Ask HN: Looking for advice, our pre-pivot model is getting traction, mid-pivot

We launched our service Fast.io around November 2019. It's simple to use CDN that pairs with your Cloud Storage. Initially, I thought the use case would be asset hosting, videos, images, app assets, PDFs. As we developed the product, my co-founder (a designer) started using it for building websites and found `syncing` changes from his laptop to a CDN to be exhilarating. It differed from Netlify in that it was a CDN down model, i.e. content is made available and cached on-demand from the CDN, where-as Netlify is a build-up model. We thought this would appeal to designers and developers.

Just before launching, we went to a JAMStack conference and realized the future of the frontend was technologies that were built and compiled on the backend. This was not what we designed our platform to do, and while we considered making a build system, there was no compelling reason why, and no problem to solve; Netlify is a sound system. We aren't sure that people hosting small websites will ever convert to subscribers either (we aren’t a website builder).

Since then, We see a high number of signups, but for web hosting, despite the fact that we removed all website branding/marketing. The question we are dealing with is: do we want to shut down these use cases forcibly. They cost money in resources, but more importantly, in time; time in customer support; time in bug fixes; time in scaling use cases which I'm not sure will ever develop real value.

We do believe in our pivot, and we’ve seen some good indicators, but sometimes a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. We haven’t been adding any new web features, but we haven’t removed any features either.

We know the conventional wisdom is to hard pivot and direct all resources towards your winning vision. In our case, our pivot uses the same technology bed and just builds on it, extends it, and doesn’t necessarily exclude these users. Maybe its a bit intoxicating to have real users too.