🧅 The "Product Onion" Framework Saved Our Startup (When Everything Else Failed)
Sales were flat. Users churned. Then, we mapped our startup like an onion—and everything changed.
👋 Hey, Chris here! Welcome to BrainDumps—a weekly series from The Founders Corner. If you’ve been reading along, you know this series is a preview of a bigger project. Well, it’s finally here: The Big Book of BrainDumps is out now!
It isn’t a theory book—it’s the founder’s field manual. Inside, you’ll find 70 powerful frameworks distilled from 30+ years scaling software companies to hundreds of millions in ARR, 20+ years investing in 500+ B2B tech startups, and over $1B of shareholder value created. From raising capital to hiring your first VP of Sales, this book turns scars and successes into practical playbooks you’ll return to again and again. I expect most copies will become well-worn, scribbled on, and dog-eared—because it works.
📖 Table of Contents
🌱 Products Aren’t Built. They’re Grown.
🎯 Layer 1: Core Customer Problem Set
🧭 Layer 2: Vision & Strategy
🔄 Layer 3: Growth & Engagement Engine
🧩 Layer 4: User Journeys
🖥️ Layer 5: UI & Technology
🎙️ Layer 6: Product Marketing
📢 Layer 7: Marketing & Sales
🧱 Putting It All Together
📋 How to Use the Product Onion in Practice
💬 Final Word: Grow From the Inside Out
🌱 Products Aren’t Built. They’re Grown.
If there’s one mistake I’ve seen more software founders make than any other, it’s this:
They try to build outward.
They jump into the user interface. Add shiny features. Spin up a sales campaign. Then when it doesn’t land, they scramble to fix messaging or rebuild features, and suddenly the whole roadmap looks like a salvage operation.
Here’s the truth:
Great products aren’t built from the outside in.
They grow from the centre—layer by layer, like an onion.
A few years ago, I saw this model drawn on a whiteboard during a product workshop with a founding team I was advising. It clicked instantly. This wasn’t just a metaphor. It was a strategy.
The Product Onion starts with the customer’s core pain and builds outward—each layer reinforcing the last. Strategy, design, GTM, growth—all of it anchored to one thing: solving the right problem for the right customer in the right way.
Let’s walk through this framework, layer by layer, and I’ll share stories from my own founder journey and the startups I’ve invested in along the way.
🎯 Layer 1: Core Customer Problem Set
At the heart of the product onion is one thing:
Pain.
Not your roadmap. Not your tech stack. Not your grand vision. Just raw, felt customer pain.
Years ago, I invested in a B2B SaaS business with a beautifully built product. Elegant UI, snappy API integrations, and an enthusiastic team. But traction stalled.
We sat down and asked the founders:
“What’s the single problem this solves better than anyone else?”
They couldn’t answer it with confidence.
That was the moment they realised they had built a solution in search of a problem.
Lesson: Before you build anything, be obsessive about understanding the customer’s world. What’s broken? What’s frustrating? What keeps them up at night? If your product doesn't ease a real pain, everything else will crack under pressure.
🧭 Layer 2: Vision & Strategy
Once you’ve locked in on pain, you need to define where you’re taking your customers—and how.
Your vision is the north star. Strategy is the map.
I often ask founders:
“What does your product want to be when it grows up?”
And more often than not, the answer is vague.
Without a clear strategic lens, it’s too easy to chase every feature request, follow competitors, and end up building something bloated and bland.
One founder I backed early on knew exactly where he was going:
“We’re going to replace spreadsheets for SMB finance teams. Not just improve them—replace them.”
That clarity gave his team confidence to say no to features that didn’t serve the mission.
Lesson: Strategy isn’t a static document—it’s a filter. Use it to focus your build, prioritise your roadmap, and guide hiring decisions.
🔄 Layer 3: Growth & Engagement Engine
Here’s where things get tactical.
Growth isn’t just marketing.
It’s how your product sells itself.
And engagement isn’t just usage—it’s how your product becomes a habit.
This layer is about building feedback loops, viral triggers, and hooks that embed your product into users’ daily lives.
