
Ask HN: What should you do or avoid when pivoting a startup? - aliabd
Stories welcome
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chriscatoya
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking a pivot is a failure and therefore
bad. What’s important is that by killing an idea, you’re giving yourself a new
opportunity rather than chasing after sunk costs.

Fear of failure is very common and it’s a huge inhibitor from ever starting-
and this is much worse. You want to set the culture that embraces failure for
what it is: a time to assess, take stock, and move forward with a better
understanding and course of action. You want to encourage faster recognition
of mistakes and removing any shame or stigma will make it easier. This pivot
is actually a good time to treat the team to a nice meal and celebrate the
progress. You’ve learned and grown together over the course of that journey
and enough to know there’s something better. This also means that when you
talk about this pivot in the future to potential customers and investors, you
have nothing to apologize for if you all did your best. Focus on how these
experiences make you an even better fit to solve the problems you’re focusing
on now.

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muzani
Pivots are like scientific experiments. You should have a hypothesis that
you're testing with every pivot. Business Model Canvas is great for this -
just pick something and pivot on that, see if it ends up better.

The goal of a startup is Product-Market Fit, which is where you're exhausted
because people are trying to throw money at you and you can't keep up with the
demand. If you're the one throwing money at them, you probably have to keep
pivoting.

My favorite source of inspiration is to look what people are hacking together,
but badly. If people are building Facebook Groups around remote work, that
suggests that there's demand for remote work sites. If people are taking
months off production to integrate chat into their site, that means the
current chat SaaS solutions aren't doing the trick.

~~~
aliabd
Thanks, the 'bad hacks' is actually really dope.

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davismwfl
Don't pivot partially. There are varying degrees of pivots of course, but if
you are having to pivot because a market or idea didn't work out, commit 100%
to it. The worst thing you can do is partially commit where you don't fully
push forward in the new direction and try to keep a foot in the old
idea/process for fear of losing what little you had.

Partially committing almost always will create a failure, or at least delayed
or more costly success. It can be scary to pivot, in fact the more success
you've had the harder it gets to pivot but many times it is more important
than ever at that point.

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smt88
Pivot before you're desperate (meaning nearly out of cash). Someone else said
not to pivot partially, which is bad advice. Some VC-backed companies can do
this, but it's usually after a spectacular B2C failure. Most companies
don't/shouldn't do it.

A pivot can start as small as a phone call with a trusted client or an
employee hackathon. You don't need to throw existing cashflow away to test it
out.

If it's vastly different from your old product, create a new LLC and brand. If
not, create a new product under your existing name. Either way, reuse your
relationships, staff, etc. and start talking to clients.

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psyklic
Many of our part-time team members lost motivation after our first pivot. They
were first sold on the original vision, and they did not see that same vision
in the product we pivoted to. Others believed we pivoted too quickly without
fully giving the first product a chance.

So, I would make sure that everyone on the team gets to participate in the
pivoting process, including realizing for themselves why a pivot is necessary.
Also, make sure everyone realizes that the overall company vision and values
are still there, even though the form of the product has changed.

~~~
gwbas1c
> Many of our part-time team members lost motivation after our first pivot.
> They were first sold on the original vision

Perhaps you grew too quickly? IMO, part of a successful pivot is making sure
you don't grow too quickly before you find product-market fit.

Perhaps you pivoted too far? IMO, a lot of early-stage companies can pivot
without changing the general vision.

I think it's important that the vision and team are flexible enough that
pivots within that vision are anticipated and tolerated.

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matijash
My advice would be when you pivot, to stay in our choose the area that you are
personally interested in / have domain expertise in.

Our story: we started with a pretty tech-oriented idea (since we are
engineers) in the events space, but then pivoted to more biz-oriented idea -
the main challenge became to sell a solution, not to build it.

That worked initially because we were addressing a real problem and we got
initial customers, but when things became hard it was much harder for us to
stay motivated - there was no tech part we could be excited about and we also
knew little about events industry at first, so we had to learn it all from
scratch.

So my advice would be always try to choose something where you have that
intrinsic motivation that will keep you going, rather than following what
feels like the "best" market opportunity at the moment.

