Let’s discuss the pros and cons here and allow me to recommend an approach for figuring this out.
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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is how to determine whether or not that next feature idea of yours should actually be a product of its own. Now, I’ve been talking about this in regards to what I’m considering to be micro sass, and it’s also referred to as low-touch products.
Those are SaaS applications that don’t require a lot of intervention from you in order to get your users onboarded to the platform to start receiving. In fact, in most cases, applications like these that I’m typically working on in a B2B area, selling business to business, they can be the full experience.
Your user can get the full experience without much training or intervention whatsoever on your behalf. Now, because of that, And because the more complicated those applications get, I have a tendency to wanna keep the experience as simple as possible, to make sure that it’s as easy as possible for your users and customers to understand and know what to do, and then to be able to get value out of it themselves.
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You know, onboard themselves, handle all of the steps and components themselves without getting lost. And the more complicated your product is, the harder it is to be to do that. Now when you’re entertaining whether or not perhaps a new request or a new idea probably coming from you is, uh, something to extend based on the capability of your current.
Application or whether or not that should be a product of its own. And that’s kind of where I’m at at the moment. I’ve got my podcasting B2B SaaS application in a good spot at the moment, feature wise, until I get a new wave of feedback. But I’ve got ways to potentially extend that capability and I can add that on to the current product, or I could turn that into a new product of its own.
And what I’m gonna tell you is that the best way to determine that, as in what’s got the best. Opportunity to generate the most value for you is to better understand what the difference may look like in regard to your ICP and your target market. So your ideal customer profile and your target market.
How much do they overlap? Between what your product is currently capable of and what you might be considering adding to that product experience. And if there isn’t enough overlap there, as in if they don’t overlap almost one to one, then you’re probably looking at an opportunity to turn your new idea into a new application of its own.
Now, I understand you’re gonna need to replicate much of what you already have, but that should be. More cost effective than the first time around because you should be able to borrow quite a bit and then just switch out the internals in order to create this new experience, if you will. But if the overlap doesn’t, isn’t one-to-one, I would look at potentially turning that into a different product.
With AI tools and things like that, we can move a lot faster. These days in terms of what our products are capable of. But I wouldn’t look to convolute the current product experience you have until you get a wave of feedback to understand whether or not that’s the direction they want to go.