Ask HN: What should you do or avoid when pivoting a startup?

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking a pivot is a failure and therefore bad. What’s important is that by killing an idea, you’re giving yourself a new opportunity rather than chasing after sunk costs.

Fear of failure is very common and it’s a huge inhibitor from ever starting- and this is much worse. You want to set the culture that embraces failure for what it is: a time to assess, take stock, and move forward with a better understanding and course of action. You want to encourage faster recognition of mistakes and removing any shame or stigma will make it easier. This pivot is actually a good time to treat the team to a nice meal and celebrate the progress. You’ve learned and grown together over the course of that journey and enough to know there’s something better. This also means that when you talk about this pivot in the future to potential customers and investors, you have nothing to apologize for if you all did your best. Focus on how these experiences make you an even better fit to solve the problems you’re focusing on now.

Pivots are like scientific experiments. You should have a hypothesis that you're testing with every pivot. Business Model Canvas is great for this - just pick something and pivot on that, see if it ends up better.

The goal of a startup is Product-Market Fit, which is where you're exhausted because people are trying to throw money at you and you can't keep up with the demand. If you're the one throwing money at them, you probably have to keep pivoting.

My favorite source of inspiration is to look what people are hacking together, but badly. If people are building Facebook Groups around remote work, that suggests that there's demand for remote work sites. If people are taking months off production to integrate chat into their site, that means the current chat SaaS solutions aren't doing the trick.

Don't pivot partially. There are varying degrees of pivots of course, but if you are having to pivot because a market or idea didn't work out, commit 100% to it. The worst thing you can do is partially commit where you don't fully push forward in the new direction and try to keep a foot in the old idea/process for fear of losing what little you had.

Partially committing almost always will create a failure, or at least delayed or more costly success. It can be scary to pivot, in fact the more success you've had the harder it gets to pivot but many times it is more important than ever at that point.

Pivot before you're desperate (meaning nearly out of cash). Someone else said not to pivot partially, which is bad advice. Some VC-backed companies can do this, but it's usually after a spectacular B2C failure. Most companies don't/shouldn't do it.

A pivot can start as small as a phone call with a trusted client or an employee hackathon. You don't need to throw existing cashflow away to test it out.

If it's vastly different from your old product, create a new LLC and brand. If not, create a new product under your existing name. Either way, reuse your relationships, staff, etc. and start talking to clients.

Many of our part-time team members lost motivation after our first pivot. They were first sold on the original vision, and they did not see that same vision in the product we pivoted to. Others believed we pivoted too quickly without fully giving the first product a chance.

So, I would make sure that everyone on the team gets to participate in the pivoting process, including realizing for themselves why a pivot is necessary. Also, make sure everyone realizes that the overall company vision and values are still there, even though the form of the product has changed.

My advice would be when you pivot, to stay in our choose the area that you are personally interested in / have domain expertise in.

Our story: we started with a pretty tech-oriented idea (since we are engineers) in the events space, but then pivoted to more biz-oriented idea - the main challenge became to sell a solution, not to build it.

That worked initially because we were addressing a real problem and we got initial customers, but when things became hard it was much harder for us to stay motivated - there was no tech part we could be excited about and we also knew little about events industry at first, so we had to learn it all from scratch.

So my advice would be always try to choose something where you have that intrinsic motivation that will keep you going, rather than following what feels like the "best" market opportunity at the moment.