You’ve made it down the long and winding road to product-market fit and found greener pastures ahead. But there’s still more hard work to do — the pressure to grow drums on.
Naturally, you might start toying around with the idea of launching a new bet. Thoughts of going multi-product typically set in once you’ve inched closer to extreme product-market fit, the pinnacle of customer demand, satisfaction and efficiency (a new concept that we recently unpacked in our essay on the four levels of PMF). After you’ve secured a foothold in your category and have a steady stream of happy customers for your core product, your next task is to find PMF over and over again for new products as you venture to widen your TAM and compound revenue.
At this inflection point in a startup’s growth journey, strategic questions loom large. Getting the timing right, choosing what to build, and corralling resources for new bets when you’ve already got a core product to look after — these are all pressing challenges for product leaders.
Through our work of extensively studying different paths to PMF, we’ve picked the brains of founders and operators who have made these kinds of decisions at every phase of a startup. Here, we’ve compiled their takeaways into one comprehensive guide on going multi-product. But if the variety — and in some cases, contradictions — of their experiences is any indication, there are many ways to go multi-product, so the tips below are by no means one-size-fits-all. Hopefully, you can take whatever jibes with your own path to help shape your multi-product strategy.
This roundup features must-ask questions, frameworks and helpful perspectives from the likes of Gong CPO Eilon Reshef, early Stripe product lead Tara Seshan, and Noah Desai Weiss, who served as CPO at Slack for the better part of the last decade. Even our very own Todd Jackson — a former VP of Product at Dropbox, early Gmail PM and a founder himself before joining First Round — has some wise words for when to shutter a product.
We’ve culled through our archive of deep dives with these product leaders and surfaced their 11 best pieces of advice for tackling your next bet.
WHEN TO GO MULTI-PRODUCT
Wait until you’re “pedaling at half speed”
Timing is one of the trickiest parts of going multi-product. When faced with the question of how to widen TAM, startups either go after another product too soon and lose focus, or they don’t start thinking about it until it’s too late — and miss out on major growth opportunities.
So how do you know when you’re ready to introduce more products — before you miss the boat?
Max Rhodes, CEO and co-founder of Faire, likens the stage the startup was in prior to expanding its TAM to the feeling of biking on level ground after a grueling stretch of biking uphill.
“We'd heard horror stories from other companies that tried to expand too early. But we got good advice that you shouldn’t expand until you feel like you're pedaling at half speed, until you’re comfortable with all the progress that is being made in your core market,” says Rhodes.
Earlier in company building, you’re going uphill on a bike and pedaling as hard as you can. When it comes time to expand your TAM, you're looking for that feeling where you’re not going downhill, but you’re on a flat road and there isn't as much resistance. You can pedal a bit and let momentum carry you forward.
For Faire, waiting for the right moment to expand meant spending several years strengthening PMF for its core product first. “We made a pretty explicit choice to really focus on nailing things in our core market. It wasn’t until late 2019, so three years in, that we decided we were ready to go international and to go after apparel — we made the decision to do both simultaneously,” he says.
Tara Seshan, early product lead at Stripe, has a similar takeaway from the timing of Stripe’s second bet. She distills how startups can approach timing for new bets into one simple directive that applies no matter whether you’re still scaling or pulling in $25 million in ARR: “Find the intersection of the moment and the opportunity.”
Stripe started out as a one-product shop for payments processing and stayed that way for a long time, until the moment and opportunity collided. “The engine that powers Stripe is payments. It's always going to be payments. And so Stripe didn’t — and should not have — overreached into multi-product before payments was really, really, working — at the level of we were fending off leads and letting them fall on the floor,” says Seshan.
For more learnings from B2B founders like Rhodes who have successfully charted a course to PMF, review our detailed framework of the four levels. Get more of Seshan’s takeaways from her multi-product journeys at Watershed and Stripe.
If you want to go multi-product early, make a bulletproof case for “why now”
While it’ll make sense for most startups to wait until they’ve got the momentum of nearing extreme PMF, like Stripe and Faire did, it’s important to be able to recognize compelling opportunities to go multi-product sooner than conventional wisdom would suggest.
To help identify the signs, here are two examples from startups that bet on multi-product early in their trajectories, along with context on why they made that counterintuitive call.
