Every startup wants to be a platform... 🤩

↳ but how do you actually SELL a platform? 🤔❓

There are three main approaches:

1️⃣ Sell one main wedge product

(and upsell add-ons)

Most people think of Stripe primarily as a payments product.

This is their "wedge" into a company — and once you've adopted their payments product, they will slowly try to upsell their other products:

"We saw some suspicious activity — you should also get Radar, our fraud prevention product."

For startups, this is the least risky option:

→ it is a forcing function to help you stay narrow and prevent product bloat

→ it helps you focus on finding product market fit with ONE PRODUCT first

→ a single wedge is by far the easiest option to market and sell

2️⃣ Sell one multiple wedge products to different segments

(and cross-sell other products)

Depending on how you first heard of monday.com, you might think of them primarily as a project management tool...

→ OR you might think of them primarily as a CRM...

Monday is positioning themselves three different ways for three different customer segments and essentially hides the other products until you're already inside and activated (and THEN they try to cross-sell you).

For startups, this is a slightly more risky option 😬

→ you basically need to run multiple go-to-market plans at once

→ you risk creating confusion if two people meet and have completely different understandings of what Monday is/does

→ it's still not the RISKIEST option, because you will most likely figure out which products are actually working and can then cut the ones that aren't

3️⃣ Sell as a bundleMicrosoft is the king of the bundle. They make it extremely hard for you to buy just Word or Excel — they REALLY want you to buy the entire Office 365 subscription.

This is the strategy that the vast majority of startups use when trying to sell a platform...

And it is by FAR the most risky option 🥵

→ if you are early and haven't found product market fit, this will make it EXTREMELY hard to understand what is working and what isn't

→ unless you're selling into larger mid market or enterprise companies to begin with, your target segment likely isn't shopping for an end-to-end platform

→ you are exponentially more likely to create extreme product bloat

→ it is a fallacy to think taking five point solutions (that nobody really wants) and bundling them will suddenly make them an attractive solution