👋 Hey, I’m Lenny and welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of my weekly newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career.
Q: How do I know if I should pivot or stay the course?
Based on my research, one in three B2B startups, and one in five consumer startups, pivot before finding their big idea. That’s a lot! Pivoting is the second most consequential decision you’ll make as a founder (second only to committing to your original idea). But it’s a surprisingly under-explored topic, and there’s very little tactical information on how to make this incredibly hard turn.
To give the topic the time it deserves, I’m making “The art of the pivot” a two-part series. For part one (this post), I’ve spent the past few weeks combing through my podcast episodes, newsletters, and online interviews to put together the most definitive and detailed breakdown of startup pivots you’ll find anywhere. For 30+ successful pivots, I’ve collected:
Why they pivoted
How long it took them to pivot
How they discovered their new idea
What they kept from the original idea
The story behind the pivot
Here’s a peek:
→ Check out the full document here ←
A few surprising takeaways:
Companies only pivot into B2B, never out of it. B2B startups stay in B2B. No one I’ve come across has pivoted from B2B to B2C successfully.
A fourth of companies pivoted less than three months after launching their initial product. The median time was one year. Notion took four years, and Lyft took five.
Many pivots kept nothing from the original idea, counter to Eric Ries’s advice to “keep one foot in the past and place one foot in a new possible future.”
That being said, the majority of pivots emerged from founders narrowing their focus to a single feature or piece of tech that was showing pull.
A surprising number of successful pivots (over a fourth of this list!) came from finding pull for a piece of tech the team built for themselves while building their original, unrelated, business.
In part two, I unpack the lessons from this data, including:
The signs that it’s time to pivot
How to find an idea to pivot to
When to pivot vs. when to give up
As you explore the document, if anything pops out at you, please leave a comment! Also, if I’m missing a great pivot story, please tell me 👇
Thank you to all of the founders and friends who helped me flesh out this document, including Christina Cacioppo, Dalton Caldwell, Jack Altman, Jason Citron, Spenser Skates, Steve Chen, and others.
Have a fulfilling and productive week 🙏
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Sincerely,
Lenny 👋