When a second product makes the first product more effective:
After Stripe, Seshan joined Watershed, an enterprise sustainability platform. “Watershed had to invest in multi-product really early in the company’s life cycle because we thought that the future is integrated carbon accounting and decarbonization tools — you need to have both to make companies effective. That vision requires interlock. And so we weren't batting leads down before we invested in a new bet,” she says.
To determine both the potential value and the feasibility of a new bet early on, Seshan offers three worthwhile questions to ask:
- How costly is it to develop an initial hypothesis?
- How lean can we be in investigating this?
- How soon will we know it’s not working?
What makes this idea for a new product something we have to do now, something we can't do later? Is there a unique at-bat for it at the moment that makes this something we have to jump on?
Training growth muscles while the company is still young:
Jay Simons, former President of Atlassian, tells a similar tale about launching a second product early on at Atlassian — in only the company’s second year.
“We created our second product, Confluence, in Atlassian’s second year, which is really unusual — especially when you’ve got a breakout product like Jira that’s growing really nicely. Conventional company-building wisdom would say not to do it — there’s still a ton of work you need to do on the first product, and it will fragment your focus once you start working on a second thing, which could be a death sentence for a young company,” says Simons.
The primary thinking behind launching Confluence early was to make it a core offering of Atlassian’s product suite. But Simons says there was a knock-on benefit to going multi-product early: It helped them develop the early team’s muscles for growth-stage challenges.
“We began to build this muscle around cross-merchandising, cross-selling and upselling. How do you think about pricing and packaging around multiple things? How do you do product planning and prioritization and budgeting and staffing? At a really early age at Atlassian, we began to wire our brain to think about all of those things that companies need to do as they get bigger,” he says.
For more of Simons’ learnings from the unconventional product moves he made at Atlassian, listen to his In Depth podcast episode.
DECIDING WHAT ELSE TO BUILD
Bring more of your customers’ workflows into your product suite
Consumers and B2B customers alike use dozens of software tools on a daily basis. Part of getting ultra specific with your ICP means knowing all of your customers’ processes and headaches, at work and in life, and which other tools they’re using alongside yours.
PM turned first-time founder of Sprig, Ryan Glasgow, drew inspiration from Figma as an example of building a new product based on a complementary job. Figma found product-market fit with design professionals who were using its core product for high-fidelity design and prototyping. But they wanted to give customers Figma tools for more parts of the design process. Customers were using other virtual whiteboard tools for ideation and brainstorming, like Miro or Mural, so they spun out FigJam so that designers didn’t have to switch between different tools. (Figma has continued to cover more parts of the product design process — most recently with the launch of Slides).
That’s why Glasgow recommends assessing your core business problem first, and then ask what else your customers are already using. Think of which jobs are ancillary to your core product, and what you can expand in your own offering.
When you find product-market fit for your first product, you have to hit that next phase of growth. What’s that next job you can solve for your customers? Unfortunately, I’ve seen many get this wrong by building something that’s tangential to what they're doing today.
Listen to Glasgow’s thoughts on overcoming product hurdles for the full conversation, or read our complementary Review article.
Ignore the refrain that competition doesn’t matter
You may have heard the advice to stay focused and not pay much attention to what your competitors are up to. But it’s extremely useful to consider your competitors’ product offerings when making decisions about expanding your own, especially when trying to cover more of your customer’s workflow, as Figma did. This way you’ll know what your new product’s differentiators can be — and how to position them accordingly.
That’s wisdom from Nate Stewart, former CPO of Cockroach Labs. The product he focused on at Cockroach Labs was highly technical (a cloud-native distributed SQL database), which brings its own set of challenges. (In his words: “You’re not just designing for human users, you’re also taking into account machine users.”) But his conviction that competitor research is valuable, particularly to see what other companies you’ll be up against when going multi-product, applies to startups in any industry.
“I initially thought that competition didn’t matter. Just focus on the customers, work through first principles, and you’ll end up in a good place. But when it comes to landing an enterprise sale or going through a thorough evaluation process, it’s inevitable that competitors are involved. It’s useful to understand where your competitors are strong and where you’re strong, and how to talk about those differentiators in a way that favors you,” he says. “When you think about the strategic investments that you can make, invest in the core differentiators that set you apart from competitors.”
