that is super interesting. It's obvious that the debate that comes up around this, right? Like what if you were to focus full time on Illo and just not do anything on the others, right?

And I mean, where do you stand on that right now? Most of the time,

Dan Rowden: I find it very difficult to pick one side and then stick with it because when, if you stick to the do multiple projects side, then you might be missing out on the potential of taking one much further than you can, when you've you're working on four or five things at once.

Whereas if you do then go to one project, which one do you pick? Like, cause I'm in a position where I have multiple projects. I would have to [00:08:00] pick one. It's not like I'm starting from zero and just starting one. So I then have to like, take the chance on one of them. Um, and kind of leave the others to kind of just do nothing for a bit.

And maybe I'd pick the wrong project. Maybe I'd let the other ones die off by accident when they could have actually kind of just stayed on. Like there's a lot of pros and cons to both sides. Personally, I like working on different projects. I like being able to switch between things because each of my projects I started because I wanted them to exist and because I see a value in them existing.

And I like working on them as problems and as like markets. So, yeah, to like pick yellow or pick cove and just do that would be a shame to me. Really at the end of the day, it would be quite sad to like, not work on the other ones. I

Brian Casel: really, really relate to that. Especially the fact that you have products that are relatively even revenue.

It's not an obvious choice, which one to double down on and which ones to let. Let plateau or whatever might happen, right. Or sell them [00:09:00] off. Because I think that the common feedback that I've seen again and again is like, if only you didn't have these other products, you would be able to accelerate growth.

Maybe that's true to a certain extent, but it's certainly not guaranteed. And even if you were able to double growth on one, it doesn't mean that you're not going to hit a plateau. So you do have these other products that could, you know, you just don't know which horse to bet on. And it's also not just a financial question, right?

It's also. The enjoyment factor of being creative on different products and shifting focus. Like that can be refreshing. Right. So I definitely relate to

Dan Rowden: that. And I also have the issue that like Cove and Illo, Cove and Illo are built on top of other platforms. So like Cove is seeing a bit of an issue now because Ghost has just released their own native comments.

So for the past few weeks, I've kind of been in defense mode with Cove and I've had to like. Rethink what Cove can offer and what happens if everyone switches to ghost comments. How does that affect Cove? What can Cove do [00:10:00] differently? It's like, I've had to kind of react to that. And it'd be the same with Illo if Twitter decided to add more analytics or copy some of the features into Twitter, then Illo would also have to kind of shift and move.

And I wonder that, yeah, building something like a ZipMessage, like its own standalone platform, maybe building something like that would be the way that I would pick one project and do something. Like full on rather than building these kind of like add on projects that doesn't have

Brian Casel: that, that

Dan Rowden: platform, but I mean, just starting while I have these four or five or six projects going, I see, why would I stop all that and start on something like a fresh that might not succeed?

Like, you know, I'm kind of stuck. I'm a little bit stuck in the position. I mean, it's not just me either. I support my family and like, I can't just like, YOLO and make these big decisions. I have responsibilities. Yeah, for

Brian Casel: sure. I was also going to ask about your cost structure. Is it like, in your business, is it [00:11:00] just you or do you have team members working with you?

No, it's just me. Okay. Is that a personal goal as well, is to keep it solo, keep it super lean?

Dan Rowden: It's not really a goal. It's just how I like working. I like just Having no other kind of parties involved and I can just do what I want. And maybe there's downsides to that. Maybe I don't have access to other minds that could help the project projects grow faster or additional skills.

But right now. Yeah, I just like building like this. I think maybe bringing on some marketing help at some point would be useful, but I've got this far on my own, so there's been no issues. I don't, yeah, I just like working on my own.

Brian Casel: Even things that are part of the delivery, right? Like, so I think you launched a ghost, like maintenance service or building service, right?

Like an agency. Is that you doing the client work or would you have a team who delivers the client work? No, that's all me. One man band.[00:12:00]

When I was doing multiple products, I think one of the misconceptions that people didn't quite get in terms of my approach to having a portfolio back when I had a portfolio before I sold the whole thing off is I tended to have one primary thing for me for a while that was audience ops. And once I grew that to a comfortable level of revenue and I had a team in place to run it.

For me, it was like a personal goal in that business was to grow it to a point to give myself the freedom to work on lots of other products and like the financial space to be able to try other things without having to be in the business every day on audience ops. Like for me, that was like a big driver in like why I had audience ops was to be able to do these other products.

And then it was like, this might relate to how you operate, but like, I never worked on multiple products, like together in the same week, it was [00:13:00] always like a month or two or three on one thing, or much longer than that before moving on to the next and then just letting that first one sit and run for a while before returning to it.

