11–20 of 121 posts
If you remove the questionable assumption that most of the ideas are good, isn't it rather kind of institutionalizing "throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick?"
Before the word pivot was being bandied about, Microsoft had Hotmail and Hotmail had something like 200 million users (over decade ago).
Microsoft released a Hotmail notifier that got prime real estate in your system tray (next to the clock). Most companies knew that the the system tray and the desktop were both prime real estate. The Hotmail Notifier tray icon solved a genuine problem: users knew right away if new mail had arrived.
In a future release the Hotmail notifier got extended to a chat application: MSN Messenger. Since Hotmail had lots of users, it managed to take over ICQ and AOL fairly quickly. MSN Messenger tried hard to market other services and products via a constantly displaying ad unit.
Messenger then assigned a blog to every user that could be activated within a few clicks. A new blog post by a user would be indicated by a star (internally they were referred to as "gleams"). I recall Microsoft claimed to have become the largest blogging network shortly thereafter though this was probably a numbers game because very few were active bloggers. Microsoft also had other ambitions such as Passport, Shopping, etc but they failed to translate/convert users from the chat window to the browser window.
I am not sure if either of those scenarios qualify as pivots in the classical sense. MSN outlived Hotmail though not for long. Passport got mixed reception. MSN shopping didn't take off but Microsoft threw a lot of things out there, hoping something would stick. This is also what Scott's post seems to suggest though I am not sure if this is such a great idea as its costly. MSN has made a loss in nearly every quarter.
One observation I drew from this is that if you have passive users, you can do a lot more with them. Social browsing is passive (chat, FB and even email back when chain mails and mail groups didn't face competition from Orkut or Facebook walls). You can throw games, videos, pictures and interest-based activities like restaurants and reviews at passive users. Mail is not a passive medium anymore. That's why Google Drive seems to make sense only some of the time, when I need to collaborate on Google Docs. At other times, it gets in the way, for example, when I want to download certain attachments.
Active users rarely deviate from their goal. This would be mostly Google Search users who want to complete the goal of finding something as quickly as possible. These users are definitely much harder to funnel into other services.
To capitalise on active users it seems that innovation is key. Google search added the calculator, conversions, weather, scoreboards, etc. I suppose the pivot here is using the search box as user-friendly command line sans the strict syntax. However, forcing these users down a different funnel such as Google+ didn't work well.
If you remove the questionable assumption that most of the ideas are good, isn't it rather kind of institutionalizing "throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick?"
There are, however, a small percentage of people that consistently succeed. I met a guy like this, and I came to find out he had eliminated a lot of the risk of his software ventures by having a ready-made market for his company among his friends in the venture/banking world. I saw him do it a few times and realized that it was cheating, in a sense. I could replicate the first N-1 steps he did, but that last one required an in with the right crowd, which I didn't have.
Success simply can't be predicted to any level of statistical comfort. There are, however, a small percentage of people that consistently succeed. I met a guy like this, and I came to find out he had eliminated a lot of the risk of his software ventures by having a ready-made market for his company among his friends in the venture/banking world. I saw him do it a few times and realized that it was cheating, in a sens…
For B2B/SaaS you can lower the risk a lot, especially if a team member has domain knowledge and industry connections.
Basically a framework that already has Stripe/Paypal payment integration to charge a user's CC, a schema for a informational or subscription-based product that I can modify pricing and description for, and some front-end templates to modify the landing page and call to action and A/B testing analytics for me to optimize on conversion.
Kinda of like A/B testing but hedging my bets and executing all of my business ideas at once!
If you remove the questionable assumption that most of the ideas are good, isn't it rather kind of institutionalizing "throw enough shit at the wall and some of it will stick?"
So, at a basic level, a pivot is just a field experiment without a control? Or is it an observational study?