Comments on: Friday Q&A: What was your biggest business pivot?

By: Ilma Nausedaite

Ilma Nausedaite — Sat, 28 May 2016 09:39:45 +0000

Our biggest pivot was when we decided to tell our story and be humans. Most of our competitors are huge corporations in the states. We used to hide a fact that we are a small company based in Lithuania. We say nothing about us. 3 years ago we decided to start talking about ourselves and share our experience. The small change helped us grow 5 times in last few years. Because people connect to people, not logos.

By: Admnja for VAs

Admnja for VAs — Fri, 27 May 2016 20:23:17 +0000

My biggest pivot is similar to what you mentioned, but on a smaller scale. Spent 2 years building a customizable cheat-sheet library tool that I *thought* developers wanted (hey, I’m a developer and it was scratching my itch)…only to find that they love to reference it, but had no desire to use it to create their own.

18 months later, after spending months interviewing members of an underserved niche we are on our way to launching an entirely different product, but this time with a validated idea and a coterie of folks who are anxiously waiting for its release. We don’t know if it will be a success in the long term, but we know we at least have something VALID to start with thanks to all of the customer research, and feedback loops we used during planning and production. Crossing fingers it was the right pivot. We will know for certain by next October.

By: Rufus Casey

Rufus Casey — Fri, 27 May 2016 15:56:21 +0000

Thanks Alex, good reminder. My biggest pivot was still during development where I switched from creating a marketplace to creating a compliance tool- the latter being much more difficult, but also a way bigger pain for the user. Yet to see if it’ll pan out, or what the next pivot will be, but so far very happy to have been open minded enough to listen to customers and stick to what was their biggest pain.

By: ryan kulp

ryan kulp — Fri, 27 May 2016 15:40:49 +0000

My biggest pivot was a small biz I started in college — we began as event planners, then transformed into a hookah catering vendor for nightclubs, then started manufacturing pin-back buttons for politicians and rappers. Finally, I sold the business for a small profit using reddit. Good times!