Stratyfy’s Product Evolution Playbook: How Customer Behavior Shaped Their Multi-Product Strategy
Most B2B startups begin with a single product focus. The challenge comes in knowing when—and how—to expand beyond that initial offering. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Laura Kornhauser revealed how Stratyfy turned careful observation of customer behavior into a successful multi-product strategy that drove 400% customer growth.
Starting with the Core: Credit Risk Assessment
“We started with credit risk assessment and decisioning,” Laura explains. “That’s where we started. That’s where we earned our first customers. That’s still where we have the majority of our customers.” But what’s interesting isn’t just where they started—it’s how they watched for signals about where to go next.
The Hidden Pattern That Led to Product Two
While building their credit risk solution, Stratyfy included a seemingly minor feature: the ability to measure bias in lending decisions. As Laura shares, “We always saw fairness as a key performance indicator that should be evaluated right alongside expected financial performance or other fit data science metrics.”
This feature generated unexpected interest. “That led to such positive feedback and interest about that capability… that we pulled those capabilities out and launched a separate offering,” Laura reveals. The result was their second product, Unbiased, which helps lenders proactively test for unfair bias in their decisions.
Turning Customer Pain Points into Product Features
The evolution of Unbiased shows how Stratyfy approached product development. Instead of building features in isolation, they first observed how customers used existing capabilities. As Laura explains, “No one intends to have an unfair bias in how they’re making loan decisions or other decisions in a loan lifecycle. But oftentimes it can be hard to root those out or to find them, especially because they often emerge over time.”
This understanding led them to develop not just monitoring capabilities, but also tools to help customers understand “exactly what is driving those bias risks so that they can move to what we call our step three of undo.”
The Market Pull into Fraud Detection
Their third product emerged through a similar pattern of market observation. “Fraud for us was something again that we got pulled into via customers and partners,” Laura notes. They discovered their core technology’s value proposition aligned perfectly with fraud detection needs because it could “leverage the best of data through machine learning, but in a way that’s very understandable for the user.”
This transparency proved particularly valuable in fraud detection where “fraud experts can spot emerging trends or emerging threats faster than you have enough data for a machine to find it on its own.”
The Unifying Thread: Core Technology
What made this multi-product strategy feasible for an early-stage company was their strategic use of core technology. As Laura explains, “The way we’ve been able to, as an early stage company support these three use cases is because they are ultimately all powered by that same core engine and that same core technology that we have at Stratyfy.”
Navigating Multiple Buyer Groups
The expansion created a new challenge: dealing with different buyers within the same organization. “Oftentimes the buyers at an organization are different, actually, though they are highly related, but they operate in different groups within the organization,” Laura shares. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle, Stratyfy turned it into an advantage, using success with one product to expand into others.
For founders considering product expansion, Stratyfy’s journey offers valuable lessons: watch for features that generate outsized interest, pay attention to how customers actually use your product, and look for ways to leverage your core technology across different use cases. Sometimes the best product opportunities aren’t the ones you plan—they’re the ones your customers show you through their behavior.
The key is building a foundation flexible enough to support expansion while remaining focused enough to execute effectively. As Laura’s experience shows, sometimes the path to growth isn’t about building something entirely new, but about recognizing and productizing the value you’re already creating in unexpected ways.