All products have a life cycle, from development to introduction to growth and maturity. A fantastic product is not enough. To continue accelerating your company’s growth, you must go multi-product.
The transition to multi-product can be a significant revenue generator when done successfully. The proof can be seen with the best-in-class companies — from Apple to Adobe to ServiceNow — constantly adding multiple product offerings and expanding on their existing capabilities. Most of these companies make significant revenue on products that aren’t their inaugural ones and have managed to sustain a hyper-growth rate by having a multi-product offering.
We were a single-product company when I started working at monday.com in 2016. During my first few years, the company saw rapid growth as customers continued to use our software in new and inventive ways. It was amazing to witness, but it posed the question: How do we maintain this momentum? The challenge before us was as clear as the laws of nature state — the larger your customer group is, the harder it is to grow at the same rate. This is when we acted on our vision to conquer each core aspect of work with new, targeted products. In addition to adding new capabilities to our platform, we launched monday sales CRM and monday dev based on our customers’ needs. We’ve experienced growth from these new products that significantly surpasses those of our early monday days, with the annual recurring revenue for monday sales CRM and monday dev growing 22x and 4x faster, respectively.
With all that said, my most significant piece of advice is don’t be afraid to take risks.
While going multi-product can bring your business to the next level, leaders face several challenges when taking on this endeavor — from finding the right product-market fit and establishing a go-to-market strategy to timing and more. Drawing on my experience of graduating monday.com from the one-product mold, here are three steps to ensure your multi-product journey is successful.
- If the (product-market) shoe fits
We all know that finding a product-market fit can be challenging, especially when you have limited resources and must move quickly to find and serve your target market. But there are a few signals that your initial offering has a wide product-market fit, and it would be easy for you to identify your second product:
