After 10 years being CEO for online marketplace, I found us in the position where our profits from the existing business (which support a team of 50) were not best allocated to the product we spent the last 10 years building. After reading Warren Buffetts “The Snowball,” I became convinced that we were best off channeling our profit into the highest ROI opps, regardless of whether they were directly relevant to our marketplace.

Judging by the other responses here, I’m in a distinct minority to claim that you could consider building both businesses.

The jury is still out on whether this will prove to be a sound idea, we started building two separate projects last year and only one has been soft launched thus far (StaticObject.com).

That said, a couple relevant takeaways from our work to date:

1. The only way a multi product company can possibly work is if you’ve accumulated an inner circle that can stand in for you. You’re not going to do a great job building two things at the same time. You’ll need to find others who can pick up your slack 2. Our arrangement was pursued in part cuz we’re almost entirely self-funded, which means less VCs to encourage/force us to follow the path more traveled 3. A single, great developer can get as much done on a project as a team of 5 developers by virtue of reduced communication cost, and (hopefully) less tech debt. There is meaningful leverage available by splitting great devs onto separate projects.