How to develop a product offering when you do lots of things
Otherwise known as the portfolio career product ecosystem.
Hey, hello, hi!
A quick side bar before we get stuck into this week’s topic. My little newsletter has grown rather rapidly of late and it feels like I’ve gone from sitting on the couch chit-chatting with friends to being stark naked in front of a crowd with nothing but a pen in my sweaty hand.
Welcome, to the almost-2000 readers who’ve joined us since this time last month (she says while violently inhaling into a paper bag)! In the words of Jay-Z, allow me to reintroduce myself. My name’s Anna and I write about startups, being a generalist and portfolio careers, which is just a fancy way of saying that I talk about my experience building a business and career made up of many parts.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post titled ‘How to build a personal brand when you do lots of things’ and thought I’d follow it up with one of the questions I get asked at least seventeen million times a week: how do you develop a product offering when you do lots of things?
There’s a unique type of radioactive frazzle that comes with being a multi-passionate portfolio careerist who’s building out a suite of products and services. Frankly, we’re impatient little buggers. We want to do all the things immediately if not sooner. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned over 6+ years of working for myself it’s that the scattergun approach doesn’t work when applied to building income streams and ensuring your financial security. So instead of offering a bit of this and that, I suggest strategically building out a product ecosystem instead.
The product ecosystem
A product ecosystem is the full mix of offers and income streams that make up your portfolio. In this definition ‘product’ describes any work you get paid for: fractional work, coaching or mentoring, consulting or advisory, projects, a paid Substack, sponsorships, affiliates, memberships, running events, hosting workshops and even your full time job.
In a well designed ecosystem each product serves a purpose and sits within one of three layers:
A core income stream that funds your life
Secondary income stream/s that provide growth, creativity or leverage
Ad hoc income stream/s that are test-and-learns, opportunistic or just because
I like to visualise this ecosystem as a target with core the income stream - the first thing to aim for - smack bang in the middle.
The core income stream
Your core income stream is your primary source of cash that acts as a financial anchor to fund your life, de-frazzle your nervous system and give you time and space to experiment. In a perfect world it should cover your basic living expenses. It might be fractional work, a long term project, a committed retainer, or a part or full time job (side note: the best time to start building towards a portfolio career is when you’re gainfully employed).
When I started out in early 2023 I knew from past business experience that I needed a solid, reliable income stream above all else (girl’s gotta eat!). Given I had no personal brand to speak of, my fastest path to revenue was leveraging my skills and network to land fractional work with startups. For about 3 months I made it my mission to find long term retainers and yearlong projects so that I could finally take a breath.
Once I landed this client work I spent about 12 months before looking ahead to what was next.
Secondary income stream/s
Once you’re earning enough money with some degree of reliability you can turn your attention to testing and establishing secondary income streams. When I’m doing this I start with my why. Do I want to bolt on new products to earn more money? For creative expression? To build a track record in a different industry or domain? To test a hypothesis? Build my reputation? Create leverage? Once I’m clear on the intention, I commit to a minimum of 90 days of validating, iterating and marketing my offer after which I’ll keep, tweak or kill.
In 2023 after locking in multiple long term clients, I started experimenting and have been doing so ever since:
Did paid freelance writing for 9 months before deciding to stop
Tested advisory for early stage beauty brands
Tested portfolio career mentoring
Launched a digital product called the Portfolio Career Operating System
Currently testing a community-based product extension called the ‘Operating System Sprint Month’
Some of these products have grown to represent my core and secondary income streams and others are no longer. But that’s all part of the fun!
Ad hoc income stream/s
Once you start putting yourself out there, you’ll find that one off projects or smaller opportunities land in the inbox. For me these bits and bobs are:
Facilitating career workshops for other businesses
Speaking on panels or at events
Other random things
I’m not actively promoting these as offers and they don’t earn me a lot, but I still map them in my ecosystem because they may become bigger over time.
Here’s what my product stack looks like today:
My core income stream oscillates between mentoring and my Operating System, and I’m working towards the OS being my core on a consistent month-on-month basis
I have a relatively established secondary revenue stream in advisory
I’m testing Sprint Month which will likely become another source of secondary revenue
Everything in my product roadmap fits into this 3 tiered framework and it directly informs my overall strategy
As a multi-passionate, multi-talented person with many ideas, curiosities, creative urges and ways you could monetise, it’s tempting to do all the things all at once. I get it. I’ve been there. But building out a well rounded offering that reflects all of your capabilities, hopes and dreams takes time, and executing a product strategy demands restraint. My suggestion is to nail your core income stream first. Experiment with fresh offers next. Then test them, keep them, scale them, bin them, step back and do it all again.
When you build out a product offering this way - from the inside out, in sequence not parallel - your focus is sharper. You’ll get runs on the board earlier. You’ll see momentum sooner. And soon enough you’ll look back to see that all the things you tried to launch, and all the offers you had to kill, and all the products you fought to scale are sitting there before you. Your radioactive, frazzled, multi-passionate self did what you set out to do.
You hit the bullseye.
PS. I’m thinking of writing a few more pieces in this ‘doing lots of things’ series including how to create an operating system when you do lots of things, how to manage your capacity when you do lots of things, and how to plan when you do lots of things (among others). Subscribe here if these topics are your jam.
How my product ecosystem has evolved over the past 2.5 years, why I no longer do fractional work and how I make decisions with the core income stream front of mind. Enjoy!
🫶🏼 When you’re ready, here are three ways I can help:
Free Training: Stabilise, Systemise and Scale Your Portfolio Career in 2025: learn the inbound and outbound acquisition strategies to generate a consistent flow of leads and grow your income, and the workflows to that will help you increase capacity beyond your time.
The Portfolio Career Operating System: a fully fledged system for people who do multiple things and want to do them well. I’m talking Sales, Marketing, Content, Product, Clients, Ops, Finances and Admin. Here’s a little testimonial ↓
Portfolio Career Mentoring: 1-1 sessions to help you get started and build a career that sits at the intersection of freedom, creative fulfilment, meaning and money.
❤️🔥 Subscribe for more ideas and frameworks…
…to help you build a financially lucrative and creatively fulfilling portfolio career and life.
There’s a whole article in the
“Keep, tweak or kill”
Once I’m clear on the intention, I commit to a minimum of 90 days of validating, iterating and marketing my offer after which I’ll keep, tweak or kill.
Hope you can do more on this. How do you 1. Decide what to KTK and 2.have the courage to start so many random things.
Like this article a lot.
I love these posts. Maybe it's because I likely have ADHD, but the "choose one thing and only talk/do that" never resonated with me fully. I tried it, then didn't like the one thing, then switched to something else. But now I have a blog about the One Thing, and then my other blog, and now I have two and I don't want both 😜
What you're suggesting around personal brand and a portfolio makes more sense to me. Right now I have one core income stream, which gives me space to work on a digital product. But I also have space to do a podcast, which is unrelated (well, tangentially related).
I like to do lots of things and I've been wracking my brain with how to approach it given the most common advice to niche down. I get it, I think it works for an authority business, but that's not really what resonates with me.
Keep going with this series!