[HN Gopher] A Brief Guide to Startup Pivots
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       A Brief Guide to Startup Pivots
        
       Author : michellepiped
       Score  : 45 points
       Date   : 2020-01-09 23:16 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.eladgil.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.eladgil.com)
        
       | nostrademons wrote:
       | One interesting thing I've learned from studying the history of
       | several dozen startups and from doing about 20 pivots myself is
       | that oftentimes the startup doesn't pivot into the market, the
       | market (or technology) pivots into the startup. In other words,
       | the startup is non-viable at the time of its founding, but later
       | events change the structure of the market in a way that takes the
       | struggling business and turns it into a growth powerhouse.
       | 
       | Google, Whatsapp, Uber, Twitch, AirBnB, EverNote, Roblox, and to
       | some extent Apple can all be seen as examples of this.
       | 
       | This has a bunch of implications for what it's really like to
       | found a startup: in particular, it validates the wisdom of
       | keeping burn rate extremely low and of being extremely
       | persistent, as well as having a product out there that people can
       | use. It also suggests that it may be better to have a lot of
       | usable-but-unpolished working products that are constantly
       | getting exposure (even if they're not succeeding), rather than
       | putting all your eggs into improving one product, and argues for
       | putting failed startups in maintenance-mode rather than
       | shuttering them entirely.
        
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       (page generated 2020-01-10 23:00 UTC)