I don't want seventeen businesses to market

I want AI to help me build more products. I don't want seventeen separate fights for customers.

If every new app needs a different audience, a different pitch and a different way to reach people, you've volunteered to start over seventeen times. The code might be cheap. Getting someone to care is still your problem.

Bannerbear founder @yongfook wrote that he'd changed his mind about focusing on one product: AI makes running several more feasible, and betting everything on one app feels risky when a new model or a clone could threaten it.¹ HeadshotPro founder @dannypostma added that founders should use their products to cross-promote each other.²

Work out who could use both products before you build the second.

Which customers already trust you with something, and what else are they trying to get done? Let their work help you choose the next product. Otherwise, cross-promotion becomes a collection of footer links between products whose only connection is your name on the invoices.

Give the second product a reason to exist

Someone paying you to send email might also need to understand why it isn't arriving. An email delivery problem gives you a reason to introduce a monitoring tool while the customer needs it.

Bento handles email marketing and transactional email; Tatami monitors delivery. Bento gives its customers access to Tatami to investigate failed or delayed emails.³ Tatami can receive delivery records from Bento, so the customer can investigate using data from the tool already sending their emails.⁴

A customer doesn't have to develop an interest in the founder's portfolio before the second tool becomes relevant.

An announcement to every customer asks everyone to work out whether they care. A recommendation while someone is investigating failed emails already has a reason behind it. Explain how the second tool helps investigate the failed emails, whether it can use the customer's existing records, and what it costs to set up and use.

Does this need to be a separate product?

Sometimes the right answer is a feature in the product people already pay for. If I have to make the original product worse to create demand for its sibling, I've probably invented a billing scheme rather than a useful business.

A useful test for a separate product: would someone buy it without buying the first one? Tatami also supports email providers including SendGrid, Mailgun and Postmark.⁵ Someone using a competing email service can still use Tatami to investigate delivery problems, so Bento can introduce customers without being a requirement for using it.

Existing customers can help a new product get started without defining everyone it will ever serve.

Before building, ask customers to show you where their current tools fall short. Where do you leave our product, and what do you open next? An awkward spreadsheet or a service they're unhappy with gives you a problem to investigate, not yet a reason to build another app. If nobody needs the next thing, access to their inbox won't manufacture the need.

The fix might belong in the first product. I'd rather improve something customers already use than create another launch I have to keep promoting.

More products can depend on the same customers

Several products sold to the same customers can all suffer when those customers have a bad year. And if every product depends on the same AI capability staying scarce, more product names won't protect you when that capability gets cheaper.

Selling to unrelated markets may reduce dependence on one group of customers. It also means learning what different buyers want and how to reach them, even if an agent writes the code.

Before I build the next thing, I want to know who I can call about it.