Why I'm Building Two Things at Once

Most entrepreneurs will tell you that it's better to put all your eggs in one basket. This is counterintuitive because we hear the opposite in all other aspects of life–minimize risk, diversify portfolios, don't burn bridges. But the idea is that starting a business and making it successful is so difficult that if your focus isn't completely on it, you'll fail.

Why I Broke the Rule

I've been running Campfire for almost six years. It has always been a passion project in addition to a successful business, a perfect match for my lifelong love of fantasy books and the worlds that they take place in.

And yet.

Another thing about me is that I juggled a lot of different projects growing up, from photography to filmmaking to video game development to 3D animation to screenwriting to novel writing and more...

It was a lot. And since starting Campfire, I stopped all of that, dedicating my full attention to the goal of building a successful business that could make the world better for authors and readers of fiction. No more side projects, no more experiments that weren't in service of that mission.

And it worked! Campfire grew into a profitable bootstrapped software company that we are now turning into an ebook platform hand-crafted for fiction, particularly sci-fi & fantasy novels. It's exciting and I am stoked to keep putting all my work hours and the majority of my non-work hours into it.

But earlier this year I got the itch again to take some of my free time and put it toward something new.

It's cliché at this point, the idea of starting a new business on the back of the new developments in AI, but I had a very specific idea and pain point that stood out to me: eliminating repetitive point-and-click work in software.

I am someone who uses a lot of software. So I run into this pain point often, finding myself facing a set of tasks that would be so short and easy to describe ("organize all my notes by topic") but so annoying to do (create folders, select each note individually, add it to the correct folder...) I've seen this play out my whole life in all types of software, from video editing to file storage to databases to word processors. There's no reason for this repetitive nonsense–the time between determining what we're trying to do and seeing it done should be as close to zero as we can get it.

And so I realized that every piece of software that people use to do non-trivial work would benefit from a copilot that can automate tasks, answer questions, and ultimately help users get things done faster.

And I just could not get this idea out of my head. A compelling need that I feel as a user so frequently, solvable with new advancements in tech, with broad applications...

The dealbreaker was when this idea started intruding on my Campfire time, jostling for space in my brain and demanding attention. This, I think, is the right way to decide whether to take on a new project (and, coincidentally, whether to venture into entrepreneurship in the first place). Is the idea of taking those first steps so aggressive, so intrusive on your thoughts that you simply cannot shut it out?

If so, I think it's worth a shot. I co-founded Rehance with Ernesto as a project to work on during our nights and weekends that would hopefully, one day, make software better for everyone.

Launching on ProductHunt tomorrow 🤫