Twenty-four steps in. The dogs ate the dog food. You have customers, revenue, retention, a CAC that's falling, an LTV that's rising. The unit economics work.
Now what?
Step twenty-four is the moment you raise your eyes from the beachhead and ask the question every successful founder eventually has to answer: what's the next market, and how does my product reach it without losing what made it work in the first one?
The Tesla pattern
Tesla started with the Roadster. Two seats, $109,000, sold to rich early-adopter enthusiasts. Profitable on a per-unit basis. Unscalable as a business.
Then the Model S. Five seats, $70,000, sold to the upper-end luxury market. The same core — electric powertrain, software platform, direct sales — repackaged into a product the next segment would buy.
Then the Model 3. Four seats, $35,000, sold to the mainstream premium car buyer. Same core. Different package. Vastly bigger market.
This is what a product plan looks like in motion. Same Core (with a capital C — what you do better than anyone else from step ten), different products serving different personas in sequence. Each segment funds the next. Each product reuses the engineering investment in the core while adapting the wrapper to a new market.
The plan doesn't require knowing the next twenty years of products. It requires knowing the next two, and the rough vector after that.
The Amazon pattern
Amazon's beachhead was books. The product plan was every other category. Books → CDs and DVDs → electronics → home goods → groceries → cloud computing → studio film production. Each adjacency leveraged the same logistics, same software platform, same brand and same customer relationship.
The core was never "selling books." The core was "online retail with an obsessive customer focus and a logistics platform that compounds." Books were the beachhead. The rest of retail was the follow-on TAM you calculated back in step fourteen.
The lesson is editorial: if you describe your business by the beachhead market you serve today, your product plan will be too small. Describe it by the core you've built. The plan flows naturally from the core to every market the core can reach.
The MVP that gets to grow back
Back in step twenty-two you wrote a list of features you cut to get the MVBP shipped. That list still exists. Pull it out.
This is where some of them come back — not all, and not all at once, but the ones that map to your persona's remaining unmet needs. The features that were deferred because they weren't required for first-customer paying use, not because they were bad ideas.
Prioritise by the persona, not by what's interesting to build. The features that improve retention in the beachhead come first. Features that win the next segment come second. Features that look impressive but don't move either metric come last, if at all.
Every feature added is a quality risk. The product plan needs a quality discipline baked in: testing, staging, gradual rollout, rollback paths. Companies that ship features fast without quality controls eventually pay the bill in retention. The customers who loved you a year ago start churning because the product they love keeps breaking.
Move fast and ship good things. Not move fast and break things.
When to expand
The wrong moment to expand is when you're bored with the beachhead.
The right moment is when three conditions are true.
You are the de facto solution in the beachhead. Not "doing well," not "growing." Dominant. When prospects evaluate the category, your name is on every shortlist, and increasingly the only name on it.
You are cash flow positive in the beachhead. The business funds itself. Expansion isn't a forced move to find revenue; it's a chosen move to find growth.
The next market is a logical extension of your core, not a fresh start. Same Core (step ten). Different persona. Different use case. Predictable adaptation rather than wholesale reinvention.
If those three aren't true, the expansion is premature and will dilute your beachhead position without yet establishing a foothold in the next market. You end up halfway in two places, dominant in neither.
The product for the next market
The next product might be the same product, with marketing and pricing tweaks for the new persona. It might be the same product with one significant feature added. It might be a different product entirely that reuses the core technology.
Tesla's Model S wasn't the Roadster with a different trim package. It was a clean-sheet design. But the powertrain, battery management, software platform, charging infrastructure — those came directly from the Roadster's investment.
Amazon's AWS wasn't a different version of the retail website. It was the underlying infrastructure of the retail website, productised for external developers. Same core technology. Completely different product.
Your next-market product is wherever your core meets the new persona's needs. That meeting point is rarely identical to the meeting point that worked for the beachhead. The work is figuring out what to keep, what to replace, what to remove entirely.
The discipline of the plan
Aulet is realistic about plans: they change. The product plan you write today will look quaint in three years. That's fine.
The point is not to be right about the future. The point is to have raised your sightline above the beachhead, so you make beachhead decisions with the next market in mind.
A founder who knows the next two products doesn't get trapped in beachhead-specific architecture that becomes a tax on the second move. A founder who has thought about expansion doesn't accidentally build features that contradict where the business is going.
You won't execute the plan exactly. You'll execute something better, because you wrote a plan and then learned from running it.
Founders who don't write the plan get to wherever they get to by accident. Sometimes that's a good place. Usually it's not.
End of edition
Twenty-four steps. From a vague idea about who might pay for what, through segmentation and persona and pricing and unit economics and assumptions and the MVBP, all the way out to a product plan that goes beyond the first market.
The framework doesn't guarantee the business works. Nothing does. What it gives you is the structure to know what you don't know, the order in which to find out, and the discipline to make decisions with real numbers instead of wishful ones.
The rest is execution. Which is also the hardest part, and the one no framework solves for you.
Go build.