The Guide to Going Multi-Product: 11 Tactics for Tackling Your Next Bet

Founders and product leaders from Atlassian, Stripe, Gong and more share their strategies for going multi-product, from managing extensive product lines to bringing brand-new bets into being.

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."

For Faire, waiting for the right moment to expand meant spending several years strengthening PMF for its core product first. “We made a choice to really focus on nailing things in our core market. It wasn’t until late 2019 that we decided we were ready to go international.”

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: Find the intersection of the moment and the opportunity.

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, it’s important to recognize compelling opportunities to go multi-product sooner than conventional wisdom would suggest.

After Stripe, Seshan joined Watershed. “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.”

To determine both the potential value and the feasibility of a new bet early on, Seshan offers three worthwhile questions to ask:

1. How costly is it to develop an initial hypothesis?
2. How lean can we be in investigating this?
3. How soon will we know it’s not working?

Training growth muscles while the company is still young: Jay Simons, former President of Atlassian, tells a story about launching a second product early on at Atlassian.

"We began to build this muscle around cross-merchandising, cross-selling and upselling."

DECIDING WHAT ELSE TO BUILD

Bring more of your customers’ workflows into your product suite

Ryan Glasgow, PM turned first-time founder of Sprig, 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 but wanted to give Figma tools for more parts of the design process.

Ignore the refrain that competition doesn’t matter

Competitor research is valuable. Nate Stewart, former CPO of Cockroach Labs, emphasizes understanding your competitors when expanding your offerings.

Don’t over-index on data

Tara Seshan advises that sometimes, you should go with your gut. Some long-term visions can’t be validated by current market trends.

Reframe “multi-product” as “product completeness”

Eilon Reshef, co-founder and CPO of Gong, suggests thinking of your plan to build out new products as a quest for product completeness.

HOW TO EXECUTE A MULTI-PRODUCT ROADMAP

Allocate resourcing for moonshots according to risk

Noah Desai Weiss, former CPO of Slack, suggests using the 70:20:10 product roadmap model based on risk allocation.

Start with a lean team and scale incrementally as you get traction

Thomas “Tido” Carriero, former product engineer at Dropbox, recommends building small teams and iterating based on customer feedback before scaling.

Keep pricing and packaging consistent for new products

Giancarlo Lionetti, current CRO at Zapier, emphasizes using a consistent go-to-market strategy across the whole product suite.

Be prepared to kill your darlings

Todd Jackson, a partner at First Round, shares an experience where a tough decision was made to shut down a non-performing product at Dropbox.

Rein in your enthusiasm for shiny new bets

Nikhyl Singhal saw during his time at Credit Karma that eagerness to build all kinds of new products can stretch focus too thin. Focus on strengthening the core business first.