Right. I also used to do like the productized course and a couple of smaller SaaS ideas, I used to do WordPress themes and things like that. So like, I would just like jump in and out of those, but like spend a lot of energy building and launching. How do you think about that? Like investing your time and focus in one area and then deciding to put it down to the next, or do you really jump around like day to day?

Dan Rowden: Most of the time I work mostly on Elo and Cove, but it basically depends what features I want to add next. So like earlier in the spring, this year, I added new things to Cove. So I worked on that solidly for maybe three, three weeks until it was ready. And then I switched back to Elo and did some Elo stuff.

And I've been doing some more cove things recently. Every day I wake up and it could be something completely random, it could be an hour of cove and then [00:14:00] three hours of illow and then some gloat and then some theme stuff, like there really isn't any structure. And a lot of people on Twitter I see say like, I hate context switching, like it's the worst way to work, but I actually maybe thrive like that because I know that I have, maybe I've got an hour now to get this stuff done on cove and then I know that I have to squeeze in three hours of illow and like.

The switching part isn't difficult for me, and I like having those compartmentalized time, like constraints, basically. Yeah. And I think

Brian Casel: that because your, I would say like overhead in terms of complexity is so low, especially without having team members that depend on anything from you and also products that don't have deadlines.

I mean, clients that might have deadlines, but most of your products are SaaS. You could ship things on whatever schedule you want. So it's not like you have that pressure. Although you said you have like the pressure of like ghost releases and things like that, but still, I think that's what adds to a [00:15:00] lot of.

When talking about like context switching, that adds a lot of complication to it and that's what makes complex context switching difficult is when like, okay, I know this person is waiting on my response via email over there. My teammate is blocked over here. But I want to go work on this other project.

There's tension there, but if it's just me building and shipping one thing and then another project in the afternoon, I could see how that's not as

Dan Rowden: difficult. Yeah. I mean, there's definitely benefits of just being me. Yeah. I can just be super nimble and switch between stuff and basically pick up. And if I want to build a new feature, I'll just build a new feature.

But I think, yeah, like I mentioned, maybe getting some outside help sometimes would, would be beneficial just to kind of vary the skillset of what is possible. Yeah. But I guess it just depends how hard I want to go. And if that obviously means freeing up some revenue or some profits to then spend on people, which I've never done before, so that would have to be like a new experience and like, obviously getting that one to speed [00:16:00] and adding the tool, like documentation.

And that sounds like a lot of a big upfront kind of investment.

Brian Casel: Yeah, that's not necessarily going to drive MRR immediately. Right. Right. It is such a tension, especially when you're below 10 K or you're even just slightly above it and you're paying yourself a salary, supporting a family. I mean, yeah, to make that step from zero to one team members is a big one for sure.

And it's like one of those pieces of advice that it's like, oh, just hire and then you can grow. Like, well, it's, there is a lot more risk involved in those early days. But, you know, I do think about like, at least this was the case for me. And I was talking to Jordan on bootstrap web about this a few months back that for me, I did find having multiple products and multiple things going, it was for me, it was like about 10 years up until 2021, when I sold them all off and went, turned all my focus to ZipMessage.

Except for this podcast. This is [00:17:00] another side hustle, but I found that having multiple products over that span of time also helped with the building in public and podcasting about my work and keeping that interesting and keeping something. To like, I just like to podcast and talk about what I'm working on anyway, just for fun.

But that definitely helped build some audience and listener base, which also had the effect of. Helping me get networked with lots, a lot of people that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to network with. Opening up opportunities, making customer acquisition, easier partnerships, easier. And that's had a major positive impact on all the businesses that I've had, but that wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had all these products that I was working on and having that subject matter to talk about on podcasts and things like that.

And even for example, like one of the reasons I wanted to invite you on to this show. And our previous chat was all about Twitter. I mean, you have two products all [00:18:00] about Twitter. It's a reason to invite you onto this podcast. So it's like having these things in your portfolio puts a signal out and it just helps the whole thing kind of work.

So like, for me, that was like really useful in the first part of my career. I think a lot of people sort of discount that benefit, like sure, you can market and grow products in other ways without, without a personal audience or without a social media presence, but there's another side to that coin, which is like, Thanks.

It's building and sharing really helps.

Dan Rowden: Have you found going from multiple projects to just focusing on one? Like, is there any major changes that you've noticed that are good or bad in your day to day or how you build things?

Brian Casel: Well, the decision to sell the other products. It wasn't necessarily the same decision to focus on ZipMessage. I was just done with the other products, audience ops.

I had for seven years process kit. I was hacking on for like three years and it didn't quite grow to a level that I [00:19:00] was comfortable investing more time into it. And my product has course I became no longer interested in selling courses and doing coaching. So I just lost interest in spending any time on those businesses and they became worth more to me sold than to remain in my portfolio.

