All-in-one is the laziest early-stage product strategy
If your product strategy is to take two, three, four, five, or more products, recreate them 10-20% worse, but bundle them together into an all-in-one package, your startup is doomed to mediocrity.
That’s not to say bundling does not work. It can and often does. If two features or products are extremely complementary, and benefit greatly by proximity and tight integration, bringing two ideas together can create massive customer value. Bundling can also help you to fight up-and-coming competition from feature-as-a-service companies (i.e., companies selling just one simple, easy to replicate feature) by cornering the market before they do.
Bundling for the sake of bundling, however, is almost always a bad idea. Even if you manage to hear a customer tell you they don’t like logging into multiple systems to get their work done, the reality of competing with every company in four or five verticals is brutal, distracting, wasteful, and uninspiring. Almost every company that tries this ends up with either all of their revenue coming from one pillar of their product, or a spread of revenue across virtually unrelated products that is so thin that prioritisation becomes impossible. They spend all of their time catching up on building commodity features rather than innovating on new ideas that’ve never been done before. And, new ideas, that are good and well executed, always create the most value.
What about Rippling or Deel? These companies have become the contrarian standard bearers of the go-wide-not-deep strategy. However, I’d argue their product strategies are more conventional than they tout. Today, the best advice is to start narrow, win in your initial market, and then expand when you can truly afford the distractions. Rippling and Deel win because they’ve truly innovated on their core product. Hiring employees overseas is a massive pain point. They solved this problem resoundingly. They just did it way faster than most startups, so they could afford the distractions much sooner. This is likely the result of the fact that much of their product innovation is actually commercial, as opposed to being solved through engineering.
If your CEO or product leader tells you something like “customers hate logging into multiple systems, so we’re going to give them a single solution for everything”, you should quit and join a startup with a truly differentiated and opinionated product thesis. A company that actually wants to build something that has never been built before. Or, at least take the high salary, low ESOP compensation option, because your company will never be generational unless it pivots.
If you are the CEO or product leader currently stuck in a failing all-in-one strategy: pivot. The good thing about having a broad product is that you should have plenty of insights into what areas have the most opportunity for disruption and innovation. Find an area to double down, and a pathway towards deprecating some of the bloat. You’ll create a much more successful product that way.