Should you have a second product?

Hey, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm. And on today's episode, I want to talk about, should you have a second product? Now, this is a question I get from a lot of people. You know, we're launching one or we want to launch one product, but should we have a second product. And so, you know, there's a lot of things to think about. There's a lot of benefits to one or more. And in this video, we're going to talk about why is this the question, what's, what's the driving factor behind asking this question, benefits of a single product, when you should only stick to one, and why you probably should have a second product. So after all that, we'll And we'll talk about why you probably should. So first, why are we asking this question? Well, typically it comes from the fact that a lot of people talk about one product and it— the benefits of having multiple products and be able to cross-sell and, and things like that. And so founders and, and startups and, and companies that are launching just one product often have that conversation with me of, okay, well, What do we need? What's going to be best? And it's really just coming from a place of, well, how do we optimize our launch? What is going to be the most optimal process for launching a product and making a successful brand and company? And so that's usually the driving factor behind even asking this question: should you have a second product? Now, I want to— the second thing I'm talking about is benefits of a single product. So when you only have one product, it means your marketing is crystal clear. There's no confusion. You're not trying to sell 2 products. You say, here's the product, this is what it does, this is how much it is, do you want it? It's very simple, it's very straightforward. Your project managing while you're launching a single product is definitely easier. You're not having to worry about multiple products. You're not having to worry about making sure that the design between them looks the same. You're not coordinating between things. Your branding is all aimed in one thing. You only have to develop one product and one packaging and one delivery system. It's all pretty— it keeps it all pretty simple. It's the simplest, you know, launch in terms of quantity of products. It's going to be the easiest to do, and sometimes budget-wise, that's going to be the best option as well. Now, third, when should you stick to just one? So I just briefly mentioned it budget-wise. If you don't have the budget, that's often a good reason to stick with only one. And if you don't have a market that is really looking for multiple products, or if you're just testing the market out and you're, you're really developing a product To go, okay, well, we're going to launch this out and see how it does. And if it goes really well, then we'll launch multiple products and we have a product portfolio that we'd like to put out. But really, we just want to kind of test the market out. Then you really should stick to one. That's going to be when one is going to be the most beneficial. It's going to be the most strategic. So really, it should just come from a place of, is this a strategic decision for one, or Is it a financial, which can be strategic? But being aware of that and deciding what the best strategy is going to be will help you decide, hey, should we stick to just one right now? Now lastly, why you should— why should you probably have a second product? Well, in my opinion, I think you most of the time there should be a second product, and at least if not 3 to 4. And the strength in releasing a few products at once is that I wouldn't do it in a all at once, but I would do it in a quick succession because that allows you to build on each successive release. You're able to prime people a little bit. You're able to say, oh well, here's this product and we have something new coming out in a few months, and you're able to build up momentum that that allows you to stay in the public's eye, in front of people more because you have more new things to talk about. You're able to capitalize on a snowball rolling down a hill, getting bigger and bigger rather than having one scoop of snow, holding it there, scooping again, and slowly, you'll eventually get as big as a snowball, but you won't have that speed and you won't be constantly growing bigger. as quickly. And so there's some marketing benefits from it. There's also from an overall long-term efficiency in terms of cost and timeframe, in that if you were to develop multiple products side by side, you can end up saving time and being able to optimize those products to each other. And you may be able to find, if we're doing design for manufacturing, you'd be able to maybe make some design tweaks in multiple products in order to share more parts between them. Because if you launch one product, that means you bought all the tooling for it, everything is there. And so when you build a second product, you're not going to want to make changes to the first one necessarily, especially if it's more recent, because you've already invested a ton of money in the tooling. You want to get your money's worth out of it. Whereas if you're developing, say, 4 products and you're able to optimize 25% of the components across all of them to be identical, now when you spend that money on that tooling, that tooling is going to be able to supply parts for 4 products, not just 1. And so your long-term cost is going to go down. You're going to be able to optimize it. You— we could find ways to share packaging components, and just other things that can make overall the cost of developing, launching, and producing those products cheaper in the long run. So that's my opinion. I think that that's usually— and there's usually a good argument for it. Of course, if you don't have the capital for it, then that kind of puts a crimp on that. But that's something to be aware of, that that optimization is possible when you are developing multiple products at once. Hopefully this gives you a few ideas to be thinking about, you know, whether you should have a second product or not and when a smart time is to do that and why in some cases you should really only have one. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed and like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well. So check us out there. All right. Thank you.