

What happens when your pivot goes horribly wrong?  - danso
http://skift.com/2012/11/23/what-happens-when-your-pivot-goes-horribly-wrong/

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billirvine
I blame the insane culture springing up around inaccurate and ill-conceived
interpretations of the lean startup methodology. Many young entrepreneurs and
early-stage startups seem entrenched in a mindset that they must be pivoting
or iterating or using all their runway or sumsuch similar nonsense.

The word "pivot" should be banned from tech startup lexicon.

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shimsham
You beat me to it. Ditto. Perhaps I should've pivoted my reply! Yes, that was
just as meaningless.

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billirvine
Next time, you can be first.

I've long had "issues" with the madness that tech startup culture inspires.
MVP should be IVP, where as IPV = Initial Viable Product. If one really learns
"lean" methodology, MVP really is IVP, but no one seems willing to actually
pause and learn. Sad.

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shimsham
Totally agree.

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pedalpete
First off, this isn't a pivot. They're expanding their service. A pivot is
moving in a new and different direction.

Secondly, they are not the first company to make a misstep, and if most of the
comments are regarding the ability to search by airport name, that is a fairly
minor issue to resolve I'd hope. Particularly if they had the feature
previously, the back-end might still be there and they'll just need to update
the UI.

This isn't 'horribly wrong', decisions need to be made, they just made the
wrong one. I doubt this is sinking the ship.

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billirvine
> First off, this isn't a pivot. They're expanding their service

Apparently the users felt differently. From the feedback and reviews, the
users saw a different direction -- not an expansion.

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neotek
I wonder how much testing they did before releasing this. As developers we
often have a blindness to the way users see things compared to how we see
them, especially if we're in love with our ideas.

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shimsham
Agreed. As developers we should also avoid turning everything into another
Bill and Ted adventure. Awesome!

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jeremyjh
"in the coming weeks" doesn't soon enough to save their business. Couldn't
they just revert to their previous version in the apple store since it is
already approved?

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clarky07
If only. There is no option to revert. The best they can do is submit an
update and hope to get an expedited review approved. Generally Apple says no
when you reason I made a dumb update.

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saosebastiao
I'll let the rest of the comments talk about how this isn't a pivot. I'm more
concerned that entrepreneurs are worried about pivoting at all. It is almost
as if they are planning pivots in advance. How fucking stupid can you get?
Sure, successful startups do it...but they do it because find out they are
going in the wrong direction...not because the act of executing a pivot makes
you successful.

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peloton
Interesting to see the similarities with this situation and the one bitly
faced a few months back: <http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/29/bitly-update-user-
reaction/>

It seems like the response will be quite different, which will make this
comparison a lot more interesting.

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Shank
If this was a change that warranted a drastic switch in a different direction,
why didn't they ask the existing user base for feedback? Judging by how vocal
this group is, they'd have easily figured out that this wasn't the right move.

Even if that user base didn't care for the change, they could have just
released a new app with the new feature set.

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rhizome
Well, people are loudest when things go wrong. The thing is though, evidently
_it wasn't actually a pivot_ , but a complete retool/redesign. Perhaps they
didn't realize that you can add features without removing others. Perhaps they
got bad advice.

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elchief
I'm sorry but I don't know what pivot means here.

I can upgrade and downgrade an html5 app (in phonegap) more easily can't I?
Just update code on server.

Apple doesn't let you do a/b testing?

This seems to be a case of the product manager having no clue what his
customers use in the product.

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bdcravens
Typically you won't have your app's UI on your server in a PhoneGap app.
You'll include the UI in the app, and what's on the server is data services.
It's not that you can't do what you described, but if your app is little more
than a browser, you increase the odds of being rejected.

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johnrgrace
If you have money in the bank and still believe, you pivot again.

If you don't have money you either get some, sellout, or die.

