FOCUS. That’s my take-away… not just in your offering, but also how you go about delivering it. I’m so guilty of lack of it!

I know Webstrong’s philosophy is to build recurring revenue streams, as are mine. An interesting article I read (I’d love to credit it appropriately but can’t for the life of me remember who wrote it) demonstrated the advantages of focusing on delivering a project at a time.

Say we have projects A, B, and C, that each will take 3 weeks to deliver and will provide a recurring revenue of €100 a week.

SCENARIO 1 (my normal mode!):
————————————–
Wk 01 – Work on A
Wk 02 – Work on B
Wk 03 – Work on C
Wk 04 – Work on A
Wk 05 – Work on B
Wk 06 – Work on C
Wk 07 – Work on A. A now complete.
Wk 08 – Work on B. B now complete. Income this week = €100 (from A)
Wk 09 – Work on C. C now complete. Income this week = €200 (from A & B)
Wk 10 – Income this week = €300 (from A & B & C)

Total income after 10 weeks = €600

SCENARIO 2 (if clients allow you to follow it):
———————————————————
Wk 01 – Work on A
Wk 02 – Work on A
Wk 03 – Work on A. A now complete.
Wk 04 – Work on B. Income this week = €100 (from A)
Wk 05 – Work on B. Income this week = €100 (from A)
Wk 06 – Work on B. B now complete. Income this week = €100 (from A)
Wk 07 – Work on C. Income this week = €200 (from A & B)
Wk 08 – Work on C. Income this week = €200 (from A & B)
Wk 09 – Work on C. C now complete. Income this week = €200 (from A & B)
Wk 10 – Income this week = €300 (from A & B & C)

Total income after 10 weeks = €1200

Hope this helps!

Andy

And in-line with what I was saying earlier, Twitter has managed to stay simple because of the API. Most of the additional features people ask for have been catered for through the hundreds of Twitter apps now available.

It’s a great approach really. Focus on your core value proposition, open up your system to other developers and then let them meet the needs of your customers with add-on services.

It’s a great way to add features without adding complexity to the core service.

In that case I think you’ve an excellent point, although I wonder just how far one should go with that concept. Ben McRedmond’s “Picomarks” service is, for example, now the only bookmarking service I use. However, I find myself looking for little tweaks here and there.

Twitter has thusfar proven to be very successful while sticking very strictly to it’s core usage. Without the API though, would it have grown as well as it did?

There’s some interesting debate to be had, but thanks for the post I look forward to future expansion on the concepts within.

I was mostly talking about product and service based sites, whereas I think [and correct me if I'm wrong here] that Boards.ie is more of a community driven site made up of lots of little niche forums in their own right.

I was making the point that building niche products or offering highly specialised consulting services was a far better business model than offering vanilla type software or very general consulting services.

I think your rule has some big caveats caveats, a major one being that this applies almost exclusively to saturated markets with low barriers to entry.

Or maybe I am completely misunderstanding what you mean . Do you have any examples failure linked directly to lack of specialisation?