Founder Lesson
Every startup pivots.

If you are founder - particularly if it’s your first startup - this is an incredibly daunting statement. You are smart. You’ve had this problem for a long time. Your initial product solves your problem. Plus you’ve been thinking about and working on this idea for 6/12/18/24 months (or longer).

So how can it be that there’s almost a 100% chance that your initial idea is wrong???

Answering this question will have to wait for a future blog post, but trust me when I say that the vast majority of startups pivot their business model/product a great deal over the first 6-18 months.

One part of the frustrations around this topic is the shear amount of time and energy that founders have put into thinking about their industry, analyzing the business models and planning/building the initial product.

If the initial product took this much time & energy, how much time & energy would a pivot take?

This podcast caught my attention when the founders of Lyft described how they pivoted their model from their previous business model to the Lyft of today in just three weeks.

You heard right…Lyft executed a full pivot in just three weeks.

So if you are a founder who is in love with the problem (instead of just your proposed solution) and customers aren’t responding how you expected, it might help to know that one of today’s most successful startups was in the same spot and took just a few weeks to focus on a different direction.

If you are particularly interested in product, here are all my blog posts tagged "product." Enjoy!

Get Right to the Lesson
I’d recommend listening to the entire thing, but to get right to the point go to minute 19:29 of this podcast.

Thanks to these folks for helping us all learn faster
John Zimmer (@johnzimmer), co-founder of Lyft (@lyft)
NPR (@NPR)
How I Built This (@HowIBuiltThis)
Guy Raz (@guyraz)

Please let me and others know what you think about this topic
Email me privately at dave@switchyards.com or let's discuss publicly at @davempayne.