Product Habits - The story of our pivot

Marie (my co-founder) and I were in San Francisco at the office of a 50-person startup to meet with the CEO, who was using our document search product.

We were prepared for a typical user research session where we’d watch him use our product.

That’s not quite what happened.

As soon as he opened the laptop and pulled up FYI, he looked nervous.

“Did you do this? These people don’t work here anymore. Why do they still have access to my documents? You shared them without asking me?!”

We quickly explained that we were just showing him the current state of his documents.

He was puzzled and quickly clicked on a person who was no longer at his company but was showing up in the FYI interface.

“Hold on, they still have access to all these documents?”

We could see the perspiration starting to form on his brow as he feverishly clicked through the app, finding more and more people with access who were no longer at his company.

The next day, he told us he’d been up all night using our tool to find people with access to his documents, then going into G Suite to remove them one-by-one. It took him hours of work, but he eventually was able to fix the access issues he had found.

This one conversation changed the course of our business.

It was the first time we had heard about the problem that eventually became the key to our pivot.

There were other signs that we had been heading in the wrong direction with document search.

We were talking to organizations about deploying FYI across their entire company. Those conversations had a pattern. They started out really bullish, and within a few weeks, every single one of them went cold.

At that point, Marie and I had this feeling that we were going to need to seriously reconsider our product direction in order to find product/market fit.

We realized that we needed to pivot.

When you pivot, you’re making a critical change to your business rooted in customer learnings.

There are three types of pivots you can make. Each comes from a different type of learning:

Product Pivot - You learn that one part of your product is way stickier than the rest, and your customers care a lot more about it.
Customer Pivot - You learn that there is a new segment of customers willing to pay more for your product than your current customers.
Problem Pivot - As you talk to your customers and do research, you discover they have way bigger problems than the ones you’re trying to solve.

This explanation of a pivot sounds simple. But actually going through it is the exact opposite.

Next week, I’ll tell you all the gory details of our pivot from a document search business to a cybersecurity business.

Hiten =)

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Product Habits - The story of our pivot

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