What NOT to do when pivoting your startup

Andrew Chen is an investor at Andreessen Horowitz, the writer of over 650 essays, and the author of the wildly popular book ‘The Cold Start Problem’. By all accounts, he’s one of the greatest minds in tech today.

When he writes, it’s worth paying attention to.

Enter his latest thoughts on “unfortunate startup pivots.” According to Andrew, pivoting doesn’t work when you:

• Go from B2B to consumer, as the skillset and expertise necessary to sell to businesses rarely overlap with the skillset to sell to consumers. As Andrew puts it, the DNA of the consumer is just very different. 

• Add secondary and tertiary features to a leaky experience. The opposite of PMF is low retention, so adding buzzy social features is rarely going to help a struggling product because nobody is around to interact with it. 

• Chase AI, web3, or some other trendy tech. Adding trendy tech will never save your struggling product. At best, you might get a small burst of curious users to try it out, but you’ll never be able to retain them over competitors who more naturally adopt the technology. 

• Zoom out. Andrew refers to this as building a “premature platform”. Basically, if you have a product that isn’t working for your target audience, “zooming out” so that your product can serve a wider range of audiences isn’t going to help you. Instead, you’re much better off trying to zoom in even further until you find your ideal customer. 

• Go from paid to free. Making a failing product free never works, because if people don’t care about your product when they have to pay for it, they are usually so indifferent that they still won’t care even if it’s free. 

On the other hand, these kinds of pivots tend to work:

• Digging into your top users and building a product just for this group.

• If you’re in a new market, pivoting into an established product category that customers already understand better.

• Pivoting to an entirely fresh idea, preferably one that you found in the process of building your startup. Slack is the poster boy for this kind of pivot. Originally an online video game, the founders decided to sell their internal messaging tool instead. The rest is history.

• Emulating a competitive product in your space by dramatically inverting one feature of their product, but otherwise mostly trying to follow their path.

Ultimately, Andrew's lessons all converge on a single point: giving the customers what they want. If you focus more time on that instead of chasing the trendy tech of the week, your odds of success will be much higher.