Consumer Software: From Single Bets to Systems

Building new apps is cheaper than ever. Restarting growth every time isn’t.

For the last decade, most consumer startups followed a familiar playbook: build a great app, find product-market fit, and scale it to the moon. This approach worked when product development was expensive, growth was cheap, and early movers had advantages. But the game has fundamentally changed.

Shipping Got Cheaper. Growth Didn't.

Building is cheaper than ever. AI, no-code tools, and improved developer infrastructure have collapsed the time and cost to launch new consumer apps. The result? More companies launching more products faster than ever before.

But CAC remains stubbornly high. Despite the explosion in building capacity, acquiring users is more expensive than ever. Facebook and Google ads haven't gotten cheaper, and organic growth loops have been milked to death.

Retention is still the hardest problem. For all our advances in product development, we haven't cracked the code on making products stickier. Competition for attention makes retention even more challenging, while good ideas get cloned before they have time to compound.

Product-Market Fit Is Fragmenting

Product-market fit no longer lives inside individual apps. In a fragmented landscape, it’s more likely to emerge across an ecosystem. Early consumer teams will inevitably ship multiple products, whether they realize it or not. In a multi-product world, the real question isn't "Can you build?" It's "Can you compound?"

The Three Paths Forward

For consumer software builders, I see three potential product-building strategies emerging:

Plan A: Build a Super App

You launch a product that super-serves a niche with a sticky use case and high WTP, then continuously add features until you're the next Strava or Duolingo.

This is most people's Plan A, but achieving this outcome was already rare—and likely to get even rarer in the AI era.

Plan B: Build an App Factory

You rapidly develop multiple products, opportunistically following trends. While you might reuse some technical infrastructure, each product is fundamentally a separate bet with its own growth playbook. Success comes from either one breakout hit or enough singles and doubles to build a meaningful business.

App studios have gotten increasingly sophisticated at recycling key components of products, but they still largely treat each app as an independent growth challenge.

Plan C: Build an Ecosystem

You push the app studio model further by designing products that share identity, growth, and monetization infrastructure. Your strategic advantage is that each new product leverages your existing user base and improves your shared systems.

This approach inverts the conventional super app journey. Rather than starting with one dominant product and expanding features until it becomes unwieldy, you're building discrete apps that connect through shared systems—potentially converging into a super app from the bottom up rather than forced from the top down.

This inversion—multiple products converging into a super app—reminds me that the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea.

The Case for Plan C: ByteDance/TikTok

ByteDance represents one of the most successful examples of a homegrown, multi-product strategy. Their approach demonstrates how shared infrastructure can power multiple successful applications.

They built their system around three pillars:

1. Recommendation algorithms that rapidly learn user preferences

2. Growth optimization engines for viral loops and retention

3. Monetization infrastructure for ads, creator tools, and commerce

This infrastructure powers multiple interconnected products: TikTok (short-form video), Toutiao (news aggregation), and CapCut (video editing), among others.

The TikTok–CapCut connection isn’t just a feature; it’s a multi-product growth loop built on shared infra. Instead of adding editing features to TikTok, they built CapCut as a separate application that leverages shared infrastructure while serving a distinct purpose. Users move seamlessly between apps with "Edit in CapCut" and "Share to TikTok" features, making CapCut users more productive TikTok creators while simultaneously developing its own audience.

ByteDance's ecosystem creates multiple strategic advantages: cross-product data enrichment, built-in cross-promotion, business resilience, and market expansion.

Velocity Without Systems Is Just Burn

Without shared infrastructure, each new app is essentially a reset—new acquisition costs, new onboarding funnels, and insights that don't carry over. Most teams think they're iterating when they're actually just restarting.

Build the Systems Early

While ByteDance's full infrastructure might seem aspirational, the foundational elements are accessible to any startup:

1. Unified Authentication & User Profiles: Build your identity system to be portable across products from day one.

2. Cross-Product Analytics: Design analytics to track user journeys that span multiple products.

3. API-First Architecture: Create backend services to be consumed by multiple frontends.

4. Centralized Monetization: Build payment processing and subscription management once.

This approach creates compound advantages without massive upfront investment. Each piece of infrastructure becomes more valuable as you add products, creating leverage that gives multi-product companies their edge.

The Shift Is Now

The companies winning in consumer today aren't winning because they found product-market fit first. They're winning because they built systems that make every launch more efficient than the last.

The future belongs to those who understand that in consumer software, systems beat single bets.

Thanks for reading

If you’re in San Francisco next week (May 4-8), I’ll be in town and looking to meet consumer software founders who want to talk about monetization.

If you aren’t in San Francisco but do want to chat, I also hold pricing office hours.