I’m not a football “guy”. Actually, the only thing I like about footballs are the inspirational movies, great quotes, and cheerleaders (yep, guilty). However, here’s a startup analogy involving football: having the ball, taking a hit, rolling [bouncing] (without touching your knee to the ground) and continuing your charge forward! That’s the mental movie I see when I think about startups.
Run. Run. Hit. Run. Hit. Hit. Run -> End Zone!
We get hit – stuff doesn’t work out – yet we keep pushing forward. The only time you stop is if you give up (i.e. knee touches the ground).
Note: Personal story about Flowtown below
Pivots
A product pivot is like taking a hit and changing directions. The idea is better described here using a basketball analogy – but I think it’s more than that. To me, It’s the equivelent of taking a hit (no product traction) and spinning (product pivot) to find another path at the end-zone (product market fit).
Customers Development
Created by Steve Blank allows startups to follow a methodology that should, in essence, reduce the amounts of time “hits” you need to take, to reach the end-zone (touchdown! [insert dance]).
Different Types of “Pivots”
I believe 2 types of “pivots” exist. Customer Development (feedback) led pivots, and Vision (management) led pivots. Arguably, the vision led pivots may have started by customer feedback – but it’s not so obvious on the outside. [again, I have no proof, other then what I have read].
Here are some examples:
Customer Development Pivots
- YouTube: Video Dating Site -> Video Site (/w Embed Feature)
- Flickr: Massive Multiplayer Online Game -> Photos (USA Today Story)
- Rapleaf: Reputation Engine -> Customer Insight for Marketers
- Imeem:
- Nintendo: Trading cards -> Electronic games
- Spokeo.com (feed reader for your friend to people search) http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/spokeo/
- tailrank -> spinn3r (consumer media company to b2b service provider)
Vision Led Pivots
- PotBelly Sandwich Company (Antique shop -> Sandwiches)
- TwitVid.com (Read below)
- Wikipedia: Life begans as nupedia, and vison led pivot to wikipedia.
- Berkshire Hathaway: Cotton mills to investments
- Pixar: Pixar Image Computer -> Animation Studio
- Apple: macs -> ipods -> iphones -> itablets (? I liked it, not 100% sure)
- .. and many tech startups {You know who you are, yes I’m talking about you. It’s all good – but recognize}
If you still want more, read: Surprising first products of 14 famous companies
Story: www.OneRiot.com
Two years ago, they launched as Med.ium – a browser plugin to allow you to view what your friends where navigating online in realtime – which they eventually pivoted to a real time search engine.
Listen to Kimbal Musk (Founder) talk about the pivot (@kimbal)
Story: www.twitvid.com
Adil Lalani (Co-Founder) via email: “Pivoting is something we’ve been doing for quite some time (although we never called it a “pivot”). So one example is my company: EatLime.com switching to TwitVid.com. Here’s an article that briefly talks about our switch to twitvid: Twitter Hype Trickle-Down Provides Boost To TwitVid ( btw that valuation in the article is old. )”
Our Pivot: Flowtown.com
We thought we were listening to the market, but we realized there was a HUGE difference between what we thought people wanted, and what they were willing to $ pay for (= how we measure traction). We had 700+ registered accounts, however, only a small percent converted to paid accounts (very small).
Long story short. We threw out 3.5 months of code (video), built a new solution www.flowtown.com and brought it to market (pivot).
The results: 11,063.35% increase in revenue in our first month. That should tell you how bad it was before ;-).
Conclusion
- Decide what traction means to you.
- Do Customer Development (CD) (or whatever you choose to call it)
- Don’t be afraid to change directions (a.k.a pivot)
- Don’t drop your knee [quit]. Ever!
P.S. For the record, doing a pivot doesn’t always work. Just saying.
P.P.S Thanks to the following peeps who provided insight to the examples above.
Jon Boutelle, Co-Founder of Slideshare.net
Jason Calacainis, Founder of Mahalo + ThisWeekInStartups.com
James Sherrett, Founder & CEO AdHack
Jon Bischke, Founder of EduFire
Marcus Nelson, Salesforce.com
Richard Mordini – Javaelin VP
Helen Zhu, Founder of Chictopia
Christiaan Vorkink – True Ventures
Jonathan Abrams, Founder of Socializr, Friendster
John Anderson, CEO of GroupCard
Joshua Brewer, SocialCast.com
Garry Tan, Co-Founder of Posterous
Arjun Dev Arora, Founder of ReTargeter
Rodney Carvalho, Founder of ScrumNinja
Julien Genestoux, Founder of SuperFeedr
