425. Doors vs. Stairs 🚪🪜

The two main options for designing a GTM strategy for a multi-product platform

Hi there 👋

Read any good books lately?

I’ve picked up a few over the past couple weeks, thanks in no small part to #booktok. See below for some recommendations on lesser-known branding and advertising books. My book list of marketing favorites is here, and as always you can see everything I’ve read recently here.

Let me know anything you’ve read and would recommend!

Ashwinn 💡 brand, biz, mkting on TikTok

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan

(ᵔᴥᵔ)

Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.

Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.

Doors vs. Stairs: How you sell a multi-product platform

Photo by David Hofmann on Unsplash

One of a marketer’s greatest friends is a product team that ships a lot of stuff. 🙏

The only challenge this raises is how do you put all the shiny objects together into a packaging strategy, go-to-market design, and brand narrative that is cohesive.

Ideally, this is happening in conjunction with product at the feature development stage and in tandem with the company’s strategic planning. This is why product marketing is such an important hire to get on board early. You can build all sorts of cool products, yes, but building cool things and solving a specific universe of problems for your biggest fans — well, that’s what we marketers are here to help with.

So let’s say you have multiple products that you’re trying to squeeze into a cohesive story …

Where do you start?

This is my preferred order:

• Brand strategy, including your narrative for why you exist and the category you exist in

• Product positioning and packaging — this is the story for "what you sell” as well as the actual things that people can buy

• Go-to-market design — how you sell it, where you sell it, etc.

These first two — brand and product marketing — should be essays to themselves, and I’m afraid I don’t have the word count in substack to say it all here. Check out these previous newsletters for a teaser:

203. Brand strategy playbook 🦄

204. Product Marketing Playbook 👖

Let’s zoom all the way ahead to the third phase of multiproduct: the go-to-market design.

Your go-to-market design will often come down to a decision:

Multiple doors or a single staircase?

Here’s more:

• With multiple doors, new signups have the option of entering your platform through any individual project, whichever resonates most with them.

• With a single staircase, new signups are funneled onto a particular product path, typically the one with the most foundational product value and broad usage. Then they can be “staircased” into additional products as their use cases expand and as they mature as a user.

We had this phenomenon at Buffer. We were in the business of social media management software, and we eventually built a platform that helped marketers perform multiple jobs:

1. Planning and Publishing their social media content

2. Engaging with comments and messages

3. Analyzing the performance of their social profiles

With multiple doors, new users could join Buffer through Publishing, Engaging, or Analyzing.

With the staircase, new users would join through Publishing; and the rhythms of the product, the deepening of their usage, and the nudges from product UI and from Customer Success would staircase them to Analyzing next and Engaging ultimately.

Buffer now has two additional products in its suite

We tried each path at different parts of our GTM journey. We started with the staircase when expansion revenue was paramount. We shifted to three doors when acquisition was most important.

There is no wrong answer for which of the paths you choose. To get it right, you simply need the full buy-in from across your go-to-market

If you choose doors, then …

• align your goals to acquisition

• make sure you’ve built in-product triggers to cross-sell users into the other doors

• make sure you’re comfortable investing in personalized lifecycle comms that are unique to each user’s doors

• be sure that any of the doors still connect to the core value of your brand narrative. You don’t want people entering through a door that is adjacent to the heart of your company; they may never get to know you for who you truly are

If you choose staircases, then …

• align your goals to expansion

• make sure you’ve figured out the right path for users to deepen their product adoption and to staircase into the upsell

• make sure to invest in success and education efforts

• be careful not to under-sell your product to the market since a portion of your product’s value isn’t realized until later in the customer journey

The SaaS world loves multiproduct platforms of all shapes and sizes, so one of the best things you can do if you’re facing a GTM puzzle is to poke around and see how it works elsewhere.

For instance, Intercom used to have three doors but now has more of a staircase model, including the addition of add-ons.

Gong has a suite of products, which it packages by tiers in a staircase model that encourages deeper expansion into its full suite.

Over to you

What have you experienced with multiproduct platforms? Do you have a preferred way of building go-to-market motions? I’d love to hear from you. Hit reply to get in touch!

---

About this newsletter …

Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I previously built brands at Oyster, Buffer, and Vox. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:

Thank you for being here! 🙇‍♂️

I’m lucky to count folks from great brands like these (and many more) as part of this newsletter community.