Complements: a powerful growth lever

Most of us spend a lot of time thinking about growth channels and competitors.

But we don’t often think about complements.

Many strategists have made a case for complements as services or products whose value increases when used together. Products and services that symbiotically provide value to the customer and, in turn, drive increased usage of each other.

Stratechery’s Ben Thompson is big on this. He regularly comes back to the idea that complements are one of the most important concepts in strategy: both for their potential but also to assess strategic threats. “Commoditise your complement” is a common Stratechery refrain. We’ll come back to that.

I’m fascinated by complements. There’s something about the long-term scope of a complementary strategy, as well as the neat effectiveness of such relationships that is greatly appealing.

In this post we’ll explore some examples, how you might find a complement for your business and reflect on when it makes sense to do so.

Complements: demand for one increases demand for the other

A complementary relationship is one where product A increases demand for product B and vice versa.

Often these partnerships begin implicitly. Two products will be adopted by customers because they solve a problem better when used together.

Over time it becomes evident that this symbiosis exists and the partnership will become explicit, with the two companies recognising the complementarity and proactively promoting their partnership, taking deliberate steps to improve it. Sometimes this results in acquisitions as well, so a company can really drive the symbiosis.

A few examples of complements.

GoPro x YouTube

As far as I know, there’s no large-scale, official partnership between GoPro and YouTube so this is a classic example of an implicit complement. Particularly in the early days (over a decade ago), GoPro provided an effective and affordable way for vloggers to capture footage. Some of the most dramatic and viral footage out there. Where would a vlogger host this? YouTube! In this way, GoPro drove YouTube usage. In a complementary fashion, the more popular YouTube became as a platform with opportunities for monetisation, the more people wanted to try their hand at vlogging, driving sales for GoPro and its competitors. Relatively cheap, virtually indestructible, small cameras for filming adventures, travel, ASMR and all sorts of other videos.

Nike x Apple Watch

IMO the Apple Watch has one killer feature: health. Within that we could break this down into preventative (i.e. exercise) and detective (e.g. ECG) features. Since launch, Apple has partnered with Nike, offering exclusive features and apps in a Nike-branded Apple watch. This is another example of complementarity. The appeal of the Apple Watch over a basic watch was bolstered by a strong health use case from day one. More exercise means more Nike sales. More Nike sales means more people wanting to track exercise. Complementarity at work.

Source: Apple website.

Mailchimp x Intuit

A few years ago Intuit acquired Mailchimp. At first this didn’t make a great deal of sense to me. But, if you zoom out, there’s complementarity here. Intuit’s main product is accounting software. If you use accounting software, you have a business.

If you have a business, you want to grow that business. Enter Mailchimp.

Similarly, if you have any success in growing your business you become a bigger and stronger company. You certainly need accounting software! And the bigger you get, the more you need it.

Behance x Adobe Creative Cloud

Back in 2012, Adobe acquired Behance, a community for sharing designs and hiring designers. Another great example of complementarity: for both professional and aspiring designers, Behance provides a place to showcase your work. The community engagement this drives, including potential work opportunities, naturally drives usage of Adobe products.

And Adobe products were the primary design tools used to create designs on Behance (at least in 2012!) The more Adobe’s products and ecosystem grew, the more designers there were to post on Behance.

Commoditise your complement

If usage of product B can increase usage of product A then it follows that the lower the cost of product B, the more usage of product A.

With this in mind, it’s in the interest of product A to commoditise product B in order to drive down it’s price.

Ben Thompson at Stratechery focuses a lot on this sort of asymmetric strategy. Understanding it can help you identify strategic risks.

A classic example is Microsoft. Microsoft was a software company. The cheaper hardware became, the more desktop PC users there would be and the more Windows Microsoft could sell.

Microsoft pushed to commoditise hardware manufacturing, by promoting OEM partners like Dell and driving standardisation in hardware. This ultimately drove the margins out of hardware and enables Microsoft to capture more of those margins.

This is where the phrase “commoditise your complement” comes from.

It’s useful to assess asymmetric complements to see where your business might be at risk of commoditisation.

And it’s also worth thinking about complements you can commoditise.

Stripe Atlas is an example of an asymmetric complement. Stripe sells to businesses and it needs businesses to exist and be successful to succeed. Stripe created Atlas to make it easy to setup a business. They commoditised the process. No longer did you need $X0,000 in legal fees, you simply spent $X00 with Stripe Atlas and away you went.

This has made it much, much easier for startups to try something and see if it works. It’s also made it easier for international businesses to start operating in the US. In both cases, those businesses use Stripe, driving demand for the core business.

Another example is Chrome. Google makes Chromium open source and Chrome is, of course, free. They make money on search and web usage: both of which drive advertising dollars. Their core product is advertising so they’ve invested in making their complement, the web browser, as ubiquitous as possible by making it free.

How you might identify

Here are a few things you can observe to help identify complements for your business:

• Your best customers already use X alongside your product.
• Using X increases the value or ROI of your product.
• Your product unlocks or accelerates the use of X.
• The pairing drastically improves activation, retention, or other outcomes.
• The value creation is immediate, not theoretical.

Given my earlier observation that partnerships typically start implicitly and then grow from there, it usually means both businesses are operating at some scale before it makes sense to invest in a complementary partnership. It can be a big investment to really make these things work and typically larger companies will want to see the model proven before investing. As such, this sort of complementarity isn’t usually the basket in which you should put all your eggs if you’re a small company.

But, sometimes, pull from the market itself drives massive adoption of a new product or service because of its complementarity. In these cases it can be because the entrant has spotted a clear need or gap that isn’t being served.

An example from the last five years is Supabase, which has a truly complementary relationship with Next.js and, now, AI platforms like Lovable and Replit. Their growth has been extraordinary.

Source: Paul Copplestone, CEO Supabase.

Another example is Discord and online gaming companies. Discord is the de facto group chat application for gamers. Successful games massively drive Discord usage (see the chart below). Whilst Discord usage encourages more intense gaming: gaming has a huge social aspect and being able to easily and cleanly communicate with your friends encourages you to game more frequently.

These are some examples where complementarity can help a business grow rapidly from the outset.

Source: Apptopia.

Rounding it out

Complements are one of those concepts that sit in the background of strategy: obvious once you notice them but rarely discussed in day-to-day operating conversations.

We spend a lot of time on funnels, acquisition tactics, positioning, and differentiation. But not usually enough time on the products, services, or ecosystems that quietly make our own products more valuable.

Mutual complements are especially powerful because they create positive-sum markets. When product A drives adoption of product B and B of A, you get demand loops that compound in a magical way.

Asymmetric complements matter too. They reveal risks, show where value might leak out of your business, and indicate places where someone else could commoditise you. They also reveal opportunities: places where making something free, better, or easier can expand the total market that you serve.

Most complements start implicitly through customer behaviour, not corporate strategy decks. The art is in learning to see them, to understand which relationships simply help your product and then to invest in them.

So the next time you’re thinking about growth, don’t just look for a new channel. Look for a complement.