On: Steve Blank: Vision versus Hallucination - Founders and Pivots

You know, pivoting is smart when you're doing the wrong thing, and it's dumb when you're already on the right path, but the path you're on is long and hard.

For example, if you're building yet another iOS Twitter client or instagram clone, pivoting to something else might make sense now that the big opportunities in that space are gone, but if you're building a new search engine like Duck Duck Go, a pivot a year or two ago into something else would have been a bad decision. The tricky part seems to be knowing when you are pushing towards a big opportunity that is hard to break into or when you are pushing towards a gigantic waste of time.

Pivoting when you're going nowhere is smart, pivoting when something gets hard could be a huge mistake. This reminds me a bit of Seth Godin's ideas about "the dip".

And the best way to mitigate the risk of making a bad decision is to track the right metrics and know your market.

When to pivot or not is the hard question, and no one, including Seth Godin, knows the answer.