Dharmesh Shah argues B2B companies need a second product to sustain growth. Adding a new offering to your existing customer base lets you hit net retention above 100% more efficiently than chasing thousands of new customers. The best growth comes from balancing new customer acquisition with upselling to the people who already trust you.
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I think most companies, when you get to a certain scale, you will need a second product, a second act, so to speak. There are some that can get away without it, but most of those exist in the consumer space. In B2B particularly, usually you will need to kind of expand your product portfolio. And there's a couple of kind of laws of physics that kind of drive that. It's not market saturation. It's not because you've already sold your product to all possible people that could buy it. What it ends up being is in order to kind of drive your go-to-market and be able to kind of drive retention rates above 100%, you're going to need something new to sell beyond what you already have into your existing install base. So you need a combination of, yes, we're going to get new customers, we're going to grow the overall customer base. That's obviously what every company is trying to do. But you also need to say, okay, well, once I have that trusted relationship, once I am the vendor of choice for this particular customer, if I had a new product, that is so much easier to sell than trying to get 1,000, 10,000 new customers. Right. So I think the successful companies find out the good balance across those 2 things.