When should I pivot?

The brutal reality of pivots; where to find signal.

It always seems like it’s easy for that other startup.

They went from $0-$1M in six months.

They just raised a huuuuge Series A.

We see other startups succeeding, look in the mirror, and ask: Why does it seem so difficult for us?

We get restless and think about pivoting. Maybe we’re just playing on hard mode. Maybe there’s an easy mode?

I’ve been asked about pivoting a lot. It’s on my mind too as I run face-first into walls with my businesses every week: When should I pivot? How do I know it’s time to pivot? How should I think about pivoting?

Two frames for you.

Restarting from scratch sucks

When we think about pivoting, we often think about starting going back to square 1, going back to the whiteboard. A warning.

The grass always seems greener. Restarting from scratch feels liberating, initially. After all, all yesterday’s problems? The things that made this business feel so difficult? Those are gone! Hooray!

This relief is temporary. It’s followed by the deepest existential angst possible in the business world. Trust me, I’ve done this about 20 times. Here’s why:

Businesses that work have all gone through an evolutionary process I call “unfolding.” In the unfolding process, the business is shaped by demand into something that customers actually want. When you hear the word “unfolding” you might imagine the elegance of origami. In a sense, unfolding IS beautiful to behold from the outside. But when I’m the origami paper, the “unfolding” process feels like a medieval torture device bending my limbs in increasingly improbable directions.

My point: Right now, wherever you are, you’re some distance through your brutal unfolding journey. When you start back from scratch, you restart your unfolding journey. It doesn’t get less torturous the second, tenth, or hundredth time. In fact, I’d argue it’s worse because you’re imagining greener pastures.

Find your bottleneck, fix it

So if restarting from scratch sucks, what do you do?

Use my PMF Score model to know where your bottleneck is.

Maybe you’re not scheduling enough sales conversations. Maybe your conversion rate is low, or your sales cycles are slow. These things are all fixable.

Many founders I meet mope around when things don’t work. I’ve done this too. I mope because I was wrong, because it’s not working, because I want to solve everything at once, because I feel dumb, because I can’t see into the future and understand how this leads to a big company. This doesn’t accomplish anything.

Just fix your #1 bottleneck, and see what happens.

A hint: The fix is almost always found in an intense demand signal you already have.

• One kind of customer buys super fast

• One feature gets 10x more usage than other features

• Everybody who comes into our sales process has the same objection

Everybody has a few of these signals waiting around. Attack yours, without worrying about the long term of where this will unfold to.

An example. With Waffle, I have two kinds of sales cycles:

1. Very fast ones - done in one conversation. They buy, implement, and are really happy.

2. Very slow ones - where they have great questions and real objections that slow down their purchasing process to a snail’s pace.

I thought my job was to figure out how to do cartwheels for Group 2. When the answer is probably just to serve Group 1, at least for now. It’s obvious as I write this, but the path to this answer was torture.

I can’t pretend to know what happens two steps out, or what shape of business comes out on the other side of our painful unfolding journey. I just know it’s a brutal process for me. I hope it’s an interesting evolution to observe for you.

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PS:

• Next PMF Camp launches next week. Technically it’s full, but if you want to join last-min learn more HERE and apply HERE.

• My new startup, Waffle, gets your AWS account SOC 2 ready in minutes and keeps you SOC 2 ready forever… for just $100/month. If you’re moving off your MVP in Vercel / Heroku and looking to get SOC 2 ready in AWS fast, email me at rob@reframeb2b.com.