E118: Go Deep Instead of Wide with Your SaaS

After launch, I see many entrepreneurs want to go much wider with what they product can do.  They always want to add more features that have yet to be requested by their early customers.  This can be a huge mistake.

Instead of going wide, let’s talk about what it looks like to go deep instead which can give you a leg up on your competition.

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Episode Transcript
 Hey folks, Sean here and today what I wanna talk to you about is why when you’re looking to extend the capabilities of your B2B SaaS that you shouldn’t go wide. You should go deep. Now, let me explain what I mean by that. So sometimes when you’ve got an early traction with your B2B SaaS, it’s easy to think through and continually add to your backlog or your roadmap.

And extend what your product is capable of. Now, when a lot of people are doing this, especially in the beginning, they’re thinking about how can I go far and wide with what my product can do? As in if it can do X, maybe it should also do Y and also Z. And I want to explain to you that I feel that that’s a trap.

I’ve been there before. And the more that you go wide, the more you have a higher probability of building your product in a direction away from what your customer actually. Instead, my recommendation is that you go deep and that you become the best version of whatever it was you were originally setting out to solve for your customer.

So that top problem continue to be better and better at that. And if you continue to chase that, assuming that you’ve latched onto one of the top problems from the start, then it’s gonna be almost impossible to. Which is gonna give you significant defensibility because your solution is gonna continue to be better and better.

Let me share with you with another example that may be relevant in another industry. So if you think through in terms of healthcare and receiving service there, you might need the help of a doctor or a particular surgeon at some point. If you have some kind of healthcare issue. Now, a lot of people have problem with their knees, so I’ll focus there like over time, knees degrade, right?

So eventually people need to go see a specialist that works on knees, for example. Now, let’s say instead you were choosing between multiple providers and they all had the ability to work on knees, but there was another one that also learned how to work on hands and necks and phases and all this other stuff.

They had specialties in all of these area. Which one would you be more likely to focus on? The one that focuses on a bunch of different areas, or the one that focuses on just the one that you need. So if you think about that from that concept, the specialist is always typically hiring demand because that’s all that they do.

They focus all day every day solving that specific problem. And that happens to be the problem that you have. This concept we see all the time in software. People have a tendency to try to go far and wide with what their product can do. That can convolute the user experience, that can add potential solutions to problems that your users or customers may not have or may not be on their radar.

And if you are adding those things to your experience for which the users that you already had were pleased with what the original set of features were, then you’re going to continue to make that experience worse because it doesn’t provide value for them. So you really need to make. That whatever it is that you’re adding to your product experience ultimately adds value for them.

And I’ve seen the concept and the strategy of going deeper into being the best solution for the specific problem that you originally set out to solve for that target market to be a much more successful strategy at doing that in the long run. Then instead, going wide and trying to solve multiple problems or extend functionality that way.