I founded a venture studio called Evernomic where we now manage over a dozen media and software startups.

Efficiency is our top priority. It's the main reason behind this approach and the only realistic way to compete. Plus, so far, all our startups have been bootstrapped which makes being efficient even more of a necessity.

To achieve this, our strategy revolves around creating a system that goes "full circle", like creating an ecosystem. This means that every project we take on must contribute, in one way or another, to other projects in our portfolio as well.

Here's an example...

We are launching an ad network soon. What's the biggest challenge with such a business? Finding sufficient creators and advertisers to make the marketplace functional  — an issue every marketplace faces, the chicken-and-egg problem.

Over a year prior to our planned launch date, we acquired FindNewsletters.com, an authority newsletter directory,  off of which  we have yet to make a penny.

However, thanks to this acquisition, we now have direct contacts with most newsletter creators which then gives us an extensive creator network to start with. Our job is now much simpler, we just need to find advertisers.

Not only that, this acquisition helped us improve the product we're building using feedback from potential customers, get referred to other useful contacts, find potential competitors, and more.

I've said this in a post I published some time ago:

"with this approach, we technically have more than 24 hours in a day, because every hour we spend on one project also translates to some sort of progress for our other projects."

As a rule, focus on creating an ecosystem, even with your personal life. Everything you spend time on should ideally have some spillover benefits.

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If you have any suggestions or thoughts on our approach, I'd love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter (@arianadeliii).