Dharmesh Shah explains when to build a second product after product-market fit. Three reasons: your first product hits market saturation, you spot a new growth curve to ride, or you need a broader portfolio to dominate long-term. Only move when your initial product has real traction.
Chapters
How do you approach the idea selection as you're looking to expand products? Once you're going and you have a somewhat successful product, which is the only time you should be looking at product N equals 2 is after N equals 1 gets to product market fit and has some traction. You have to sort of know why you're going from N equals 1 to N equals 2. And there's kind of categories of reasons. One reason might be most of the people that needed to buy our product have already done so and we've hit market saturation. Reason number 2 is it could be opportunistic. We want to start the next S-curve. We want to invest early. We've got the capital that we're going to start layering in what many call Act 2 of the business. And the third reason is you cannot not build that second product because in the long run, over the fullness of time, whoever has that kind of more full product portfolio is going to end up winning the overall game.