Should you launch new products frequently or sell the one(s) you have until you squeeze every last drop out of them? Should you focus on one product (a ​signature product​, as Jay Clouse calls it) or diversify?

It’s the perennial dilemma of the creator/solopreneur. And we’re getting to the bottom of it today.

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If you’re like most of my clients, you’re struggling with two pivotal questions: how many products should you build and what should they be?

On the one hand, you’ve got the signature product, a single offer that’s perfectly aligned with your brand and values and on the other hand, you’ve got a ​value ladder​ or a diversified product stack.

There is no right or wrong answer. But there is a right or wrong timing.

The signature product — one offer, one strategy

Jay Clouse speaks very highly of this approach. It makes perfect sense, not just because you have one thing to sell and one thing to promote.

There are other advantages to it:

  • You get associated with a single thing, which means less confusion for your audience.
  • People come to YOU if they want that thing and no one else.
  • Your promotional activities become easier: you get to keep refining the messaging and the tactics for a single product.
  • The product itself becomes better: since it’s your single focus, you can iterate and re-iterate until it’s as close to perfect as it gets.

There are quite a few popular creators who use this tactic too.

Screenshot via ​Creator Science​

Plus, a few others who are considering adopting it:

Should you? On paper, they look good but, as with everything in marketing, they’re not for everyone.

Signature products — challenges and limitations

The trouble with signature products is that they’re very, very hard to nail down. Very few people get it right the first time.

So it’s quite common to get discouraged and pivot to another product before you refine the first one.

To have a successful signature product, you need:

  • A relatively large audience (it can work on a smaller one too, but it will be HARD).
  • Reputation: signature products are usually high-ticket items, which means that you need reputation and credibility before people shed 4-5 figures on a single offer.
  • Time: it takes years to build it and refine it.

More importantly, the creators Jay mentions above sell more than the signature product, even though it doesn’t look like it.

They are diversified. They have speaking gigs, high-end consulting gigs that you won’t find on their websites, royalties from social media platforms, brand partnerships, book deals, and more.

This is very important: no one (successful) in this industry has a single revenue stream.

Unless you’re part of the stratosphere, you will need to diversify your product stack.

Which begs the question:

How often should you launch a new product/offer?

The hive mind says you should be launching something every quarter. That’s four new offers per year.

Did you audibly gasp?

Bear with me for a second.

I know, launching a new product is hard.

It took me months to put ​Audience Accelerator​ together. There’s no way in hell I could do that four times a year and maintain the same level of quality.

I bet you can resonate with that, whether you’re thinking about digital products or productized services (communities, cohort-based programs, and so on).

These things take a lot of time:

  • To build
  • To promote
  • To refine
  • To deliver

Plus, having too many of them will definitely confuse your audience — what the heck are you even good at?

But there is a strong case for launching every quarter AND a way to do it without burning out and without compromising on quality.

Why do you need to launch more often than you think?

Selling to an existing client is ​5 to 7 times cheaper​ than acquiring a new one. IF your first offers hit the spot, your existing clients already trust you and they are waiting for you to launch something new — they’re ready to pay you.

If you only have a signature product, they have nothing else to pay you for. Sure, they’ll keep consuming your content, so you can make money through affiliate marketing or brand deals.

But those aren’t nearly as lucrative as selling directly to the people who trust you.

More importantly, people need help with more than one challenge.

A regular flow in my business is:

My best clients bought all of the above, some of them multiple times. If I only had one signature product, their purchasing history would have stopped there.

This is, in fact, the biggest issue with having a single product: you need to keep growing your audience at an incredibly fast pace, to attract new people to it.

Now for the thorniest of issues:

How do you launch a new product every quarter without burning out or launching crap?

I teased this issue on social media yesterday (see it on ​LinkedIn​ and ​Threads​) and most replies said something along the lines of “a new offer every quarter? Hell, no!”).

My community is wicked smart and they’re right. Unless you have a sizeable team, you cannot create AND market a new product every quarter.

Plus, after a while, you’ll have so many products you’ll forget about them.

When I first read this once-a-quarter approach, my knee-jerk reaction was “f*ck off, you maniac!” too.

What if I told you that you don’t have to build from scratch every time?

This year, my business grew by 240% (​the full breakdown here​) and I launched:

Four products, one per quarter, even though they are not equally spread across the entire year.

There are a few keys to this:

  • One of them is a service. It takes very little to put the offer together BUT it takes time to deliver it.
  • The brand partnerships are very low-lift BUT you need a large-ish audience for them.
  • The Audience Accelerator course and workshop were the hardest, most time-consuming product in terms of…everything: putting them together, promoting them, building the systems behind them, and so on. BUT they draw on each other, so I didn’t have to do everything twice.

9 ideas to launch products more often without being a hustling maniac

I’m firmly against hustle culture, so I would never suggest working 12+ hours a day to meet a product quota.

What I do suggest (quite often!) is making the most of what you already have. Let’s look at a few possible scenarios.

You already have a pre-recorded course → get 3 more products out of it

If you feel like the course has more juice in it but sales have been slower than expected, you have a few options:

  • Run it like a live workshop (live teaching gets more traction) with a Q&A session at the end.
  • Simply run the Q&A session. Offer access to the course and a live Q&A session. Encourage people to watch the course before the live Q&A session, so they get the most out of it.
  • Re-launch it with a VIP package i.e. 1:1 work with you. I launched Audience Accelerator with a VIP option and an intermediary package that offers an audit. I never considered these separate products but they are.

You ran (will run) one or more workshops → get 3 more products out of them

  • Re-record the workshop and turn it into a course. Or use the workshop recording (if you can trim out the faces of the attendees) and sell it as a course.
  • Got several workshop recordings on complementary topics? Bundle them together in a package and sell them at a discount to people who couldn’t attend the live session. Example: each workshop cost $150 to attend live → sell a package of three for $200. Or turn them into a course if the topics fit well together.
  • Turn them into a live challenge → “30 days to [outcome]”. You can re-run the workshops live or give people access to the recordings and set “office hours” calls once a week for 30 days.

Three more product ideas you can create without burning out

  • Got a lot of written content? Turn it into an eBook you sell for ±$10
  • You probably have a lot of templates, SOPs, systems, and other things on your hard drive. Bundle them together and sell them.
  • AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions. These are ideal if you already have an audience that trusts you. Unlike workshops and masterclasses, you don’t have to prepare anything in advance, just announce the time and date and be ready to answer the questions.

These are just a few examples of products you can build in a few hours

Plus, you’ve already done the bulk of the work — you probably have emails and social media posts you can re-use with minimal tweaks when you re-launch in a different format.

The only caveat here is that you need to have been in business for a while for these to work — you need to have existing products or content to draw on.

You don’t need to spend months on a product and weeks preparing ​the launch​ for it to be a success. You probably already have almost everything you need for your next product – it’s time to reap those compounding benefits.

Try a couple of these ideas and a couple of “serious” launches and one product every quarter doesn’t sound like such a heavy lift anymore, does it?

Still,

You ABSOLUTELY DON’T HAVE TO launch four products every year

You can get by on a single offer, signature or not. Just like you can launch two or twelve products.

Most of us got into this business for the freedom it promises, so don’t let anyone on the internet tell you what you have to do (myself included).

This breakdown is designed to show you what’s possible, not mandatory.

If you already have some of these products and if they’re not gaining the traction you had hoped for re-launching them in a different format can be a game-changer.