How to Grow Your Product Faster Without Growing Your Team

01 /The Concept

Upshift offers developers the ability to "turn their products into ecosystems."

In plain terms: it lets developers embed app stores, plugin marketplaces, and template galleries into their products – but where the plugins and extensions are built by third-party developers, forming an ecosystem around the core product.

The appeal of this model is obvious. A product's value can grow substantially through added functionality built by others' hands.

If those plugins are sold, the core developer gains a new revenue stream, while third-party developers have a financial incentive to build them. Users benefit too: external developers can create extensions for niche use cases that the core team may not get to for months or years.

Building such a marketplace isn't trivial, though. At minimum, you need the storefront itself – plus payment processing, subscriptions, developer payouts with commission holdbacks, and accounting records for taxes.

On top of that, third-party code needs to execute safely. It must not harm users, and it must not break the core product – whether due to malicious intent or simple carelessness.

Upshift promises to solve all of this:

- Sandboxed execution of third-party code, with safe API access to the core product and built-in UI interaction methods.

- Persistent data storage between plugin invocations.

- Version control for third-party code, tied to versions of the core product.

- An internal review and moderation system for new plugins and new versions.

- A ready-to-embed marketplace UI for the core product developer.

Upshift is currently going through Y Combinator, which provided its first $500K in funding. The startup just published its platform announcement on the YC blog.

02 /Why It Matters

Even at first glance, the idea is compelling – for product developers, for users, and for developers who want to earn money building plugins for other products.

The revenue potential isn't trivial. Using Salesforce as a benchmark: its plugin marketplace will generate $2.7 billion in revenue in 2024, growing to $6.6 billion by 2031.

Plugin and app stores are fundamentally a mechanism for turning competition into collaboration. Smaller developers can skip the war with larger players and instead sell their work through established ecosystems.

Zoom out and there's a deeper reason this kind of collaboration is becoming the norm. Users simply can't absorb an ever-growing number of separate apps.

Mobile app download figures tell the story. In 2022, there were 255 billion app downloads globally. In 2023: 257 billion. Nearly flat. The number of apps in stores is growing just as slowly – the Apple App Store barely moved between 2022 and 2023, after growing ~20% year-over-year back in 2019.

Meanwhile, the average user has around 80 apps on their phone, actively uses 9 per day and no more than 30 per month. That leaves 62% of downloaded apps sitting idle.

Enterprise is no different. Between 2017 and 2020, the average number of cloud services per company surged from 17 to 80. Between 2021 and 2022, that number barely moved: 110 to 130.

The root cause is simple: growth always has a ceiling. Users don't have the attention to open more apps. Companies don't have the resources to manage an ever-expanding zoo of enterprise software.

But users' appetites have no ceiling. They constantly want new functionality. That's the contradiction – and how you resolve it is telling.

Fewer services need to offer more and more features. But developers have limited resources – they can't build an unlimited number of features themselves. The resolution: bring in external developers to build new functionality inside existing services.

To make that work at scale, every mature service needs a plugin and extension marketplace – which is exactly what Upshift provides. Theoretically grounded, practically timely.

03 /Opportunities

All the theory aside – one thing is undeniable: product success today is entirely determined by development speed. You're either fast or you're dead.

The most practical way to accelerate your product is to harness external developers who can rapidly expand functionality in every direction and edge case your users encounter.

But as Upshift pointed out, building your own extension marketplace is a significant undertaking. If a platform can handle that complexity quickly and cleanly – smart developers should grab it.

So while platforms like Upshift are still rare, one possible move is building a similar platform and aggressively onboarding developers of already-popular services – or services that are just starting to take off.