Last week, I shared a tweet saying:

One person asked when the best time to add a second offer is. It is an important question: do it too soon, and you end up killing your momentum (one of my regrets was building more products when my first major one, High Impact Writing, was scaling so quickly, which I’ve explained below).

There are three situations when you should not add a new offer, and three when you should.

Let’s run through them.

Do not add a new offer if…

1. The first offer is new

Do not add a second offer if your first one is in its infancy. It doesn’t matter if you build a community, course, or cohort—you need a large number of customers to go through the material. Not only will this allow you to refine the offer, but you get more testimonials and case studies. These are essential for an offer to begin to sell itself (it is much easier to pitch something when you can point to real-world results)

1. The first is going well

It is a misjudgment to think that because your offer is scaling, adding another will double the result. I made this mistake with my first course, High Impact Writing. I had several six-figure launches. In hindsight, I should’ve doubled down on this momentum—one offer executed well can skyrocket your reputation. But instead, I built more products. I am proud of my offer library, but every time you take an offer from zero-to-one, there is a serious investment in energy. If a ball is rolling, let it continue. Like Charlie Munger once said, the number one rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.

1. The first is not productised and systemised to the best of your ability

Before you add complexity, create simplicity. Every step must be laid out, every possible asset produced, every automation set up. The offer marketing should be dialled in, and there should be no friction in your delivery. If you don’t do this work when you only have one offer, you won’t with two.

An unoptimised offer quickly becomes an anchor, which means you start to resent it, so stop selling it. But all you needed to do was make it good enough to deliver first. This applies even for your low-leverage offers like 1-1 coaching.

When to add a new offer

1. You have more customers than you can handle

And you do not want to increase your capacity to serve them in the current format (such as hiring help). It can be relatively simple to build a more scalable version of the offer for those not able to afford your current version. For example, you might create a course version of your high-ticket offer so customers can do it themselves. You can start selling this in your welcome sequence and newsletter, then make your high-ticket more exclusive.

1. You want more leverage

There is something special about selling something not tied to your time. This is especially true for digital products and software, where the marginal cost of replication is next to nothing. It is relatively simple to set up a customer journey using automations so that you have sales ticking over just from creating your social media content and emails. You likely won’t break the bank if your audience is small. But a secondary offer can increase demand for the primary one—so the downstream effect is great too (it is harder for someone to go from subscriber to high-ticket client without a smaller purchase in between).

1. You are bone-dry bored of your current business model

A classic business meme is that success is about doing the boring thing longer than anyone else. But what a dumb reality this creates—you sitting at your desk, mind-numbingly clicking, a slave to your revenue number.

I don’t know about you, my friend, but I built my business so that I can build a life on my terms. It is the main reason I quit dentistry. If your work does not make you feel alive, then you need to change it.

Period.

Not only are you impossible to compete with when you are having fun, but it is sound life advice too. We get one shot on this planet and can play any variation of the game we like. Don’t waste it on some weird sense of duty or fear of making a change. It is fun to play with new offers if you feel ready for it.

If you’re considering a second offer (or have added one), I’d love to hear how your experience is going.

In the meantime, I hope this helped,

Kieran