How to know when to pivot?

With a SaaS model, your best bet is to target a bigger audience in your focused segment. Only then you can convert enough users to make a sustainable income for yourself or for managing a team down the road.

But before that you need to answer yourself if there is a strong demand / customer pain in your focused segment or not? Because if the pain is not urgent then the users would not convert or leave your competitor for you.

Only pivot if you think that the answer is no for above question. Market research is pretty necessary before taking a call to pivot. Because every pivot involves developing something, then marketing and then seeing failure/success/period of no results. So that's another hustle altogether while you have something already built here.

Hi there William!

"However I recently shared it with a more general, larger community and received majorly negative feedback regarding how the service isn't unique enough to existing services."

This can be a "positioning" problem, not necessarily a product problem. You see, not everyone will "view" your product in the same way. A more niche market could resonate with one feature, and a broader market could simply not. Before you pivot, I think you should try to understand your broader market and try to come up with a message that resonates and differentiates you from the rest. An excellent (and not too long) book for this is "Obviously awesome!" by April Dunford.

On when to pivot, Eric Ries proposes that you focus on a metric that could "explain" the success or failure of your project. This is super specific to your project and sometimes referred to as "north star". The idea is that you should try to come up with experiments that you believe will have the biggest impact on your north star with the least amount of effort. If your metric keeps trending in the right direction, there is no need to pivot. If you are stuck and don't know how to keep improving, you might want to revisit a pivot.
I highly recommend the book "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries for this.

Good luck!

If you are a solofounder and do not have a lot of savings to back you up I would focus on what is making you money

If I were in your shoes, I'd consider forking the project and starting to do some more discovery re: the new project (while still pushing the first project forward.)

I'm not saying this is you and I'm not saying this is your situation, but I know I am sometimes tempted by shiny new ideas, and building is fun. When the rubber hits the road - trying to find/acquire users - it's not always as fun. And if you're more excited by the new idea, that makes it doubly hard to resist. (To be clear, I'm not necessarily suggesting that you should stay the course with the current project forever --maybe it IS a better / more exciting project -- I'm only suggesting that you should do more validation work before jumping in to the second one.)

Also, I do understand that this is easier said than done. There are only so many hours in the day! But one of my big regrets about my current startup/situation is that I didn't do more extensive customer discovery earlier -- I just built the thing I believed needed to exist. More customer discovery means more insight about what the product should be, but it also starts building your audience (another thing I wish I'd been more diligent about.) My life would be easier right now if I'd taken this route, but I was too stubborn and sort of egotistically believed that the product we were building was the right one. The jury is still out on that. :)

It's obvious such thing would happen when you went from narrow to broad. I'm confident you can still grow vertically in your previous niche.

Hi William,

I of course don't know the answer to your question better than you since you sound very knowledgeable yourself. However I can advise you against making these kinds of decisions on your own.

Have you made any attempt at partnering up? It doesn't have to be a 50/50 split but any kind of opinion from a second vested interest would be very important in general.

I'm not a Lean Startup fan because I think getting that kind of definitive feedback is very difficult but some attempt in that direction is still better than going it alone.

There are founder groups that might be able to exchange deeper thought on each other's problems. I work in a 2 man shop so I've never pursued those seriously but they also are probably better than going it alone.

Finally if your product is something I can use and Uclusion is something you can use then we could do a usage exchange and be able to help each other with decisions like this.

Good luck!

I think pivot is overrated. In your case, I would keep it as it is, and maybe only readjust my marketing message to convey to certain people it is more affordable, and then market it that way. Being cheaper than most of your competitors is a valid differentiator to me.

If you are listening too much to what other people say, then you are not true to yourself. If you are not true to yourself then you are even less unique. If you are less unique then what's the point of doing a pivot? To make other people happy, and please the masses?

I feel you.

I too am running out of time (runway).

At the end of the day you need capitol but you shouldn't steer away from the amazing thing you've done. You've built something people want to pay for. That means you have something of value.

Here are the three things I'm going to do when as I run out of runway. Maybe they'll help you on your journey.

1. Processify and automate everything I don't need to do directly.

2. Supplement my income with work that helps me progress my businesses/products.

3. DO NOT GIVE UP ON WHAT I'VE/YOU'VE BUILT. The sign to give up is slowing business and loss of customers.

Hey William,

My 2 cents.

Congrats on getting several hundred users. That's an achievement in and of itself. The unfortunate thing is that they aren't paying you money. And that really limits your ability to grow.

As you mentioned, you have a limited runway. And this is the problem with both free products & looking to fit the product to the market. I actually wrote a post about this problem and the solution right here - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/why-this-startup-lost-2-million-and-how-to-avoid-the-same-fate-b0b2b0c9e7

Best

Chris

If you completely stop growing than its time pivot may be but if you are growing keep doing that while looking at ways to make your project unique that would bring this broader appeal. Stay on course until there is no option but to pivot after having tried all the trick you have under you sleeve. Lets put it this way if you don't get grow there is not way but to pivot or fork... I could be wrong but that's how I see it. All the best William 👍

For me pivot happens when you have evidence that your value proposition is not gping to work and you have a clear indication what to pivot too.

Speak to users and learn more

If you have an idea of how to pivot, definitely pivot.
This video might come in handy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pNxKX1SUGE

Forking it might work too, but you've got to be really careful to not lose focus and execute fast on both.

Hard to say without seeing the products. Generally I think pricing alone can be enough of a differentiator especially when going from unclear (think AWS calculators) to clear pricing.

Big fan of the 'fork the project and create two separate products' idea. I haven't tried myself, but I wonder if the person is advocating for forking the projects into 2 separate projects based on one boilerplate project, or to have 2 projects that are two versions of the same project.

Not sure if I really explained that well...but I'd probably guess it's have two versions of the same project.

@WilliamPaul, if you’ve got the first product/business on the go and it’s relatively successful. The first question is, what are the differenced between the initial community (who are buying/subscribing) to those who gave majorly negative feedback?

Are they truly the same ICP?

If you have a 2nd product in mind that you think could serve an audience and requires timing to be right (i.e. it can’t wait) then perhaps a small MVP could work to suss out the initial feel?

Just because people give negative feedback, means they would purchase a solution also. So that’s worth considering.

I’d definitely stay the course with your initial product - if it is showing really good signs of growth. But definitely MVP/explore if you can, especially if they’re related and they can form under one product/service.

I'm not sure how much time and how many of these larger communities you've sought feedback from, but if you've spent a year building a product maybe marketing and seeking feedback also deserve a few months? ;)

As a dev i over index on this too.. that if "you build they will come". I'm trying to overcome this as well. I'd pause on the idea of building or pivoting quickly until my already acquired customers start clamouring for changes or drop off.

Congrats on getting paying customers! I would double down on your niche. Who is paying for the product and what are they using it for? Find more people like them and grow. Don't try to be something for everyone or you'll end up being nothing for anyone. Instead be of value to a specific group of people. Incidentally this also really helps with marketing as you know what value you are creating and for whom as opposed to trying to appeal to a wider audience with a diluted value prop.
I had an online course that I was trying to sell to everyone and it was really difficult because no one could see it was specifically for them. As soon as I focused solely on the most successful group customers (getting most value, most engaged etc) thing took off and got so much easier.

I just did this small market planning tool to calculate revenue/profit etc.

https://increnovation.azurewebsites.net/fermi

Maybe this can give you some picture on how you should proceed