Pivot Hell is avoidable
Pivoting vs. Unfolding
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There’s a special cage in the pre-product-market-fit dungeon: Pivot hell. It is the worst place to be. Nothing’s working, you’re jumping around aimlessly, usually having raised money and “invalidated” your first idea.
Pivot hell is a special kind of limbo. You can spend years in pivot hell, making no progress, hunting for ideas, dabbling, invalidating, hating yourself more every day.
I believe pivot hell is mostly avoidable.
Why? Because pivot hell is a new thing. I don’t think entrepreneurs before the Lean Startup would have even understood the concept.
The “pivot” concept CAUSES pivot hell.
The Lean Startup is a great book with some interesting ideas. Pivoting, in theory, is a good idea. It’s just that founders like you and me butcher this idea in practice.
Our mental model for “pivoting” CAUSES pivot hell. Here’s why:
We think that we can separate out our business idea into different “risks” and assumptions, test those, and
We think we can actually effectively run experiments to validate / invalidate things
When we don’t get clear experimental results and/or “invalidate” things, we believe the answer is to go back to the whiteboard and use our big brains to come up with new hypotheses, variables, and
This is why the pivoting concept makes sense in theory, but in practice leads to pivot hell. We just can’t get anything conclusive, and we just try to think harder. Serial entrepreneurs know that this isn’t helpful; they operate on ex-ante intuition and ex-post logic; they sell to learn.
My unfolding concept is designed around how entrepreneurs figure things out in practice. It is a humbler version of the pivot, that doesn’t require us to be so Godlike in our predictive knowledge ex-ante.
Compare and contrast pivoting and unfolding below in my fancy Buffalo Bills themed diagram:
So what?
Banish the word and idea of pivoting from your brain.
Sell and deliver something, today. In the process, you’ll figure it all out.
This will be painful and awful. You’ll feel stupid today, to feel smart tomorrow.
Which is much better than the pivoting approach, where you feel smart today, but stupid tomorrow.
“This will be painful and awful. You’ll feel stupid today, to feel smart tomorrow.
Which is much better than the pivoting approach, where you feel smart today, but stupid tomorrow.”
This exposes why it’s such a tough row to hoe.
Few chose pain of uncertainty today, unless they’ve experienced just how much worse that pain later is!
As to the rest: totally agree. Except on lean startup - it sounds good, but it’s a terrible concept for the reasons you outlined. It sounds smart to identify assumptions, craft hypotheses and make targeted experiments. It never works, except by accidentally triggering unfolding.