{"id":1170,"date":"2014-08-27T08:03:01","date_gmt":"2014-08-27T13:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/4-tips-to-decide-when-to-pivot-your-business\/"},"modified":"2021-02-03T16:39:51","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T22:39:51","slug":"4-tips-to-decide-when-to-pivot-your-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/2014\/08\/4-tips-to-decide-when-to-pivot-your-business\/","title":{"rendered":"4 Tips To Decide When To Pivot Your Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

People often ask me how hard is it to pivot a business.  Younger businesses are always easier to pivot than existing businesses.  Not only are larger businesses, well larger, they also have a legacy of existing revenue that will more than likely be cannibalized, reduced, or even eliminated.  An example of a recent pivot that was acquired is Twitch TV (formerly Justin.TV).  Amazon announced that it just purchased TwitchTV for $1 billion in cash.  TwitchTV had gone through many pivots.  This post<\/a> from a couple of years ago does a nice job detailing all of their business incarnations.      \"Rodney\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In startup or a restart of a business, you are basically trying to build a scalable business model that has longevity and defensibility.  On the path of finding your cadence in this new endeavor, you are constantly testing and iterating. There are a ton of great posts on indicators that are obvious when you need to pivot your business model.  I like Eric Ries post<\/a> on the subject.   <\/p>\n

Along the way to pivoting your business, you are going to go thru many different paths.  I have my own set of metrics that are indicators whether you need to pivot your business.  I call it the "Rodney Dangerfield Test\u201d as a reference to the popular comedian\u2019s stick for not getting respect.  Here are some indicators that your business doesn\u2019t \u201cget no respect\u201d in terms of its future direction:  <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You have to change your consumers mindset (or workflow) – anytime you have a product where your customers have to do something completely different in order to be successful is going to be either too expensive to launch\/grow or will never be successful.  <\/li>\n
  2. No one wants to talk to you about it – this is the epitome of the Dangerfield principle, no one gives you respect.  Especially customers and partners, investors are a different beast, they say no to investment ideas for a living.  <\/li>\n
  3. No one likes your product – you can beat your head against the wall but if no one likes your product, then you need to try something else.  <\/li>\n
  4. Complex road to success – anytime you start out by saying to a prospect, you just need to believe that my widget is going to take off because of x,y,z happening that does not currently exist, it is too much of a risk on a confluence of long-term variables.  No triple-bank-shots, please.  <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I have been involved in some pivots before like at AdXpose. Here\u2019s a post<\/a> on that.  I also sit on the Board for a travel company called Yapta which successfully moved from a consumer to a B2B business.  Although, pivots are a necessary part of growing or restarting a business, its hard to run through the Dangerfield assessment especially when you are in love with your business idea.  It can be a hard process but don\u2019t be afraid of the ugly truth if your idea is not working.   Or as Dangerfield once said, \u201c \u201cwhen I was born I was so ugly the doctor slapped my mother.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    People often ask me how hard is it to pivot a business.  Younger businesses are always easier to pivot than existing businesses.  Not only are larger businesses, well larger, they also have a legacy of existing revenue that will more than likely be cannibalized, reduced, or even eliminated.  An example of a recent pivot that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1170"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1758,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1170\/revisions\/1758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}