Think Slack’s “invite your team” nudge. Or Notion’s shareable templates. These aren’t afterthoughts—they’re baked into the product’s growth DNA.
I once coached a founder who added a simple “share dashboard” feature—and saw a 3x spike in weekly signups. The feature took a weekend to ship. But the effect was compounding.
Lesson: The best growth doesn’t come from campaigns. It comes from smart product design.
🧩 Layer 4: User Journeys
Now that you’re bringing users in, you need to guide them.
Every journey is a story.
A beginning (onboarding), middle (activation), and end (success).
In one startup I advised, the product team assumed users would “figure it out.” But churn was high. So we shadowed users and realised they were dropping off after the second step in onboarding.
The fix? A single, well-placed tooltip. Retention improved by 20%.
Lesson: Watch your users. Follow their paths. Remove friction. If you do nothing else, get onboarding right—it’s the front door to everything else.
🖥️ Layer 5: UI & Technology
This is where your experience comes to life.
And where poor execution can kill you fast.
I’ve seen brilliant backend products fail because of confusing interfaces. And I’ve seen modest products win because they felt intuitive and fast.
Don’t underestimate how much trust is built (or lost) in a few seconds of lag or clunky UX.
And behind the scenes? Tech needs to be scalable, secure, and maintainable. Especially in SaaS, where uptime is everything and tech debt is a slow-moving tsunami.
One team I worked with delayed refactoring for six months. By the time we tried to scale usage, performance tanked—and we lost a major deal.
Lesson: Clean interfaces win hearts. Solid tech wins scale. You need both.
🎙️ Layer 6: Product Marketing
This is where the story gets told.
If UI is how your product feels, product marketing is how it talks.
I’ve sat in meetings where a founder demoed an incredible product—and the buyer still didn’t get it. Why? Because they were speaking in features, not benefits.
Your messaging has to answer one question:
“Why should this customer care?”
That means crafting landing pages, sales decks, email flows, and onboarding copy that translate pain into promise.
A fintech founder I advised rewrote his homepage headline from “Flexible cash flow management for SMEs” to “Stop running out of money before payday.” Conversions jumped.
Lesson: Clear beats clever. Benefits beat features. Pain drives urgency.
📢 Layer 7: Marketing & Sales
Finally, the outermost layer:
Your go-to-market engine.
This is where product, positioning, and people converge.
I’ve worked with teams who launched with £100K marketing budgets and got nothing back—because the core wasn’t strong.
But I’ve also seen startups with zero ad spend hit £1M ARR through crisp messaging, smart targeting, and tight feedback loops between sales and product.
This layer scales only as well as the six beneath it.
Lesson: GTM isn’t magic. It’s the natural extension of every decision you’ve made before.
🧱 Putting It All Together
Let me give you a quick story.
One founder I backed was struggling to scale. The sales team blamed marketing. Marketing blamed the product team. Product said users were churning “for no clear reason.”
We mapped their product onion. Turns out:
They weren’t clear on the core customer problem.
Their onboarding was clunky.
Their positioning was generic.
Their growth loops were non-existent.
We didn’t change their product.
We aligned their layers—from customer pain to sales enablement.
12 months later, churn was down, growth was up, and the team was rowing in the same direction.
📋 How to Use the Product Onion in Practice
Here’s how I recommend founders apply this:
Print it out. Seriously. Stick it on a wall.
Map your current product to each layer. What’s working? What’s missing?
Do it with your team. Different departments will see different things.
Use it as a diagnostic tool. Every quarter, run a “layer audit.”
Use it as a launch checklist. Before releasing anything, ask: Is each layer strong?
💬 Final Word: Grow From the Inside Out
Too many startups try to patch the outside—more sales, more marketing—when the core is misaligned.
But if you want to build something that lasts, build from the inside out.
Start with pain. Craft the vision. Guide the journey. Nail the interface. Tell the right story. Then—and only then—go to market.
Because great products aren’t loud. They’re layered.
—Chris Tottman
Great presentation and full of hints. Thank you.