How many times did you pivot?
Mark Prutskiy
62 replies
After 2 years, we pivoted 3 times and it looks like we will pivot 1 more time.
I think pivots are essential for startups to survive.
What is your story? How many times did you pivot with your startups?
P.S. Our product: https://www.bumpy.app
Replies
Akram Quraishi@akramquraishi
Curatora
Pivoting is important to survive longer-term in the market. But the most important thing is to understand and take a call on when and how to pivot your business. It is part data and part instinct that can guide the founders on this.
We had a major pivot in our business model once when we moved from a WordPress plugin sale to a subscription-based WordPress Maintenance service. And many many small pivots in terms of target customers and pricing etc.
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Curatora
In business, pivoting is indeed an important skill. One of the best examples of this is Nokia, which did not adopt Android on time. It is imperative for businesses to learn from their customers and keep up with industry changes.
At Plugmatter.com, we started as a WordPress plugins studio. But now we are a WordPress Maintenance Service.
None. I don't think I've ever pivoted in my life. I don't consider changing the targeted customer persona as a pivot.
What sort of pivots did you have to make @mark_prutskyi ?
We are reaching the end of our second year for https://skilledup.life - free talent for tech startups. No pivots. The path is very clear. Not easy, but clear.
@manojranaweera not many people I've seen without pivots. Congrats.
We built a dating app for "find the people you bump into in real life" but users hacked the app and started to use it as "international dating" via a few functions in the app. So we pivoted to an "international dating app" and it's saved us.
@mark_prutskiy that makes sense and good reason for the pivot.
Ohh, it's better to ask when was the last month without pivot :)
@stas_voronov let's take this as an indicator of growth and development 😉
My first business, we pivoted 2xs. It was exhausting and draining, but also always motivating once we acknowledged that we need to make a change. Deciding when to stay the course and when to pivot is hard... looking back I'm not sure whether we got it right.
Micro pivots all day!
StoryPrompt
I like to think of it as a series of iterations until we find product market fit. In my experience, the core tech remains the same but the positioning is what changes. My first startup, Sendible, began as an SMS scheduler and evolved into a social media management platform. It took 2 - 3 big iterations to realise who our customers were, but the core scheduling tech remained the same.
@gavin_hammar When you changed the positioning, does that mean you changed the landing page? How technically did your pivots look like?
StoryPrompt
@mark_prutskiy yes, landing page, business model, pricing etc. We didn’t rewrite our tech completely, we just evolved it in the direction of our ICP. Sometimes it meant removing a feature and replacing it with something else. In most cases the pivot occurred because we got our original ICP wrong. Once we discovered who was getting value from the product, we built for them. Are you going through a pivot atm?
@gavin_hammar Thanks for sharing this. I am working on my first startup now. And, we are in the middle of testing several different apps that are on top of the same tech to find our real customers. Really glad to see your sharing to get a little more validation. Thanks!
On my first business we pivot three times. We started as a fast mvp builder for non technical entrepreneurs, after some growth we become an agile development agency for enterprise (looking for higher recurrent revenue) growing for a few years before we reached a plateau and than we pivot again to become a "broker" between businesses and a community of tech specialists and have been growing fast for the last 3 years.
On my current startup (Lumiar) we are on our second pivot, just finished simplifying the product, launching for early adopters next week and feeling very close to market fit. 🤞
@mark_prutskiy the most important lesson for me is that it's really easy to lose focus of your clients biggest problem. Several times we were putting more energy on improving OUR product than in creating a better solution for the problem our clients wanted to solve. More than once we fell on that trap.
I noticed that when you need to work very hard to convince your client that your offer is the best fit for them it usually isn't. Sometimes it needs a small tweak, others a pivot or even changing the client itself but from my experience when you nail the problem -> solution your clients just want it now, doesn't matter if its incomplete or still doesn't look great... they just want it now.
@robertomorais Thanks for sharing your story.
What was the most important lesson did you get from your pivots?
@robertomorais "improving OUR product" do you mean did you build that is unnecessary or did you solve technical issues?
Totally agree with you about focusing on "problem -> solution".
@mark_prutskiy I mean the focus was on the product/service and not on solving our client's most critical problem (which resulting in working on unnecessary things). In other words there are always small problems to solve or things to improve in any product or service, it's easy to get lost on that. A lot of times we changed our offer based on small feedbacks or personal feeling of what the best product is but this hardly has any significative impact.
