Better to offer everything under one product or split it into a suite of products?
Hi,
I have a time management product that could potentially be split between goal management app and time management app.
It seems to me that marketing each product separately would be more effective but I see companies like Basecamp and Culture Amp who prefer to put all under one product. (And then you have companies like Atlassian or Zoho who do split their offering into several products).
What do you guys think?
I'm in the similar space and I believe the integrated bundled product is the selling point as this drives the value. I don't think you sell goals or time, you sell productivity and for that you probably need all and having all differentiates you from your competitors.
It also makes your competition different, you probably can't compete against the best goal setting tool, or the best time tracking tool, you compete on the best integrated set.
Then people will search for goals or time so it is good to make landing pages for this separate so the value proposition for each are very clear.
Also from an engineering / billing perspective it could be complex to split up tools, you might want to focus that effort on other things depending on where you are with your product and traction.
This is my perspective from a product point of view, not knowing your exact product. Maybe from a sales perspective might advise to split it up and maximize revenue on each of your tools so looking forward to read more tips in this topic.
Have you heard of the Jim Barksdale (Netscape) saying, the way to make money is by bundling and unbundling
If you have unbundled products, you will look like a bigger multi-product company and be able to make more money by bundling when appropriate.
There are a couple variables to consider in your decision:
Complexity of product / Interdependency of features - The more complex your product is, the more justified it is to split it into a suite. Each of Atlassian/Zoho's products are sufficiently complex that they could theoretically stand-alone and be their own smaller SaaS company. Versus Basecamp's features are simpler and would not be able to stand alone, and are meant to work in conjunction with the other features in the product.
How often customers use both features, or just one or the other - Are your customers often using just the goal management or just the time management features of your product, or do they usually use both? You'll only want to split if customers are usually buying and only using one or the other.
Your current resources - Splitting a product into a suite of products is more resource intensive than marketing a single product with multiple features. You'll need to figure out separate pricing, separate marketing pages, separate ways to pitch the value add.
These are the things that we considered when we split our product, TINT (https://www.tintup.com) into a suite of products. Customers often used only part of our product for a specific use case and didn't like that they were paying for features they were not using. Also, by breaking it into a suite, we could better pitch the value add for each use case. The tradeoff that we paid for was an increase in complexity for our pricing in addition to the time spent creating new marketing to speak to each use case.
Thanks for the thoughtful answer.
Would you consider your decision to split was the right one? What results did you get out of it?
Did each product convert better because of the more focused public website?
Small/simple that helps accomplish one task: I'd pay it once.
Set of tools to support the whole work: I'd pay it monthly.
But as an entrepreneur, which approach would promote the most growth do you think?
That was just an insight. The decision depends on things outside my control or knowledge, the intention is to bring thought.
I like this approach.
Hey @AymericG
My personal suggestion would be is to split into suite of products
1.Gives you the chance to detail out the features and benefits of each product with a separate page for each product.
2.Helps you monitor, analyse and understand which products your users are more interested by looking at the traffic coming to the website.
3.More chances to play around with your pricing strategy both short and long term.
4.Helps with SEO , let's say you reckon doing SEO for time management app will result in more traffic and sales, then it's beneficial to have separate pages for each product.
I love how Freshdesk have branded and marketed their products. They have used the prefix name Fresh to add to all of their products (Freshsales, Freshchat, Freshservice etc) https://freshdesk.com/
Thanks for the freshdesk example.
The company behind my products is called Wise Labs.
So I was thinking of having :
wise Goals
wise Week Plan
wise Journal