Should you build a broad horizontal platform, or a deep vertical solution for a specific market?
Experts
Build a flexible platform that serves many use cases. Horizontal products have larger TAM, stronger network effects, and can expand into verticals over time.
Go deep in one vertical. Vertical products achieve faster PMF, face less competition, and build domain expertise that's hard to replicate.
The hierarchy of engagement | Sarah Tavel (Benchmark, Greylock, Pinterest)
And so, how do you maximize your chance of tipping a market? You have to focus on a really constrained opportunity, and that is level one. So that's kind of like the broad framing, which is like a really important thing of how, when you're building a marketplace, you actually are building towards that point of dominance.
The first obvious one is just concentration on the supply side. In order to be able to tip a market, you need suppliers to want to lean in on your marketplace. My partner, Bill Gurley talks about how great marketplaces create the new incumbents. So you basically have suppliers who aren't the incumbents.
Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier
One lesson I learned the hard way a bunch of times on this is that if you think about running a marketplace, you're basically like a gardener. You have to have a very light touch. If you're building a SaaS business, you're a construction worker, you're building the product and the features and selling it, and it's this very linear thing.
Right, because you're just taking a cut and you're not selling software. And then the acquisition channels, retention, monetization, marketplace have those three things just broadly and then plus these additional two elements.
Geoffrey Moore on finding your beachhead, crossing the chasm, and dominating a market
Well, when does budget get established? When a category goes horizontal and people go, "Well, yeah, we all want Wi-Fi, we all want mobile apps, we all want cloud computing, we all want whatever it is." And now what happens is...
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)
Yeah, so like you said, I've been in the product management team at Atlassian for roughly 10 years now, and I've been working mainly on bootstrapping new things. Initially, I joined to start the cloud developer ecosystem so developers can build apps on top of the Atlassian platform and sell them on the Atlassian marketplace. I worked on HipChat and Stride.
It depends who you're doing it for and the programs that they've got. Don't feel limited by your platform to answer the core things that are necessary for your product to work, basically. So if the platform is good enough for us, if the UX was good enough for the product managers, we would not have done that.
A framework for finding product-market fit | Todd Jackson (First Round Capital)
All these things are super awesome. And finally, now you've got your gross margin above 80%. Your burn multiple's ideally less than one at this point, you've got less than 10% churn. You've got greater than 120% NRR. And so now the whole thing is like, "Well, how do I keep growing?" This thing's gotten pretty big.
The majority of companies, so greater than 50%, probably closer to 60 or 70%, are going to get stuck at L1 or L2. And so that leaves, roughly, let's say, 30% make it to L3 or L4 just in our experience looking broadly. And that's our entire goal. Because again, once you get to L3, you've got a real shot, you've got a real shot at building an awesome company.
An inside look at how Miro builds product | Varun Parmar (CPO of Miro)
I think the second thing is Miro is actually used obviously by teams that are creating these innovative products and we actually have broad applicability across industries and verticals.
Yeah, so I would say it's maybe a hybrid structure that we have, but the foundation of the team setup is around persona. We have what we refer to as streams, some companies refer to as domains, but essentially it's a set of individuals that are focused on solving the problems for a key persona.
Why ChatGPT will be the next big growth channel (and how to capitalize on it) | Brian Balfour
They're somewhere at 25 and 30%. Another example of they close down organic distribution in order to monetize, all that kind of stuff. The same thing will happen in this AI world. Cursor, it's very clear Cursor's on the path to also probably create some type of agent platform for developers. That'll be a smaller ecosystem to play in for some products.
I'll give something, really a very opposite example of the ones that I gave. Look at the platform Udemy. They are a platform for course creators. I don't know if most people know this, but when they started, their rev share to creators was something like 80% to creators. They started very high.
Bending the universe in your favor | Claire Vo (LaunchDarkly, Color, Optimizely, ChatPRD)
And so first, I talked a little bit about how I got into this role. I do think you have to be technical to do a role like this. I think a lot of people look at my professional background and think that I use my broad leadership skills and leverage of a great SVP to keep engineering team going.
Moving fast and navigating uncertainty | Jeremy Henrickson (Rippling, Coinbase)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, for interview world-class product leaders and growth experts, to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today my guest is Jeremy Henrickson. Jeremy is senior vice president of product at Rippling, where he leads the product and design teams.
Thinking like a gardener, slime mold, the adjacent possible: Product advice from Alex Komoroske
Anytime that an industry gets really, really, really, really, really good at like vertical SaaS, we know how to execute the crap out of that. We know exactly what to do. It doesn't require that much. It requires consumption and execution velocity and all this.
How to become a category pirate | Christopher Lochhead (Author of Play Bigger, Niche Down, more)
We could do a 12-hour deep dive on all your content and how you built the newsletter, and you'd love it. It'd be great. We all do. If you're a creator of any kind, entrepreneur, innovator of any kind, you love the thing you're creating, of course. However, Gojo focused on the problem, not just the solution.
As do I. Most people don't challenge their own thinking. Most people say, "Now, why do I only think what I think about abortion? Where did I learn that? What do I really think about abortion? What do others think about abortion?
The AI-native startup: 5 products, 7-figure revenue, 100% AI-written code. | Dan Shipper (Every)
It knows so much about every little branch of human knowledge and every art form and every way of making things or building things, and you just have access to that, so it's doing a lot of the ...
What differentiates the highest-performing product teams | John Cutler (The Beautiful Mess)
But I think that what I realized over the course of these four years is that I wanted to pivot back to help put most of my energy into helping my own company. They're growing super fast, so the numbers are in the hundreds of everything or in the thousands of everything, and they're not just the POS business.
Inside Linear: Building with taste, craft, and focus | Karri Saarinen (co-founder, designer, CEO)
My belief is that, like any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. What happens is whenever there's a new paradigm, I don't know, like the mobile or the web or something the first iterations of those products existing there, they don't have to be super well designed necessarily because they are the first.
My belief is that any domain or industry, the more it matters, the more the design matters. I think it's fairly easy to see in different, even in software or in other industries.
OpenAI’s CPO on how AI changes must-have skills, moats, coding, startup playbooks, more | Kevin Weil
And I think, like I was saying, the data is industry-specific, use case-specific, behind certain company walls, things like that. And there are immense opportunities in every industry and every vertical in the world to go build AI-based products that improve upon the state of the art. And there's just no way we could ever do that ourselves. We don't want to.
I think being first helps, which is one of the reasons why we're so focused on moving quickly. We like being the first to launch new capabilities. Things like deep research. Our models, they can do a lot of things. So they can take real-time video input, you have speech to speech, you can do speech to text and text to speech. They can do deep research.
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Vertical SaaS is underrated. We built a CRM just for real estate agents and our close rate is 3x the horizontal competitors.