Should I pivot or stay the course?
For the last 1.5 years I've been building a community called Parable, inside which we are publishing case studies of real bootstrapped online businesses.
However, after some conversations and new info I am considering pivoting away from the community business model to a more ecom-like model.
The difference is that instead of publishing a super long video case study with supporting infographics once a month we will release focused industry packs. So for example a SaaS case study pack where we share case studies from 20 or 30 different SaaS businesses and what we can learn from the overall data.
I think this will be more useful for the customer and easier to purchase - one-time payment vs a recurring subscription.
I've decided to go ahead and test this theory over the next month by just creating an MVP case study pack and launching it to my audience and seeing how it sells & what the feedback is like
What do you think? What would you like to see inside a case study pack like this in terms of questions or information?
I plan to build this new case study pack in public here on IH and share progress and experience live 😊
Excited to hear what you think!
Hi Mitko, if you've spoken to a lot of customers and done real customer feedback and listening you could try pivoting slowly and seeing how they respond. Have you heard of the book The Mom Test? It was a game-changer for me to understand customer interviews!
Hey @snay yes I really like The Mom Test!
I have done quite a few customer conversations and know the market pretty well since I've been working in this space for 5+ years so I do think I have a good grasp of what will be liked/not liked.
The biggest reason why I decided to go ahead with testing this pivot is that it's a relatively quick and easy test... might be quicker to test than to set up 50 calls with potential customers and worst case scenario it will be great content for my audience 😊
You can always do a hybrid model in terms of having both one time pay-off for early users and a recurring subscription model.
You probably need to understand your potential clients better to make a deterministic decision on this. I'd say do some user experiments.
Yeah, I do see the possibility of some type of hybrid model... will test and see how things go. Thanks for the suggestion!
I really like the industry packs idea and the one-time purchase. So pivot. You can still keep a subscription or bundle option too.
Glad you like the idea!
Yes, I think the subscription could be an upsell for those who want a community and support in building a lifestyle business. Thanks for the tip 😊
Just curious, do you have a demo or example case study? I’d like to learn more