I am often asked how it is possible—or even sensible—to pursue two different companies and products at the same time. Isn’t that splitting focus? What are the challenges, and where are the advantages?

Over the past months, I started reflecting more deeply on these questions—not only to have better answers ready when someone asks, but also to clarify them for myself, my team, and anyone interested in the journey.

The Beginnings

My motivation for starting a business has always been twofold:

1. Turning problems into products. I wanted to take a real-world challenge, translate it into a scalable solution, and test it in the market.
2. Building with people. Entrepreneurship, to me, is about working with a team and sharing the journey together.

Finding the problems to solve was never the hard part.

• CountryRisk.io was born from the idea of helping sovereign risk analysts escape the clunky world of spreadsheets and fragmented data by providing an intuitive sovereign rating model and structured data platform.
• ZOA Legal—though its backstory is longer—was founded in response to the operational headaches companies faced with the GDPR data protection regulation.
• And there was even a third idea in the early days: Financial Life Goals, an API for goal-based asset allocation. That project ran for about two years before we decided to shelve it. Today, ZOA and CountryRisk.io continue to thrive.

Today’s Differences

Although ZOA Legal and CountryRisk.io share many similarities, their differences are just as important.

• ZOA Legal is sold primarily to: Law firms looking to go beyond the billable hour by offering LegalTech solutions and recurring “Knowledge-as-a-Service” packages. In-house legal teams that need a structured way to manage knowledge, data protection, and communication—particularly through the ZOA Teams App.
• CountryRisk.io, in contrast, serves: Public and private sector institutions focused on country risk and economic research. Clients ranging from banks and asset managers to SaaS providers who rely on our country risk scores, models, and platforms such as CountryData.io and CountryRisk.io Insights.

Both companies are at comparable stages in terms of product maturity, client base, and growth potential. Both are bootstrapped, without outside investors. The teams behind them also overlap significantly.

Yet, the ideal customer profiles (ICPs) are entirely different. A lawyer will not become a sovereign risk analyst, and vice versa. For this reason, we have not pursued cross-selling between the two—at least not yet.

Lessons Learned

A few reflections stand out from managing these differences:

• Domain expertise matters. My background is in economics, data, and country risk—not law. In hindsight, having an experienced lawyer on board early at ZOA would have accelerated our understanding of how law firms operate and the institutional hurdles they face when adopting technology. Many law firms are still not accustomed to making tech investments, and their partner-driven decision-making model can slow adoption. (Ethan Batraski has an excellent piece on this, which I recommend (Link)).
• Investors want singular focus. From the outside, running two ventures is often seen as a lack of focus. Investors, in particular, are usually allergic to anything other than 100% commitment to a single company.

Synergies

At a higher level, the synergies are clear:

• Both products are B2B solutions for mid-sized to large organizations and public-sector entities.
• Both live in domains where clients must make sense of complexity—whether navigating global risks or interpreting evolving regulations.
• Both require synthesizing information and opinion: Economic data and forecasts on one side. Laws, court decisions, and regulatory guidance on the other.

And in both cases, the “job-to-be-done” is similar: helping clients answer forward-looking, high-stakes questions.

Being Part of an Ecosystem

One of the biggest lessons was realizing that neither product operates in isolation.

• In legal: nearly every company works with external law firms.
• In country risk: most institutions already subscribe to established research providers, whether via direct payments or bundled soft-dollar arrangements.

That meant our products had to fit into existing ecosystems, not replace them.

Interestingly, we found law firms and research providers share common pain points in the age of AI:

• AI disruption. Tasks once handled by lawyers or economists can now be performed by generative AI tools and agents.
• Pricing pressure. Hourly billing or pay-per-report models make less sense when AI can deliver faster, cheaper, and more customized outputs. Outcome-based or value-based pricing is emerging as the future.
• Productivity shifts. AI lowers costs, opening access to markets that were previously too expensive to serve. For example, AI-first country risk teams—or AI-powered legal support—are no longer the exclusive domain of multinationals.
• The “data moat” myth. Not all data is valuable. Public and factual information (laws, statistics) has become commoditized. The real value now lies in proprietary, structured, and context-rich data: legal commentary, decision trees, contract playbooks, econometric models, alternative datasets, and forward-looking expert views.
• Embedding content in workflows. As raw content becomes commoditized, the competitive edge lies in integrating it into client workflows. This is exactly where ZOA Legal and CountryRisk.io aim to add value.

In-House Synergies

Running both ventures in parallel also creates concrete internal synergies:

• Product development. Both are SaaS products built on similar web technologies. While the infrastructure is kept separate, we share know-how, design approaches, and even reusable frontend components. AI capabilities—whether assistants or workflows—are developed with both products in mind.
• Support functions. We save time and costs by reusing legal documents (NDAs, T&Cs, policies) and could further streamline operations by aligning jurisdictions for both entities.
• Marketing & sales. Both rely heavily on content-driven marketing and account-based sales strategies. Customer success also follows a parallel philosophy: the “forward lawyer” and “forward economist” concepts ensure adoption and impact.

Timing, Timing, Timing

Entrepreneurship is as much about timing as it is about execution. If you pursue ideas only sequentially, you risk missing the moment when the market wakes up to a problem. To borrow from value investing: “Being early is the same as being wrong.”

By running a small portfolio of ideas in parallel, we gained diversification benefits. When one product’s market timing was not yet ripe, the other carried momentum.

Outlook: Stay Nimble, Stay Humble

Looking back, I’m proud of what the CountryRisk.io and ZOA Legal teams have achieved. My aspiration is simple:

• Grow both products to a scale where they remain innovators in their fields.
• Generate sustainable revenues to support a strong team.
• Expand into adjacent verticals when the timing is right. 

Above all, I believe in staying nimble enough to adapt and humble enough to listen—to clients, to markets, and to fellow entrepreneurs.

I’m always curious to hear from others who are building in parallel. If you’re on a similar journey, let’s connect for a chat or a coffee.