As a part of building in public, my goal is not only to cover the coding and building of the apps and projects, but the back office / behind the scenes work as well.
Under the umbrella of Graystone Tech there are many different projects and brands being worked on simultaneously. Some of these ideas were originally conceived years ago, while some were started and postponed and others are brand new.
Along the way, it seemed like each idea should be treated like separate companies. This would entail separate systems and accounts for each. However, after just a short time, the amount of credentials alone became cumbersome. Looking into the future, it also seemed that keeping things separate would scale up costs as well. There are many systems that can be shared within a hub-and-spoke model instead of having individual stacks for each project
At this point, I decided to rethink this approach & structure.
Some accounts can be combined to save overhead, time and complexity. For instance, housing all Google Analytics and Search Console properties under one ID instead of individual accounts. Having the startup studio own each project outright allows to share the bank account and accounting systems as well.
GoDaddy, Mailchimp & A2 Hosting (or any shared hosting account) are addiitonal examples of accounts that are easy to split between small startup ideas, especially during the initial build phase.
Here’s an important consideration when deciding how to organize different projects: there will be likely rework someday. This is like tech debt when refactoring at the end of a big project. Maybe you need to silo off specific projects under their own umbrella in the future, but it’ll likely be for good reason (growth, exit, etc…).
In this case, I’d rather get something built as fast as possible while reducing overhead-based friction. Keeping certain things centralized in the beginning can save some time, but if you choose the same path, consider how things may be unraveled in the future.