And then ZipMessage started to grow faster than any of the other products. And then I took investment on ZipMessage from Calm Fund for the first time in my career. So between selling the businesses and taking some investment, the big change for me mentally is that I'm working off of runway financially.

And in the past, it was always more like revenue in expenses out, like just keep it profitable, keep it stable, slow, steady. And I still operate that way, like a bootstrapper as I have my whole career, except now focusing on one does mean like there's a date in the calendar when the business runs [00:20:00] out of money and we have to grow MRR.

To keep that runway going or like every month when we grow MRR, we're slowly extending that runway up until a point where we just become profitable. And then it grows and I'm still in the runway phase, right? And this might extend another year or two. So that adds some new mental pressure. That's different from what I had before, but I'm also at a stage in my career where I had done the portfolio thing.

And I had done multiple products that to me felt more like stepping stone products. And I feel like I learned a ton. I'm still learning of course, but like I can get into a point where I would feel much more comfortable in a strong, sustainable, profitable SaaS business that I feel good about. And I've had this mental goal of, I want to sink into like a 10 year plus business that can really grow.

I think ZipMessage could be the thing that becomes that a lot more work to do on it. But that's sort of where my personal interest lies. And plus it's like the type of work that I really want to [00:21:00] do longterm, building products. And less of the stuff that I've done before, which was a lot of productized consulting, info products and stuff like that.

Dan Rowden: It's interesting. You mentioned stepping stone project products, because a lot of the time I, I think I tweeted about this recently as well, is that my big project hasn't started yet and I've sometimes feels like whatever I'm working on now, it's just kind of those small kind of getting me to somewhere else and that may be the one big project is in the future somewhere.

Which is kind of a weird way to think about the work you're working on. Cause right now this is like my everything. It supports my family and it's what I do every day. So to think of it as just like a temporary stepping stone to something else is, yeah, strange to think sometimes. It's so true

Brian Casel: though.

That's what it is. I mean, especially in like the first half of the career, it's, you're not going to learn what it's like to run a SaaS business unless you try to launch a SaaS business. And chances are the [00:22:00] first couple ideas are either not going to work at all, or they might work a little bit, but they're not going to grow fast.

And then there are exceptions where it does grow a lot. Like I remember my very, very first product was selling WordPress themes. This was in 2008, 2009. And I remember thinking, cause at the time I was just a freelance web designer doing WordPress sites for clients. I was like, who knows if I'll be able to sell even one of these WordPress themes.

But I know that if I spend the next three, four months, like building out my own custom themes shop, I'm going to learn a ton about what it's like to try to build and sell a digital product on the internet. And I did, and then it was like the most amazing thing to be able to sell a 50 WordPress theme.

And then same thing, I did restaurant engine, which was like a SaaS for restaurant websites. It's like, I have no personal connection to the restaurant industry, but it was the first time like taking, trying to see what it's like to build a SaaS. And then eventually I was even able to [00:23:00] sell that business. And then I got to learn what it's like to sell a business.

And like, these are just building blocks that you can build on and, and op. And you know, the other thing, I don't know if you've experienced this in deciding what new projects to start up, but for me, it's always been every single new idea is a reaction to the previous one, some thing was suboptimal in my previous product.

So my next product is improving that in some way. Like process kit, when I exited that, one of the big conclusions to me or a challenge that I had was like every customer who came on board on the process kit needed a ton of help to get on boarded and get set up and migrate their whole team into using process kit.

And that was a big blocker. It's a big challenge to growth. And one of the things that made ZipMessage so attractive was it was like the opposite. It was like so fast to just pick up and use and get value from. Um, That was like, for me, part of the [00:24:00] attraction to doing ZipMessage was like, it's a reaction to my previous thing, where it's just easier to grow users and like, looking back on every one of my businesses, it was, I had some sort of like challenge.

And then I sort of course corrected in the next one. Like, have you seen any of that in, in like your portfolio moving from one thing to the next?

Dan Rowden: Not really, because they launched all at the same kind of time and haven't really launched much since they were all started because. They were either something that I wanted, like, you know, I wanted better Twitter analytics.

So I just built that and Cove was a reaction to Ghost adding memberships and I spotted there was this unique opportunity to build comments that were tied to the memberships. So it was, it was more kind of using tools and trying to make them better, basically. Yeah, Tolta was, I wanted to, yeah, track all my MRR sales revenue.

Twitter followers, Instagram followers, all that kind of like data in one place, like a very simple place to watch numbers and how they change over time. And then [00:25:00] also embed those counters. It was just something I wanted to build and I wanted to use myself. That's kind of where my projects come. I built one of those once.

I

Brian Casel: did one called sunrise KPI. And that was the idea of like pulling numbers from Stripe, from app, from Google analytics, from Twitter and into one dashboard. And it would email me my numbers every morning or whatever. And I love that product. That was my first learning product that I ended up selling it last year.

