I shouldn't have quit this soon - Lessons learned from pivoting 7 times in 5 months 😅

Pivoting is what you do when you are playing the startup lottery and fail with your first attempts.

First off Neu, congratulations on building and launching something! It is a valuable experience and you learn and grow from doing that, more than the individual who never launches.

However, I see so many people (more often in the VC-funded space) talk about the importance of pivoting. They are trying to win the lottery with a genius product idea and when one fails they pivot. They don't know their market, their customers, or the problem they are solving until after they randomly hit a market.

For Indies, we need to see a need and work with customers to solve that need. We should be making course corrections as we learn more about the problem we are solving, and occasionally we may see a better problem to solve and pivot the focus of the company, but with so little resources, we shouldn't be taking the VC-backed startup approach. We aren't trying to build billion dollar companies. A few million or so is enough. :)

So for your next product, my advice is to skip thinking of a cool idea and going for it. Instead, find a problem that people you know need solving and are willing to pay for, or even better, one that you want to solve for yourself and would pay for if it existed, and build it. You can find an existing product that seems to be making it, one that you know you could do better at than they are, and build it for a more targeted niche.

Like any advice, take this as one guy's opinion. I've only got one success under my belt. I did it by taking a niche market that I was passionate in and creating a product I used and could see others were using (and paying for!). But I knew how I could make it so much better/simpler.

Personally, I don't think 6 months is enough. I've started 6 companies, and only 2 of them have been "successful" in that they make significant revenue (defined as: I made a comfortable living from it). But I stuck it out for at least a year for each one.

What a year does is teach you how to be patient, forces you to fight harder for your idea, and reduces the risk of potential seasonal fluctuations in interest.

My last project was an utter failure--lost me $15k last year. Not super terrible, but a hard lesson nonetheless. But what I learned over the course of that year mostly came in the last 3 months and it allowed me to pivot much faster and more effectively when I finally decided to in December of last year.

I think the most important thing to define first, though, is what does "success" look like to you? Is a project only worth pursuing further if you have [x] number of users or $[x]/mo in revenue? Or something less quantifiable like are people enjoying it and is it turning a profit? What is the success metric that defines to keep going or to stop?

Not asking you to answer, just suggesting that may be the first place to start.

For me it's a combination of:

1. Is it turning a profit? (Generating more than I'm spending?
2. Am I reaching more people on a monthly basis whose lives are better because of the product?

Thanks for sharing. Extra time is sometimes needed. Knowing when to stop as well. Hard to find balance. We all struggle :). Good luck.

Thanks for sharing! How is the pivot like? When you pivoted did you keep the old product running in parallel with the new one? Or was the old product stopped entirely?