For the past year I've been building three products at the same time: BikeHealth (cycling maintenance), SidelineHQ (youth sports management), and Slvr (caregiving coordination). People ask if I'm spread too thin. Honestly, working on all three has made each one better.
Ideas travel between projects
The scheduling patterns I built for SidelineHQ changed how I think about care coordination timelines in Slvr. The way BikeHealth shows component wear over time taught me things about showing data gradually that applied to all three products.
When you're deep in one domain, it's easy to believe your problems are unique. Working across domains shows you how much the underlying patterns overlap.
Where the time actually goes
People assume the bottleneck is design or code. It's not. The real time goes to:
- Understanding the domain — Talking to enough cyclists, coaches, and caregivers to know what actually matters versus what you think matters
- Deciding what not to build — Every product has an endless list of things it could do. Cutting is harder than building.
- Switching context — Not the time it takes to switch, but the discipline to go deep enough each session to make real progress
How I structure the work
I block time by product, not by task type. Monday and Tuesday might be BikeHealth. Wednesday is SidelineHQ. Thursday and Friday are Slvr. Within each block, I do everything — research, design, code, user conversations.
It works for three reasons:
- I get deep — Two focused days beats five scattered hours
- My brain keeps working — While I'm on SidelineHQ, I'm processing BikeHealth problems in the background without trying to
- I come back with fresh eyes — A few days away from a product and I see things I missed when I was in the middle of it
The trade-off
Each product moves slower than it would with full-time attention. That's real. But the quality of decisions is higher because I'm bringing patterns from other domains to every problem I work on.
Building one product teaches you about that market. Building three teaches you about building.
If you're thinking about side projects, my advice is don't just do one. Do two or three. The learning compounds in ways you don't expect.