Why I Build Many Things Instead of One Thing
The conventional advice is to focus. I've spent 12 years doing the opposite. Here's why the portfolio approach works for this studio — and why I'd make the same bet again.
Every founder conversation eventually gets to the focus question. "How many things are you running?" Eight or so, depending on how you count. "How does that work?" Honestly, better than you'd expect.
The conventional wisdom is clear: find one thing, go deep, don't split your attention. And for a lot of people building a lot of companies, that's the right call. I've watched enough focused startups succeed to know focus works.
But I've also watched enough focused startups fail for a single reason — market timing, a competitor, a bet that didn't land — to know that focus has its own risks. When everything rides on one thing, one thing going wrong is catastrophic.
Risk Distribution Is Real
The portfolio approach starts with a simple premise: I don't know which of my bets will hit. Nobody does, not really. What I can control is how many bets I'm making and whether each one is structurally sound.
AI Recaps, Dealery, Game Night, Redinfinite, Nion Lights — they're all real products with real users. Some will grow. Some will plateau. Maybe one becomes the thing. But the studio doesn't collapse if any individual one underperforms, because no single product is holding up the whole structure.
The downside of this approach is obvious: none of them get my full attention. The upside is that I've stayed in business through multiple market cycles, technology shifts, and the general chaos of building things independently. That's not an accident.
Cross-Project Learning Compounds
Something happens when you're building multiple products at once: solutions you find in one place start showing up everywhere. Infrastructure patterns, content strategies, distribution approaches, tooling — they transfer.
The auto-posting system I use across all eight blogs started as a solution to a specific Game Night problem. The Shopify integration work from Nion Lights informed how I thought about commerce across the portfolio. Building Redinfinite taught me things about fast content rendering that influenced how I approached AI Recaps.
When you're building one thing, you only get the lessons from that one thing. The portfolio compounds faster.
Staying Curious Is Underrated
I've met founders who are brilliant at their one thing and visibly bored by it. They built the right product, captured the right market, and now they're managing a machine they've already solved. That's a legitimately hard problem to have, and I don't want to minimize it.
But it's not my problem, and I think that's partly by design.
The portfolio keeps me interested. Nion Lights is a physical product company that goes to festivals. AI Recaps is a media tool. VitaLink is B2B software. Game Night is a consumer app with 150,000 installs. They're genuinely different problems, and I'm genuinely curious about all of them. That curiosity isn't a distraction — it's what keeps the work good.
No Single Point of Failure
This is the one I think about most. Every solo founder has a bad quarter — a missed launch, a platform change that wrecks distribution, a product that doesn't find its audience. When you're running one thing, a bad quarter can be terminal.
When you're running a portfolio, a bad quarter in one product is a bad quarter. You learn from it, you adjust, and the other products keep going. The lights stay on. The studio survives to take the next swing.
Twelve years in, I've had plenty of bad quarters. I'm still here because no single one of them took everything with it.
This Doesn't Work for Everyone
I want to be clear about something: the portfolio approach only works because I've spent a long time getting good at building things quickly and cheaply. The leverage I have now — the tooling, the systems, the pattern recognition — didn't exist at year two. If I'd tried to run eight products in year two, it would have been a mess.
The portfolio bet requires a foundation. You have to be able to ship fast enough and well enough that spread attention doesn't mean shallow work. That's a bar you have to earn before the strategy makes sense.
But once you have it, it changes the math. Not just on risk — on motivation, on learning, on staying in the game long enough to see what sticks.
I've been running XenneX as a multi-product studio since the beginning. I've never seriously considered collapsing it into one thing.
I'd make the same bet again.