Scaling your product offering after launch

You’ve launched your product. Customers are purchasing and everything is going really well. You’ve reached the point where your product contains all of the features you feel are necessary in the core offering, yet you want to expand. Today, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on how to expand once having reached this perceived plateau.

Look at other products your customers are using

If your product is often used alongside others, it is possible to simplify the process of using these products together. Your customers will thank you for this. If, for example, you sell drills and a drill case with specific slots for your specific drill bits, you may find that offering a different type of slot for a drill bit you don’t sell, may help your customers. While I’m not a drill fanatic, I assume this would be helpful.

In the context of WordPress plugins, for example, one may find that users of an eCommerce plugin are also regular users of a particular email newsletter management service. Creating an easy-to-use (plug-and-play, if possible) integration with this email service simplifies the setup process for the mutual customers.

Discuss the day to day use of your product with your customers

While similar to the customer feedback loop, this is the part of that loop where you infer opportunities from the discussion. Your customer might, for example, describe their daily use of the product in a step by step manner. Perhaps you can take one or two of those steps and simplify/remove them. That’s an opportunity for your product to scale, or to offer an additional product for customers who would like to simplify or remove the step.

Look at logical next steps for your product

With any product, there is usually a next step or a logical addition. Using drills as an example, drill bits is a logical addition. Using WooCommerce as an example, we examined the needs of our customers and found a logical addition in Storefront, the flagship theme for WooCommerce-powered stores.

Questions to ask are questions along the lines of; “does this idea enhance my product, or make it easier to use?”, “would the majority of my customer base find this idea useful?”, “is this something which could be included in my core product, yet is large enough to stand on it’s own?”.

If the answers to the above are “yes”, “yes”, and “yes”, you’ve got yourself a new product which can stand on it’s own, yet also help to scale your product line after launch.


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