But like, that was the product where I learned, uh, Ruby on rails. Like I was a front end designer before that, but then I spent the year in 2018 learning rails, did a bunch of practice projects. And then that was like the first real SaaS that I was able to build and launch. It got a few customers. And then I ended up selling it really, really fun little project.

So just to sort of like wrap this up, you've made a ton of progress. You were able to leave your job and go full time on your portfolio of products. Where do you see this heading for you in the next [00:26:00] couple of years? Are there any. Big directional changes in terms of like maybe taking a bet on one, or maybe starting to grow the team or anything like that, or launching a new product ideas.

Like, are you already working on a new product idea? What do you got cooking?

Dan Rowden: So I do actually have an idea that's been knocking around for maybe three years now, and I'm just not bold enough to do it. Cause it's kind of a big, a bigger thing, but I think if I did something that would be the one, but yeah, like I don't typically think too far in the future.

So like it's just kind of growth and adding new features and making sure that people are happy with the products. I have a cove. I'm adding some cool email automation to ghost members. So you can email them at different points of the member life cycle, like with your reminders or like a drip sequence as they sign up that kind of thing.

Um, you know, I'm adding the writing tool. I need to add. Like thread UI, I'm going to make it really nice to write threads and draft stuff. [00:27:00] So I need to finish that off and launch that properly. And then yeah, sub cells just runs, gloat just runs, super themes, I might add some new ghost themes soon, made a new ghost theme for a while.

So it's just kind of continuing what I'm working on. I think maybe, maybe sitting down and trying to. Work on that new idea is kind of tempting sometimes, but then again, what do I do with the things that I have now? That's kind of a yeah, I don't know. It's kind of hard to get around

Brian Casel: I don't want this to go on like too long But I didn't mean to just ask about marketing because you mentioned like it might help to have a marketing person if you were ever to grow the team but aside from Launching a new product maybe on product Hunter and on Twitter and on indie hackers and stuff like that And then aside from launching new features into a product Maybe sharing that out.

What else do you generally do from a marketing standpoint? And do you think about any projects around, like, let's see if we can double MRR in this product by [00:28:00] doing some project you ever think about that?

Dan Rowden: Uh, no, not typically. Uh, yeah. Marketing is, is hard. I rely on Twitter a lot for reaching new people, especially with ELO, because it's a Twitter product of, yeah, I've built like a referral affiliate system into that to get users to.

It has a blog that I write on, I should write on more, which brings in a decent amount of traffic. I've hit a few good keywords, especially like Twitter spaces. Analytics seems to be doing quite well with bringing in new people for that. I mean, I don't be able to come up with like marketing kind of, I don't know what the word would be like campaigns or just like special events or like things like that.

It's more like generic, just kind of churning out content, make sure the marketing site gets picked up in search engines, make sure that people that are using product talk about it to other people.

Brian Casel: And would you say that like all of your work, I guess [00:29:00] what ends up being marketing work looks a lot like your product work in that, like, it's just things that you can design and build and publish yourself.

You're not relying on other people to. Promote your products for you or link to you from their websites. They might do that naturally, organically, but it's, but you don't have any active effort to send outreach or run campaigns. Like, it's really just about like, I've got this thing, I'm going to share it with this audience.

If it resonates, it resonates.

Dan Rowden: Yeah, and that's got me to 9K MRO, whatever. Technically should get me further, but at some point, I think maybe I would need to like kick it up a notch a little bit and maybe just get it like some sort of marketing engine running that brings in far more people, basically. I don't know what that would look like or how that would work, but I think at some point, cause ideally I'd get to 20 to 30 to 40 K like [00:30:00] within the next few years, but as looking at previous growth is.

Quite slow and steady rather than like a hockey stick kind of thing, but yeah, that's something to think. Yeah. And I

Brian Casel: mean, again, like there's just nothing wrong with that. You get to work solo, do work that you love, jump around to different creative projects and make a full time living to support your family.

I mean, there, there just ain't nothing wrong with

Dan Rowden: that. Yeah. It's just pretty nice life.

Brian Casel: Well, that's awesome, Dan. It was great to unpack this stuff with you. Keep shipping. I know I'm, I'm a fan of what you're doing. I'm going to be using your products. So yeah, thanks for coming on and talking about it. I think this resonates with a lot of folks in our circles, probably more than it might seem.

We tend to see the folks who have the big successful single product trajectories, but I do think that there are a lot of people who are successful with smaller products and building up a portfolio and learning and then sharing it publicly. So. Love what you're doing and we'll obviously get all of your products linked up.

We'll get your [00:31:00] Twitter linked up. And yeah, Dan,

Dan Rowden: thanks for doing this. Yeah, no worries. Thanks for having me on.