I blame that on the pursue of productivity. Nobody wants to waste manpower so we are always looking for things to work on and that makes we take any low hanging fruit and work on that. What I learned is that it's better to "waste" time looking for the right thing to change or build (through prototyping / pre-sale / hacking a real mvp / etc) until you find it. This is a lot easier said than done because there are a lot of pressure on being busy and delivering things.
AI Link Manager
@robertomorais This is so profound. Completely agreed on both the things - figuring out ways to keep yourself busy and lot easier said than done. I was in the same boat.
SuperTokens Passwordless
Once. Learned that users liked / preferred just one feature form the product vs the entire product so made that feature our only feature, haha. 😺
Papermark
We also pivoted 3 times for 2 years and continue testing things all the time. I also find out that pivots are different it can be product, or market, or channel. So it is not necessary that everything should be changed.
-> 2020 Collaborative learning for employees
-> 2021 Customer training
-> 2022 User onboarding automation
I feel there are 3 kinds of pivot: you can change the problem you're solving, the solution, and the customer.
I'm on my 2nd pivot and considering the 3rd one.
The first time I pivoted was a total mess. I listened to some crummy advice from my accelerator and tried to simultaneously change the problem, the solution, and the targeted customer. The result was a mess. The value proposition was all over the place, there was little clarity, and because my user was not my customer, potential users had a tough time telling me they didn't want the thing I was working on.
So the 2nd pivot was to reverse the first one and narrow down the problem I was solving. It was great. It was easier to communicate the problem and determine whether or not someone needed my product.
Right now, I'm considering a 3rd pivot. It's tricky. I have a little bit of traction. I have a couple of customers. I'm like, "Maybe it'll work.". But I feel they wouldn't be too sad if my product ceased to exist tomorrow. Maybe there is a better customer persona to whom I should try to talk.
@fernando_cordeiro2 so cool story!
Can we see your product?
@mark_prutskiy Oh, sorry, it's pluckd.co
So true.
We pivoted at roughly the same rate.
Each time, we optimised it more and more to solve the users' problem.
I think its essential to do so until the product is effectively doing its job.
Agreed pivots are essential for startups. I think startups are all about running quick experiments and getting validation and then doubling down on what's working.
We have pivoted once last year but that pivot has resulted in a good outcome.
Another term I like to use is diverging and converging with experiments.
@anil_meena21, thanks for your story.
How significantly did the last pivot affect results?
@mark_prutskiy we were primarily focused on teacher earlier but after the pivot we widen our audience and then narrowed on coaches, mentors, and startup. Earlier we were building LMS but we pivoted to making an community platform instead.
Find its product market fit is not an easy thing.
The ability to bounce back and challenge oneself is essential. We did 3 pivots in a few months. It is a lot but it was the only way to keep going. Fortunately, we were three and we coud have supported each other. Now we have found our sweet spot.
@olivier_toledano strong! Agree that it's cool to have many pivots if they help
Just about to. So only once!
Interesting question.
We did once, after nearly 3 years. A "classic" Service to Product pivot.
Looking back, I think we should have done it earlier. The more you wait, the harder it gets.
@mounir_nejjai we had the same story. We did it too late. It's almost killed us.
At first we had one idea in mind, but when we came across a solution... other app ideas emerged on this basis, as a result, instead of one service, we began to create an entire platform, and this is definitely the best thing we decided to do!
5 or 6 times by now.
finclout started out as a social aggregator with decision engine and machine learning for stocks during the meme-stock craze.
After partering with Bitclout in March 21 we moved these aggregator functions into hyperfocus.ai, added a crypto-based monetization model, and focused on user-generated content for investing with additional tools in a B2C model. However, Reddit, Twitter, and Stocktwits are really expensive to get users interested in such a product.
Main reason was that the differentiators weren't strong enough, we have now after many many many discussions reached a stage where the product has a SaaS B2B business model. We have daily returning users that use finclout to get content cues and insights for their work.
https://app.finclout.io/signup
We made 2 pivots with a content product.
It's always hard to make a final decision and admit that you need to change something. It's even harder to cross even a little part of the work.
But it's better than making a useless product. The key insight is to talk with your target audience as soon as possible.
Finally launched today MakerBox Frameworks and very happy with the customers' feedback on the final product! The pivot was a good decision!
https://www.producthunt.com/post...