Every founder blog post tells you to focus. "Do one thing well." "Say no to everything else."
I ignored that advice. I built two products at the same time — and honestly, it nearly broke me before it made me better.
Here's what actually happened, and the counterintuitive lesson I wish someone had told me earlier.
The Setup
I'm a solo founder running two SaaS products: FillTheTimesheet, a time tracking tool for freelancers and agencies, and PromptShip, a shared prompt library for non-technical teams using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Two completely different audiences. Two different sales motions. Two codebases. One person.
Sounds like a recipe for burnout, right?
The Breaking Point
Three months in, I was context-switching between products six or seven times a day. My commit history looked like a ping-pong match. Monday morning I'd start a feature for FillTheTimesheet, get a support ticket from a PromptShip user by lunch, and spend the afternoon fixing their issue instead.
My weekly output dropped by half. I was busy all the time but shipping nothing.
The Lesson: Structure Beats Willpower
The turning point wasn't some motivational breakthrough. It was systems.
I started blocking entire days for each product. Mondays and Wednesdays were FillTheTimesheet days. Tuesdays and Thursdays belonged to PromptShip. Fridays were for marketing, content, and cross-cutting work.
But the real unlock was smaller than that. I started tracking where my time actually went — not in broad categories, but at the task level. And the data was humbling. I was spending nearly 40% of my "development" time on things that weren't development: Slack, email, context-switching overhead, and re-reading code I'd written the day before because I'd lost the mental thread.
What Changed
Once I could see the problem clearly, the fixes were obvious:
- Batch ruthlessly. Support tickets get a two-hour window, not an interrupt-driven response.
- Write yourself back in. Every coding session starts with a 5-minute note about where I left off. That note saves 30 minutes of re-orientation.
- Automate the recurring stuff. Content pipelines, deployment checks, billing reconciliation — anything I do more than twice gets scripted.
- Say no to "quick" requests. Nothing is quick when you're already holding two products in your head.
The irony is that building a time tracking product forced me to confront my own terrible time habits. And building a prompt library made me better at systematizing the repetitive parts of my workflow.
The Counterintuitive Part
Here's what the "just focus" crowd misses: running two products gave me a perspective I wouldn't have gotten from one. FillTheTimesheet taught me that people don't want more data — they want fewer decisions. PromptShip taught me that non-technical users don't need simpler tools — they need tools that match how they already think.
Those insights feed each other. The design philosophy from one product improves the other.
The Honest Answer
Should you build two products at once? Probably not. But if you do, the survival skill isn't focus — it's structure. Block your time. Track it honestly. Automate everything you can. And write things down so your future self doesn't have to reverse-engineer what past-you was thinking.
The founders who make it aren't the ones with the most discipline. They're the ones with the best systems.
I write about the messy reality of building SaaS products as a solo founder. Follow along if that's your kind of thing.
