In improv, they teach you to always say “Yes, and” rather than no. It keeps the improv going and makes for much more pleasant scenes. The “Yes, and” technique has now been adopted by companies considering the products and services they offer customers. We’ve now got convergence because businesses want to say yes to every piece of diversified revenue. Everyone offering everything within a space leads to** **less specialization and dimmer customer delight.
Yesterday, Thesis Driven, a leading real estate intelligence platform highlighted the convergence of the two main proptech 1 AI companies. EliseAI went from focusing on AI communications for tenants and landlords to adding a CRM. Funnel, another AI company, did the exact same, in reverse. The lane divider in the pool has been completely removed.
You can see this phenomenon in fintech all over. Shopify offers lines of credit. Now even GoDaddy offers lines of credit. You’ve just spent $8.99 registering a domain name with us. Would you like a $25,000 line of credit for your business? Huh? Thankfully this doesn’t run in reverse. I have yet to be offered a .io or .ai domain name when walking in to use a Chase ATM.2
In ‘trading,’ the apps are converging. Prediction markets have already had their Oprah moment: Robinhood got a prediction market, Coinbase got a prediction market, and Crypto.com got a prediction market! Kalshi and Polymarket enable you to speculate around stock prices and earnings hits and misses. It all blurs together.
Airbnb, as we’ve seen, has hotel listings. Uber also has hotel listings. In certain markets, Airbnb provides (under a new partnership with Welcome Pickups) 3 transportation to Airbnb Experiences.
Booking.comhas experiences and hotels. Is this sprawl or is it placing multiple bets on the roulette wheel? The bets hypothesis would require us to believe that any one of the bets could be a true gamechanger (Red 14 hits and you get 35x) rather than just an incremental revenue source. Sprawl is just adding incremental revenue.
On that frame, the trading apps could be placing multiple bets, as the different products might disproportionately outperform some of the current product lines. Kalshi and Robinhood don’t really know the limit of how big the perpetuals market could be, so they place the bet.
GoDaddy offering lines of credit is sprawl, clearly. We will not wake up in a few years to discover that GoDaddy’s loan book has drastically outperformed the market and they’ve uncovered secrets to underwriting and risk assessment. Some of this sprawl is a lack of creativity of the underlying business and a copycat mentality. Shopify has lines of credit, so we should too? Well, Shopify also has a much higher churn rate while simultaneously having a deeper relationship with its customers. Right tool for the job.
Some of the sprawl is mistakenly pushed under the delusion that customers don’t notice the difference. To put that in a customer’s own words, Thesis Driven wrote:
“One issue we've run into is that a lot of the companies we brought on for a specialized reason, say vendor credentialing or tenant screening, start branching out and doing other things,” explained Kelley Brine, President of Rose Valley Management, a multifamily operator with more than 10,000 units. … “Everyone starts at one point and then spreads. The problem is that it can dilute the focal point of where they started. Then you get overlap. The company we use for one thing is suddenly also a CRM, and our CRM is also something else.”
A seasoned real estate operator knows sprawl when she sees it:
“The main thing we hired them for sometimes isn't as good as it was, because they're investing in all these other avenues to diversify revenue.”
Smart customers can sniff out which parts of a company’s product offering is just there for diversifying revenue. Sprawlers are vulnerable to new companies coming in with a narrow, purpose-built solution.