(2024-05-18) Lenny The Art Of The Pivot

Lenny Rachitsky: The art of the pivot, part 1: The definitive list of successful pivots. For part one (this post), I’ve spent the past few weeks combing through my podcast episodes, newsletters, and online interviews to put together the most definitive and detailed breakdown of startup pivots you’ll find anywhere. For 30+ successful pivots

A few surprising takeaways: (list)

The art of the pivot, part 2: How, why and when to pivot

There are two kinds of pivots: ideation pivots and hard pivots

Ideation pivots: This is when an early-stage startup changes its idea before having a fully formed product or meaningful traction. These pivots are easy to make

often completely unrelated to the previous one.

Hard pivots: This is when a company with a live product and real users/customers changes direction

How to find a better idea

The best news of this post is that there are four clear paths to finding a better idea. And three of the four paths are simply about noticing what’s working when building your current product.

Strategy #1. Go all in on one feature that’s showing pull: Loom, Notion, Yelp, Pinterest, Instagram, Flickr, Okta

Strategy #2. Go all in on an internal tool or piece of tech that’s showing pull: Amplitude, Slack, Shopify, Hugging Face, Discord, Segment, Plaid, WhatsApp, YouTube

unexpected pull—either from users, other founders, or their employees.

Surprisingly, this turned out to be the most common strategy.

Strategy #3. Go all in on an adjacent bigger market showing pull: Coinbase, PayPal, Box, Twitch, Framer, Lattice

Strategy #4: Ideate internally: Twitter, Lyft, Brex, Retool, Vanta

a meaningful number of pivots (though only startups in the “ideation” phase) resulted from simply brainstorming, tinkering, and talking to users.

Should you pivot or stay the course?

I ran a poll on both LinkedIn and X asking founders who had their startup fail if they had pivoted beforehand, and nearly two-thirds had attempted a pivot before giving up.

My favorite general piece of advice on this question comes from Scott Belsky

How much conviction do you have in the solution you’re building?’ I know in the beginning, before you knew all you know, you had tons of conviction

All of this is to say, the odds of your startup succeeding are low, no matter what you do.

Now, knowing all you know, do you have more or less conviction in the problem and the solution you're building?

But oftentimes I’ll hear, ‘Honestly, if I knew then what I know now, I would not have done this. Holy shit.’ I’m like, ‘Then quit.’

My final piece of advice is that if you’re reading this post right now and your gut is telling you that it’s time to pivot, it’s probably time to pivot. How long to wait to pivot

If you’ve tried your best ideas and they aren’t clicking, it’s unlikely that a few additional features will all of a sudden change everything. See: The next feature fallacy.

The two signs it’s time to consider a pivot

Sign #1: Persistent lukewarm interest

If you see very low retention, a consistent growth plateau, and largely lukewarm interest in your idea, and you don’t have any more good ideas to drive growth, it’s probably time to pivot

Sign #2: Realizing it’s never going to be as big as you thought