Get more of Stewart’s advice for avoiding common pitfalls when building highly technical products.
Don’t over-index on data
Tara Seshan has some advice for a multi-product strategy that may surprise the many analytically-minded folks in the product field: Sometimes, you should forget what the spreadsheets are telling you and go with your gut. Some long-term visions can’t be validated by current market trends.
To back this up, she offers an anecdote not from her own experience, but from Cash App. “Jack Dorsey had an intuitive belief that people needed payments to work this way and they needed to empower the masses to be able to bank when they're underbanked. And so they kept plugging at it for years and years. And now look at how successful Cash App is and what a giant part of Square’s business it is. So instinct can be a huge driving factor in figuring out when you go multi-product.”
The analytical approach will get you a lot of singles and doubles. But the home runs really come from those intuitive calls on how you think the market and the world is going to work and betting in that direction.
Reframe “multi-product” as “product completeness”
Gong co-founder and CPO Eilon Reshef advises that instead of going “multi-product,” you can think of your plan to build out new products as a quest for “product completeness.”
This perspective won’t track with every multi-product strategy — if you’re planning to expand into a new category, for example. But if you’re staying within the same category, like Gong did when launching its second bet, it’s a productive mindset shift to help you stay focused on what matters: your customers and central business problem.
“When you’re building a second product, I don't think you're looking for product-market fit because at the end of the day, product-market fit is for a category. So it's more about product completeness,” says Reshef.
Gong started out with a tool that records sales conversations, with an eye toward eventually becoming a full revenue intelligence platform, rolling out a SKU for the forecasting process and a SKU for the sales engagement process, which can help users interact with customers.
To apply a similar framing, pull from these questions Reshef poses to assess how “complete” your suite of products is:
- How well does it solve the business problem?
- Can it compete successfully with other players in the market?
To build new products that deliver on both of those outcomes, the team at Gong leans heavily on design partners. Gong has worked with design partners since the startup's first six months of testing the initial idea and still does to this day, 10 years later with a multi-product lineup, a thousand-person organization and over 4,000 customers. Design partners aren’t just for early-stage building — they can continue to give you constructive feedback as your products and customer needs mature.
“To build for the outcomes you want, it’s easier to work with design partners and build the product together. Building something that can actually compete successfully to win 50, 60, 70, even 80% of sales deals is much harder because over time, you find out what customer number 37 wants and needs, which you might not have seen with the first batch of design partners,” says Reshef.
Listen to Reshef’s In Depth podcast episode for more of his musings on his experience as a second-time founder and long-time product leader.
HOW TO EXECUTE A MULTI-PRODUCT ROADMAP
Allocate resourcing for moonshots according to risk
When you’ve got your eyes on a big bet that your gut is telling you is the right one, how do you divide up engineering and product work between that newer, splashier product and your core product?
To tackle this resourcing question, former Slack CPO Noah Desai Weiss likes the 70:20:10 product roadmap model he picked up from his time at Google. Base your investment and prioritization in risk — your bets should be diversified and you should allocate resources according to what you want and need now and what you might want and need in the future.
With this model, you can break down engineering work into the following categories:
- 70%: Tasks related to the core business.
- 20%: Working on new bets that have already taken off.
- 10%: Ideating and working toward future bets.
“They are tentpole products now, but there was a time when Gmail and Google Maps fell into that 20% category," Weiss says. “The logic was to keep investing in those bets even though they weren’t fully at scale yet. And the 10% category was around self-driving cars and AI.”
Read more about Weiss’ approach for taking bold product bets at Slack.
Start with a lean team and scale incrementally as you get traction
Thomas “Tido” Carriero, former product engineer at Dropbox and chief product development officer at Segment, has noticed a common trap startups fall into when investing in new bets. They build out hefty teams before getting good customer feedback with the new product, only for it to never get off the ground.
But building engineering and product teams around new products should be an iterative process as you validate customer demand. Carriero recommends hitting key customer milestones, whether that’s through sales numbers or qualitative feedback, before scaling up your org to build out more of the product. “I think the first step for a new product organizationally is building a small team. And it's often only three engineers, a PM and a designer, something like that,” he says. “You should have a really clear gate before you seek large amounts of funding that show that your customers are super excited about your next product. Frankly, not everywhere I've worked has had that,” says Carriero.
I've seen projects where 30, 40, 50 engineers got invested for six months, nine months, 12 months. And they never really took off because they never understood the problem well enough that a customer could recite it back to us with extreme amounts of excitement.
“You should start to see the value from the financial lens, or maybe a screenshot of a customer asking you if it’s going to be ready next week. Anything that demonstrates excitement or pull is a pretty simple milestone, but I’ve found it to be a very effective one. You should only build a team of five, 10, 15 engineers until you really see this kind of crazy pull,” he says.
For more of Carriero’s wisdom on scaling engineering and product orgs, listen to his podcast episode.
Keep pricing and packaging consistent for new products
You’ve got a new offering built out and you’re ready to go to market. Maybe you’re considering revamping the sales processes you used for your original product.
But you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. In fact, a consistent GTM motion will bolster sales across the product lineup. Go-to-market expert Giancarlo Lionetti, current Zapier CRO (with previous growth stints at Confluent, Dropbox and Atlassian), recommends that startups use the same GTM strategy across the whole product suite, particularly with pricing and packaging.
Keeping a tried-and-true GTM model in place has worked out well for Atlassian. “If you look at Atlassian, whenever they introduce a product to the market, it looks very similar to other products in their portfolio. And what that means is the pricing is similar,” says Lionetti. “They develop this very consistent view of the world that they try to map to each of the offerings they bring to market. That makes it incredibly simple.”
And that consistency will help your GTM org hone their approach for future products. “At Atlassian, what you do for Jira, you’re ultimately doing for Confluence or any other product in the family. And that consistency is incredibly important, especially if it's a new muscle,” he says.
For more tactical tips on pricing and packaging and building a go-to-market motion, listen to Lionetti’s podcast episode.
Be prepared to kill your darlings
Unfortunately, not all of your 10% or even 20% projects are going to pan out. But that’s just part of the growing pains of a scaling startup.
If you’ve already expanded into multi-product and given your new products some time in the market, apply the same rigor you used to decide whether to launch it in the first place to whether it’s worth keeping if it’s not getting the results you want.
Todd Jackson, a partner here at First Round, had to make the tough decision to shut down a product during his time at Dropbox.
When he joined as VP of Product & Design in 2015, the company was just three years away from its IPO and furiously preparing for it, sharpening its product strategy and revenue growth model.
“We were struggling with the decision of shutting down this product called Carousel, which was a beautiful consumer photo sharing app. It was very popular in some circles and we had a lot of folks working on it, but it wasn’t growing in a way that would have moved the needle for the company. It was a key moment for us internally — could we afford to support and invest in this consumer-oriented part of the company, or did we really need to turn the ship and focus 100% on our SaaS business?”
Though difficult, that change of course ended up being the right call for the business. “We chose the latter, which was in retrospect a good decision. It enabled us to have the revenue predictability that was key to our 2018 IPO.”
Read more of Todd Jackson's product advice for founders.
Rein in your enthusiasm for shiny new bets
Once you’ve hit your stride of repeatability, it’s easy to get swept up in endless daydreams of what’s next.
But eagerness to build all kinds of new products all at once is a pitfall Nikhyl Singhal saw during his time as CPO at Credit Karma.
Singhal joined Credit Karma as CPO when it was in its hypergrowth stage back in 2015, and the product strategy had been stretched thin. “About a year into my time at Credit Karma, in the midst of crazy growth and exploring shiny new things, we realized that the pendulum of our focus had shifted too far away from our core business,” says Singhal.
“Though everyone wants to work on the exciting new product lines and features, we needed to make fewer new bets, invest in our organization and technical platforms, and ensure we could measure and predict our business more accurately. Strengthening cross-functional teams, processes and foundation isn’t sexy, but it’s key to innovation,” he says.
Once Credit Karma tightened up its investment in its core product, Singhal went on to oversee the launch of half a dozen product lines. His takeaway from managing the execution of multiple products at the same time? Never neglect your core business.
Hypergrowth is about scaling the core business and expanding your offerings simultaneously. Accomplishing both is insanely challenging. And it’s exponentially more difficult to pull it off amidst a sea of new employees, customers and increased expectations.
Read more of Nikhyl Singhal’s learnings on scaling a product org from early to hypergrowth stage.