Thread by @hnshah

It’s time for a thread about startup pivots...

Last week, for my startup, we announced our pivot from a document search tool called FYI to a security product called Nira (@niradotcom).

Here are answers to the most common questions people have asked me about pivoting a startup.

What made it necessary to pivot?
People assume companies pivot out of necessity because something isn’t working. When you pivot, you’re making a critical change to your business rooted in customer learnings.

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

The pivot was a choice between the opportunity we had been pursuing and a new opportunity we had discovered. 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.

Organizations of all sizes need help protecting their company documents from unauthorized access.

The new direction was a much better option for us. We were equipped to tackle it based on our backgrounds as a team and our recent experiences building @usefyi.

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.

There were still some challenges that we had to get through first.

How did you deal with the pivot personally?
Finding this opportunity was amazing, we now knew the problems and couldn’t wait to start building. But we tried to work on both products. Instead of pivoting weeks earlier, we finished a promising new feature that never launched.

In hindsight, every minute we spent working on the search product was a minute we weren’t spending on our new direction.

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. My co-founder (@marieprokopets) and I had to feel great about the pivot before talking to the rest of the team.

How did you “sell” the new direction to the team?
Our entire company is centered around customer obsession. Communicating changes with the team is very straightforward. We simply share the customer learnings in enough detail to help the team get on board with the new direction.

Detailed answers to questions about customers is how we shared pivot learnings with the team.

What problem do they have and how do they describe it?
Who are they and how painful is their problem?
Are they willing to pay us to solve this problem?

Equipped with these answers, 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. That’s part of the journey at a startup.

What reasons were you entertaining to NOT pivot your startup?
We had been working on document search for years and still see potential there. @MarieProkopets and I talked through the reasons to keep working on it, in order to ensure we are making the best possible decision.

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

We had a roadmap we believed in that included features that would help us grow the user base faster.

We thought that selling 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, pivoting is a mix of painful 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 new real-time access control product (@niradotcom). 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!).

My co-founder @marieprokopets and I know what gets us excited and makes the challenges of startups worth it. We love to find problems that we can turn into must-have products for the market.

With @niradotcom, we’ve found just that. An opportunity worth pursuing with our time.

We pivoted. As of June 1st, my startup went from being called FYI (@usefyi) to Nira (@niradotcom) and we got a shiny new four-letter dot com domain name in the process.

nira.com

If you have any other questions about startup pivots or my journey, reply or DM me.