How We Choose What to Build Next

Running a studio means facing the same question over and over: with a small team and a finite number of hours, what do we build next? Every product we start is a product we have chosen over a dozen others we did not. This post is an honest look at how we actually make that call, written in the same building-in-public spirit as the rest of these notes.

If you have not read what a venture studio actually does, that piece sets out the wider model. Here we are zooming in on one decision: choosing the next thing to work on.

The constraint that shapes everything

We are a small team running several products at once. That single fact drives almost every decision. We cannot chase every promising idea, and we cannot afford to spread ourselves so thin that everything we run gets a little worse. The real cost of building something is not the effort it takes. It is everything else we cannot do while we are building it.

So the question is never simply whether an idea is good. Almost everything sounds good in isolation. The question is whether it is a better use of the next few months than anything else on the list. That framing kills a lot of tempting projects quickly, which is exactly what it is meant to do.

What we look for in an idea

A problem we have actually felt

The ideas that survive tend to start with a problem we have run into ourselves, or watched a customer struggle with up close. When we understand the pain from the inside, we make far better product decisions and waste far less time guessing. Unavoidable CRM began exactly this way, from the everyday frustration of missed calls and unbilled work in small service businesses.

Something our shared platform makes cheap to build

Because we run several products on one shared platform, the ideas that fit our existing plumbing are far cheaper for us to build than they would be for a standalone team. Sign-in, billing, hosting and the rest are already solved once. An idea that reuses most of that gets a big head start. An idea that needs a completely new foundation has to clear a much higher bar.

A clear, reachable customer

We want to be able to name the person who will use the product and describe how we will reach them. Vague "everyone could use this" ideas are a warning sign. A sharp, specific customer we can actually find is worth far more than a huge imaginary market we have no way to reach.

What we deliberately ignore

It is just as important to be clear about what does not sway us. We try not to be pulled along by whatever is fashionable that month, because trends move faster than we can ship and most of them do not match a real customer we can serve. We are wary of ideas that need an enormous upfront build before anyone can use them at all, because that is a long time to be wrong in private. And we discount ideas whose only argument is that the market is large, because a large market we cannot reach is not an opportunity, it is a daydream.

How an idea earns a slot

An idea that clears those tests still has to earn its place. We start small and cheap, putting the roughest possible version in front of a handful of real people to see whether the problem is as sharp as we think. If it is, we build a first version on our shared infrastructure, ship it quickly, and then watch what people actually do rather than what they said they would do. Real usage settles arguments that could otherwise run for weeks.

Crucially, shipping is the start of the decision, not the end of it. Plenty of ideas look reasonable on paper and then quietly fail to earn attention once they are live. We would rather learn that in a few weeks with a small build than after months of polishing something nobody was waiting for.

Saying no is the real skill

The hardest and most valuable part of all this is turning down good ideas. Not bad ones, good ones. There is always another product we could plausibly build, and the discipline is in protecting the focus of the things we already run. A studio that says yes to everything ends up running a lot of half-loved products. We would rather run a smaller number properly.

Where this leaves the portfolio

The result is a portfolio where every product had to beat the alternatives to exist, reuses as much shared groundwork as possible, and serves a customer we can actually name. You can see the current line-up on our portfolio page, and we write up what we learn from each one here as we go.

If you are building in a similar way, or you think there is a problem we should be looking at, we are always happy to compare notes. Say hello through our contact page.

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