Is “pick one thing and go deep” still good advice for indie hackers?

One of the most repeated pieces of startup advice is:

Pick one problem, build one product and spend years making it successful.

This makes sense when you are building a venture-backed company and trying to create one huge outcome. But I am not sure it is the best strategy for indie hackers. The alternative is what I call the many-donkeys thesis. Instead of betting your entire career on one product becoming a unicorn, you build a portfolio.

You might create ten products.

– two eventually make $10K+ per month
– five make between $500 and $1,500
– three make nothing

That can still become a great business. Pieter Levels is probably the clearest example. He describes his approach as a shotgun: launch many projects and see which ones stick.

Nomad List and Remote OK eventually became his main businesses. By 2019, the two had reached more than $1 million in combined annual revenue. But they came from years of launching and experimenting with different ideas, not from correctly identifying the perfect company on day one.

Marc Lou followed a similar path. In 2017, he spent a year building one startup that made $0. In 2023, he launched ten products and made $263,000. In 2025, his portfolio generated $1.032 million across products such as ShipFast, CodeFast, DataFast, Indie Page, and several smaller projects.

But these products do not grow independently. They share the same founder brand, audience, distribution, credibility, skills, and customers. Every launch grows the audience for the next launch and every successful product makes the next one easier to sell. Even the failed products create content, lessons, and attention.

This does not mean constantly abandoning products, but it means exploring broadly first, then going deep when something shows real demand.

Would you rather spend five years on one product or build ten and let the market choose?