Odd timing for you to publish this today. I've seen this exact phenomena in 4 out of the 6 investment opportunities I met with (here in Venice) over the last month. I guess 'the attempted pivot' must be trendy right now. They all received a copy of "The Cold Start Problem" from me via Amazon the next day.
nice! I think most startups end up pivoting (or restarting) at some point, so it's common. But I think for sure some pivot ideas tend to be better than others, though obv it's hard to generalize too much. Glad you liked the book!
Yeah, i recently made this mistake of zooming out, it was an unfortunate mistake but gave us some insight of which segment and value proposition we should focus on, and now we zoomed in to work with a specific niche.
FYI: this is our journey so far, we were getting good numbers with a wellbeing niche, CAC, LTV... and i thought would be a great idea to zoom out and bring new communities in, but it turns out, we found out our users were not interest in other subjects at this point, they wanted to be a part of a wellbeing community, nothing more... and now we zoom in again and excluded all other communities and will keep on the first path of being a wellbeing community app...
i still have my doubts about the monetization model we choose though, it's freemium now... will keep you posted on the next chapters lol
Yup. Or a game that decides to add web3, or a crappy game then adding IAP. The players don't care about your business model! Just if it's fun. So all of these are just wasted energy. I can see a version where -- in a market of only paid games -- you build the free version of something, and make it good. Then it's differentiated. But if it's not a good game/app/whatever, the business model is irrelevant
This is really insightful post. Fortunately, we started with B2C product, though we don't pivot into new ideas. I should keep the points in mind when expanding.
Just saved my ass from doing a whole load of work pivoting to freemium model, thanks Andrew! We've bootstrapped $305k revenue on a minimalist phone app in 10 months, but wanted to grow more organically and thought free would help. Good to know we can continue course! And yes on Android in particular where the expectation is free (and user data is sold to survive), more defs need to be paid.
PS: we met at the a16z office Substack event during SF tech week. I'm the guy breeding your Goodr with your Apple watch. The talk with Chris inspired me to start the Diary of a Wackass Founder lol.
Fantastic article! and consistent with what I've seen. Would love to get your perspective on business model changes, more specifically what you've seen with companies pivoting from a services model to product model. Thank you for the article!
This is a nice read. I run a course on PM fundamentals and I saw my students being tempted to add chat/social/notifications features to their solution when doing case studies a lot. The difficulty here is that these ideas can be seen in existing solutions that are popular, probably because they evolved overtime to expand to include these features. But it's very unlikely they were the wining factors at the beginning. Broadly speaking, I think one of the common pitfalls is to add features that exist in popular apps without a deep understanding of why such features exist in the first place.
'The opposite of PMF is low retention.' That is so true. Finding low retention in a product and pumping it up with bells and whistle features, gamification, and notification only pisses off the end user.
Odd timing for you to publish this today. I've seen this exact phenomena in 4 out of the 6 investment opportunities I met with (here in Venice) over the last month. I guess 'the attempted pivot' must be trendy right now. They all received a copy of "The Cold Start Problem" from me via Amazon the next day.
nice! I think most startups end up pivoting (or restarting) at some point, so it's common. But I think for sure some pivot ideas tend to be better than others, though obv it's hard to generalize too much. Glad you liked the book!
Yeah, i recently made this mistake of zooming out, it was an unfortunate mistake but gave us some insight of which segment and value proposition we should focus on, and now we zoomed in to work with a specific niche.
great - hope the new direction works well for you!
I hope so LOL, will just keep trying...
FYI: this is our journey so far, we were getting good numbers with a wellbeing niche, CAC, LTV... and i thought would be a great idea to zoom out and bring new communities in, but it turns out, we found out our users were not interest in other subjects at this point, they wanted to be a part of a wellbeing community, nothing more... and now we zoom in again and excluded all other communities and will keep on the first path of being a wellbeing community app...
i still have my doubts about the monetization model we choose though, it's freemium now... will keep you posted on the next chapters lol
LMK if you have any other tips about this <3
This is a great simplification of a series of very difficult problems to get through.
thank you
This is so real. The failed paid game to free to play game pivot keeps getting tried by game devs and never once has it worked
Yup. Or a game that decides to add web3, or a crappy game then adding IAP. The players don't care about your business model! Just if it's fun. So all of these are just wasted energy. I can see a version where -- in a market of only paid games -- you build the free version of something, and make it good. Then it's differentiated. But if it's not a good game/app/whatever, the business model is irrelevant
This is really insightful post. Fortunately, we started with B2C product, though we don't pivot into new ideas. I should keep the points in mind when expanding.
My learning: https://glasp.co/kei/p/2f007ccfb7cc6d07437e
Just saved my ass from doing a whole load of work pivoting to freemium model, thanks Andrew! We've bootstrapped $305k revenue on a minimalist phone app in 10 months, but wanted to grow more organically and thought free would help. Good to know we can continue course! And yes on Android in particular where the expectation is free (and user data is sold to survive), more defs need to be paid.
PS: we met at the a16z office Substack event during SF tech week. I'm the guy breeding your Goodr with your Apple watch. The talk with Chris inspired me to start the Diary of a Wackass Founder lol.
Great 👍
Fantastic article! and consistent with what I've seen. Would love to get your perspective on business model changes, more specifically what you've seen with companies pivoting from a services model to product model. Thank you for the article!
This is a nice read. I run a course on PM fundamentals and I saw my students being tempted to add chat/social/notifications features to their solution when doing case studies a lot. The difficulty here is that these ideas can be seen in existing solutions that are popular, probably because they evolved overtime to expand to include these features. But it's very unlikely they were the wining factors at the beginning. Broadly speaking, I think one of the common pitfalls is to add features that exist in popular apps without a deep understanding of why such features exist in the first place.
'The opposite of PMF is low retention.' That is so true. Finding low retention in a product and pumping it up with bells and whistle features, gamification, and notification only pisses off the end user.
Nice quote about love, but maybe you meant the opposite of love is indifference, not ambivalence (which is mixed feelings).
This is a great summary, thanks for sharing!