The Flywheel
Whether you agree that AI has made building much faster, or not, whether you were already a fast builder or feel much faster with AI. The one thing AI still hasn't fully solved is distribution. Depending on who you ask, this has always been the hard part about building successful products and businesses, and it certainly is the shared bottleneck across my little portfolio.
The most obvious part of the flywheel
The beauty of building multiple products is, I can plan for some sort of synergy from day one and that's what I did. We have Contentcron for inbound: generating relevant, SEO-optimized articles and changelogs. And we have Leadrack for highly targeted outreach: helping me find and contact the ideal customers. I'll still have to do calls myself, but up to that point, I can automate almost everything, dogfooding the portfolio products.
At least, that’s the theory. If it works, the benefit won’t only be more leads. Every part of the process should make the next turn a little better. The articles that attract the right people teach me which problems they are searching for. The prospects who respond (or don’t) teach me which positioning resonates. Calls reveal the language customers actually use, the objections they have, and the features they care about. All of that can flow back into the products, their websites, future articles, and the criteria Leadrack uses to find the next group of potential customers.
The products also become their own first customers. Contentcron already writes for itself and Modsignal. Leadrack can help find customers for Contentcron, Modsignal, and the rest of the portfolio. Using the products this way gives me something more useful than a polished demo: real workloads, real failures, and a strong incentive to fix whatever gets in the way. Over time, I hope the compounding happens elsewhere too.
A lesson learned from one launch can prevent the same mistake on another. Eventually, revenue from the products that work can fund the experiments that haven’t found their footing yet. Even if a product fails to get any traction and I end up shutting it down, the learnings likely lead me to a better understanding what (not) to build next.
The headwind
There is, of course, an equally plausible version where this turns into the opposite of a flywheel. Every product adds support, maintenance, context switching, and another place demanding attention. Instead of making the portfolio stronger, each new product could make all the others slightly worse.
That is the tension at the heart of this experiment. The portfolio only compounds if every product eventually contributes more leverage than complexity.
Eventually I think it should be easy to see whether this happens or not: Are Contentcron articles bringing relevant people to the products? Is Leadrack starting conversations I wouldn’t have found otherwise? Are shared systems reducing the time it takes to launch and operate something new?
It is, however, much too early to call any of this a working flywheel. The pieces exist, and a few of the arrows are beginning to connect, but most of the system still lives in my head.
Right now, it looks a little more like this:
