Pivot in Pictures: What it is and what it isn’t

Was doodling the other day and came up with this set of pictures about pivoting as I understand it.

You start with a vision. You’re going to transform an industry, revolutionize a sector, improve the quality of something. There’s a castle that you’re going to storm. You think you have a good strategy on how to breach those walls and you build your Minimum Viable Product.

Based on learning about the customer, and learning about your strategy, you start to iterate on that initial idea. You use the knowledge gained from that MVP to build a better product. Measure this and see if it is improving your key metrics.

At a certain point, you stop to take stock of the situation. Are the metrics that matter showing you the growth that you’re looking for? The metrics vary depending on you engine of growth, but they should all be improving to the point where you feel there can be a viable pattern of growth.

You have to decide to Pivot or Persevere.

Instead of more iteration, you pivot your business. Holding on to the same vision, you try a new strategy - a new big picture idea that takes what you learned and tackles the vision from a new direction.

You make a key realization about the customer and decide that instead of storming the wall, maybe you just need to get a person inside the castle. One foot planted, the other stepping to face a new direction - pivot.

This is not a pivot. Tackling a completely new vision in a completely different direction is not a pivot, it’s a new business. It’s completely viable to do this. Perhaps your original vision was ahead of it’s time and the market wasn’t ready. But this is not a pivot, it’s a restart.

Take the example of Turntable.fm. Turntable.fm is a hot startup now, but it began life as Stickybits. The idea behind Stickybits was to distribute stickers that people could stick onto physical objects. People could scan those stickers using mobile device cameras and that would link to data on the internet.

The idea of affixing stickers onto things was their initial idea, but it soon ran into problems. They discovered that users weren’t interested/confused by the value proposition of the stickers. The company soon pivoted to a more consumer brand oriented idea. Users could scan items such as Pepsi cans or Ben and Jerry’s ice cream canisters and link to communities and rewards based on the product.

The pivoted Stickybits however, still failed to deliver the traction they needed, and so the founders started Turntable.fm - sort of a DJ meets chatroom meets social music hangout. This was their restart.

Let’s try to break it down.

The initial vision of Stickybits was not stickers. Stickers was a strategy to storm the walls of the vision. The initial vision of Stickbits was: how can we augment the physical world with digital content.

Through the pivot to consumer products, the vision remained the same. Instead of scanning stickers, the strategy became scanning physical objects. They took what they learned about customer behavior and tackled the vision in another direction. When that failed to progress, the vision was abandoned (or postponed) and another vision arose. Social music events.

The point is not to cast aspersions onto Stickybits. It was probably a good idea to switch to Turntable.fm when they did. Emerson famously said “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The point is to clarify what a pivot is and what it is not. Hopefully my scribble-scrabbles help.