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Chapter 8: Pivot or Preserve

1. Pivot definition: A structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy and engine of growth. A pivot requires that we keep one foot rooted in what we have learned so far, while making a fundamental change in strategy in order to seek even greater validated learning.

2. Pivot sooner than later: Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner.

3. The land of the living dead: Happens when a company has achieved a modicum of success – just enough to stay alive – but is not living up to the expectations of its founders and investors. Companies that cannot bring themselves to pivot to a new direction on the basis of feedback from the marketplace can get stuck in the land of the living dead, neither growing enough nor dying, consuming resources and commitment from employees and other stakeholders but not moving ahead.

4. The Runaway: The true measure of runaway is how many pivots a startup has left: the number of opportunities it has to make a fundamental change to its business strategy.

5. Vanity metrics prevents pivoting: Vanity metrics can allow entrepreneurs to form false conclusions and live in their own private reality. When an entrepreneur has an unclear hypothesis, it’s almost impossible to experience complete failure, and without failure there is usually no impetus to embark on the radical change a pivot requires. You will always succeed - in seeing what happens. You won’t know whether to pivot or preserve.

6. Common with pivots: it is not necessary to throw out everything that came before and start over. Instead, it is about repurposing what has been built and what has been learned to find a more positive direction.

7. From early adopters to mainstream: The rationale for building low-quality MVPs is that developing any features beyond what early adopters require is a form of waste. Once you have found success with early adopters, you want to sell to mainstream customers. Mainstream customers have different requirements and are much more demanding.

8. The heart of the lean startup: A pivot is not just an exhortation to change. It is a special kind of structured change designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, business model and engine of growth. It is the heart of the lean startup method.