A marketplace expert explains how to expand into adjacent products: start with honest reasons why, audit what you're good at and what you need to learn, and use data and A/B testing to find what works. TripAdvisor leveraged its demand-side strength and bought capabilities it lacked.
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Could you walk us through a little bit more as far as, you know, what some of those specific considerations are when maybe expanding, you know, from a kind of core product offering into these more adjacent kind of use cases and then how some earlier stage founders can kind of think about that themselves now?
Yeah, absolutely. So with product expansion, which is, you know, a topic that I had the privilege of focusing on in all 3 of my roles, I think the first thing to really, you know, the honest conversations, I say, like you need to have a lot of honest conversations with yourselves. and your leadership team around, yeah, first start with the why. You know, I've done this personally where I was kind of leading my teams to product expansion to like over— like overlooking the, some of the problems in our core business and then turning to expansion as a solution, which is absolutely the wrong way to go about it. So I think that's really the first place to understand Why are you doing this? Really ideal scenario is this is part of your company vision and strategy. You know, it's you're embarking on the plan that you— it's going to get you to where you want to be in 5 years. Like, that's ideal. But in the real world, we also know that a lot of things happen. You know, markets get competitive, your board members get, you know, eager and exploring new areas, or, you know, an acquisition comes around that you just can't say no to. And those are all valid reasons. So when those reasons happen, I think when they come together, then you need to focus on how do you maximize your success. And that's done through, you know, you give it the resources it needs, which is usually an independent team that's going to go pursue this, you know, exploration and then finding product market fit through retention. You really need to understand, okay, what are the capabilities in my core that I have? How can I add to these capabilities? And then what are my missing capabilities? We did this really well at TripAdvisor where, you know, we knew our core capabilities were around like we had this demand side of the marketplace, but to kickstart the supply side, we had to think creatively. We kind of like faked it till we made it. And then we also went around and acquired companies. So that set a very clear strategy for us. Another key thing at this point of expansion that again, I think we did well at TripAdvisor was recognizing the importance of data. So as you're going from a single way to monetize to many ways to monetize, your success depends on a user comes in and you kind of got to lead them to the right way, to the right path. And that, that requires data capabilities first around, you know, getting and storing data from multiple sources, and then being able to have the right personalization engine so that you're leading the right customer to the right place. And then you also have to have the right A/B testing mechanisms, which we did at Tripp, and that really helped us tremendously. Yeah, and then finally, I would say really being able to look at, you know, each use case and platform and then giving them what that's worth and Really, I can't really emphasize enough the importance of this, you know, core team that's going and pursuing the new opportunities.
