Product Habits - Common pivot questions

Pivots are a topic that keeps coming up again and again in startup land.

I’ve successfully pivoted my businesses in the past and every single time it’s a new adventure. This time with FYI it wasn’t any different.

I wanted to help dispel some of the common pivot misconceptions, and share the highs and lows we went through as we thought about changing our business and ultimately pivoting.

So, I went on Twitter and asked: What burning questions do you have about startup pivots?

Here are my answers to the most popular questions that people asked about pivots.

What made it necessary to pivot FYI?

People assume that companies pivot out of necessity because something isn’t working. That’s not quite right. When you pivot, you’re making a critical change to your business rooted in customer learnings.

At FYI, it wasn’t exactly necessary for us to pivot.

It turned into a choice between the opportunity we had been pursuing (document search) and a new opportunity we had discovered (access control). Every IT team we talked to wanted us to solve their document access control problems. We discovered that these problems were not only painful but also potentially costly.

Companies needed help protecting their documents from unauthorized access, and we knew a massive business could be built doing just that.

The new direction was simply a much better option for our business. Not only was it a better option, but we were equipped to tackle it based on our core competencies of working with dozens of APIs as well as building out document search infrastructure.

We made a conscious choice to change directions, and it was the best decision we could possibly make for the business.

In our case, we weren’t pushed into the pivot. We were pulled.

How did you deal with the pivot personally?

Realizing there was a massive opportunity serving IT teams was amazing, I couldn’t wait to build a solution for them.

The problem was, I thought we could split our focus. We wanted to keep working on our document search product too. We even spent a few more weeks than we should have finishing a promising new feature for the search product.

But what we didn’t think about was that every minute we spent working on the search product, was a minute we weren’t spending on our new direction.

In hindsight, we should have stopped working on that feature and shifted all of our focus to the IT product right away. Because that feature we kept working on never saw the light of day.

We couldn’t realistically work on both products at the same time. It just didn’t make sense. Neither idea would be able to reach its full potential.

That was the most challenging part. Dropping something we had worked on for years and believed in because there was a better, larger opportunity for us to focus on.

How did you "sell" the new direction to the team?

Our entire company is centered around customer obsession. With this approach, communicating changes with the team becomes very straightforward.

We simply share the customer learnings in enough detail to help the team get on board with the new direction. We do this when we’re pivoting, and also every time we iterate existing features or work on new ones.

Questions that we answer for the team include:

What problem does the customer have and how do they describe it?
Who is the target customer and/or user and how painful is their problem?
Are our target customers willing to pay us to solve this problem?

With answers to these questions in their hands, our team became aligned with the change of direction quickly. They were part of the journey that we went through hunting for product/market fit.

But it’s not always that simple. Sometimes people on the team get attached to the old direction. In our case, we had a designer and an engineer leave because they didn’t want to work on the product we pivoted into.

Not everyone will be ready for a change in direction and some people will leave because of it.

What reasons were you entertaining to NOT pivot?

We had been working on document search for years and still see potential there. So Marie and I talked through the reasons to keep working on it, in order to ensure we are making the best possible decision for the business.

There were dozens of reasons we entertained on why we shouldn’t completely pivot. Here are a few of them:

We had a roadmap we believed in that included features that would help us grow the user base faster.
We thought that selling directly to HR could lead us to get company-wide adoption.
A new desktop app with search was a promising opportunity we had identified. We thought that it would help us expand beyond our chrome extension.
There was a possibility that we could sell IT teams document search for employees, bundled with the document access control product.

We really thought we could do it all. It took a lot of discussions to realize that the other direction (building a tool for IT teams) was worth focusing on 100%.

The debate ended abruptly the second we experienced strong indicators of product/market fit during sales calls.

Is pivoting painful, fun, or both?

Like most critical decisions in startups, it’s a mix of pain and fun.

Letting go of a product that we had spent years working on was not easy. No matter how good a new opportunity is, letting go of the old is the most painful part.

The fun came in building the document access control product. We got to learn from IT, an entirely new customer segment for us. This meant more customer development and research (fun!), building a new product (fun!), and selling (super fun!).

Marie and I know exactly what gets us excited and makes the challenges of startups worth it. We love to find problems to solve that we can turn into must-have products for the market.

With this pivot, we’ve found just that. Something worth pursuing with all of our energy and resources.

If you have any other questions about startup pivots or my journey with FYI, please reply to this email and I’ll do my best to get back to you.

Next week, I’ll introduce you to our new product.

Hiten

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Product Habits - Common pivot questions

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Document search is doomed for the SaaS graveyard

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