Today I drew a diagram. I was doing a bit of product retrospective and planning, and to make sense of my different products, I charted them out. Call it my product diversification portfolio strategy. It’s similar to the concept of a diverse investment portfolio, where you have diverse investments to spread out risk, to not put all your eggs in one basket. I use “products” here generally to mean service products and software products.

Imagine a spectrum/continuum from left to right. On the  left end, is “Services”. On the right, “SaaS”. In a sense, Services are opposites with SaaS.

Service <———————————> SaaS

Services are:

• where you sell your time for money (consultancy, design, freelance)
• easily to start up, almost zero capital needed
• limited scalability due to max upper limit on how much time you can realistically work
• little passive income potential

SaaS are:

• where you sell a solution to a problem, in the form of a software product
• harder to start up, usually need some to a lot of upfront capital, time or manpower
• high leverage and scalability as it can earn as you sleep
• high passive income potential

Next, I positioned my products on the spectrum – Outsprint, Keto List, Sweet Jam Sites, Your Life In Months. (best read on desktop)

          Outsprint             Sweet Jam Sites             Keto List         Your Life In Months

Service <———————————————————————————> SaaS

So I generally got a good spread on my product diversification portfolio:

• Outsprint is a service through-and-through, as I’m needed to run the consultancy projects and I can’t do more than 2 projects in a month. I’m the bottleneck. 
• Sweet Jam Sites is a service but it’s productized, that means, tightly packaged like a product, with specifically pre-defined features and prices stated upfront. 
• Keto List is an information product, that ‘sells’ it’s content to consumers, and the traffic to ad buyers. Definitely higher leverage and scalability.
• Your Life In Months – I think I tried making a SaaS with Your Life In Months but it’s just a beta at best right now. It’s built on Ruby on Rails, something which I picked up from scratch last year, and I’d love to continue to work on it, though now I’m wondering if I should move it to JAMstack as I’m even more excited by the potential applications of it than Rails. 

Looking at the mapping, what seems to be a big jump is from Keto List (an info product) to Your Life In Months (a true SaaS in scale). I wonder if I can have a smaller stepping stone towards a true SaaS by building a micro-SaaS first. Something small enough, easy enough for me to try out to build skills and confidence in. Something one-time purchase perhaps, a plugin to help others build out a small part of their website, or a browser extension. I’m looking to micro-SaaS like Pixel Snap, CSS Scan, ReaderMode, Progress Bar OSX as inspiration.

What can I make for a micro-SaaS?

I got some ideas, but I’m also concerned if I’m spreading myself too thin. This product diversification portfolio strategy makes sense in terms of antifragility and resilience. Having multiple income streams has more redundancy built in than relying on just one. But ensuring that I have enough time on each is a challenge. Already I feel like I’m torn between Keto List and Sweet Jam Sites. I can’t imagine having to maintain and support 4-5 products. Yet, it doesn’t feel like I had hit on something which sticks and has bigger market potential to would allow me to make a good living off it. Perhaps, even with 5 products, I can systematize and outsource some parts. Perhaps if something sticks, I can spend less time on other less sticky products, or close it.

Working on new stuff and learning new things always excite me! So a micro-SaaS it is!