[HN Gopher] A Brief Guide to Startup Pivots ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-01-10 23:00 UTC)