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The Pivot

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Re: The Pivot

#51

Post by wdewind »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #36
wlievens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big question is: how do you discover and identify a good b2b problem that needs solving in the first place.

You probably have to have actually done the job to know where the pain points are. B2B problems (that aren't also consumer problems) are not something you can easily find in my experience.

Again, try working for a larger company and see what they spend a lot of time/frustration on. It's the same skill you'd use to spot consumer level opportunities. I'd say it's much easier, in fact.

Re: The Pivot

#52

Post by YZF »

wlievens wrote: post #23
wdewind wrote: post #12

For those of us not working on cat photo sharing products for the ever shifting consumer market there is considerably less luck, throwing random stuff at the wall, and pivoting involved. B2B SaaS is pretty nice. Join us on the dark side :)

The big question is: how do you discover and identify a good b2b problem that needs solving in the first place.

Some good ideas here already. The way I see it good products are born in the intersection of the industry problem space and the technical solution space. Often you will have people in some industry doing something without knowing there is a better technical solution and you have technical people unaware of problems their technology can solve. This is especially true for new technologies that enable new things that couldn't be done with older technologies. == "Disruption"

The best entrepreneur IMO brings a combination of the technical expertise with understanding of the problem, preferably a personal/deep understanding. If you want to understand specific business problems for some specific businesses/industries you need to read about them, talk to people from the industry and/or work in the industry. Some problems are generic and cut across industries. Some b2b problems are the same problems individuals have in performing their work.

Some problems are easy, e.g. have easy solutions, everyone knows about them. Some problems are hard, a lot of work to solve. Some problems are very niche/specific, no one knows about them...

Re: The Pivot

#53

Post by jasoncartwright »

natural219 wrote: post #38

This is a great blog post, but I want to point out that this is not a new idea, just a way to express an old idea using new terms ("pivot", "startups", etc.) What Scott is trying to express is that, in a capitalist economy, money is the goal. The process of getting money, once technical innovation is subtracted, is called Marketing. The process of doing Marketing is to understand psychology -- given a set of craftabl…

Absolutely - just happens faster.

Nokia was a paper mill (1865), Suzuki made looms (1910), Mannesmann produced steel tubes (1890), and Berkshire Hathaway did textile manufacturing (1839)

Re: The Pivot

#55

Post by imgabe »

nickpinkston wrote: post #45
imgabe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a large enough population with random outcomes, of course a small percentage will consistently succeed.

It's not ALL luck - some people do way better than rolling the dice alone would suggest. Of course, it's very hard to measure this and know if you're one of those people.

I'm not saying it's all luck, but if you have a million people rolling dice, some percentage of them will have a lucky streak doing "better than rolling dice would suggest". A random outcome doesn't mean every individual gets the average result every time.

Re: The Pivot

#56

Post by callmeed »

> And then they find out that success in the start-up realm is mostly luck. They discover this by trying great ideas coupled with great execution and failing.

While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Or, there is at least some severe cognitive dissonance going on when they begin to discover it.

Even "the pivot" itself was made popular by The Lean Startup–the book that many take as the formula for startup success (very much the antithesis of luck).

Yes, you have to hustle. Yes, you have to build something people want. Yes, you should have an awesome team. When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. ("I couldn't get funding", "Google changed their algorithm", "I couldn't hire the right person for X")

Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can't code as good as you and didn't go to as good a school as you–then it was most definitely luck.

Re: The Pivot

#57

Post by JoeAltmaier »

michaelmior wrote: post #6
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #2

The internet is a psychology experiment? Well, maybe a tiny fraction of it. You know, those spammy pages where they promise something amazing if only you'll enter your email address. I'm not sure we need more of that. Its like someone pretending to sell brushes wanting in your house, who keeps glancing around casing the joint while blathering some spiel. As a model for qualifying internet product plans, its going to…

Experiments are far broader than landing pages for nonexistent products. The same thing applies to building a working product and realizing it's not what your customers want. Or building a small feature that turns out to be a product in itself. The entire product development process is a bit of a psychology experiment. Try to understand what your customers want, build it. Learn from it. Repeat.

A small bit of feature isn't much different than nothing. So the salesman shows you a brush - but his sample case is empty. Same issue - its a hoax, designed to waste my time so the guy can case my house, my computer, my needs.

Re: The Pivot

#58

Post by michaelmior »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #57
michaelmior wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Experiments are far broader than landing pages for nonexistent products. The same thing applies to building a working product and realizing it's not what your customers want. Or building a small feature that turns out to be a product in itself. The entire product development process is a bit of a psychology experiment. Try to understand what your customers want, build it. Learn from it. Repeat.

A small bit of feature isn't much different than nothing. So the salesman shows you a brush - but his sample case is empty. Same issue - its a hoax, designed to waste my time so the guy can case my house, my computer, my needs.

Not what I meant. Suppose a company produces brushes. But they find out there a lot of people buying their brushes just to remove the handle and attach it to other things because they happen to really love the handles. Maybe the brush company is in the wrong business.

Re: The Pivot

#59

Post by timr »

wdewind wrote: post #50
timr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For those of us not working on cat photo sharing products for the ever shifting consumer market there is considerably less luck, throwing random stuff at the wall, and pivoting involved." ...but how do you know that? The principal disadvantage of B2B is that the long sales cycle greatly increases the time until you get feedback that your product sucks, so you either succeed (in which case, of course, you say "it was…

> the ability to pivot quickly in the face of consumer feedback is a feature, not a bug. I couldn't agree more, but I'm not sure you're right about the feedback cycle. We did a ton of "lean startup"-ish stuff including launching minimal products to trusted beta users and expanding based on customer feedback. But there is exactly a 0% chance that Justworks will ever fundamentally "pivot" to being a different product.…

"A pivot should be a last chance "we got it wrong but we've got some money left so let's try something else" - not a matter of course."

Eh...perhaps "payroll" is a bad starting point for a pivot, but I think that if your product weren't selling, you'd be more eager to find a related product that did sell. Pivoting isn't a gratuitous thing, but neither is it a complete overhaul of your business model. Hence, the name: you change direction, keeping one foot firmly planted in your current business.

I think the devil is in the details of how you define "pivot" -- done correctly, it's just an intelligent reaction to new information. If you look at it that way, it makes no sense to avoid it.

Re: The Pivot

#60

Post by jacquesm »

NhanH wrote: post #47
wdewind wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the "throw it up there and see what happens" movement comes from young engineers who literally lack the life experience to know what problems to solve. Given that scenario, and the intense pressure that comes from SV for young people to succeed, the approach makes sense, but there is a longer term, more considered approach to things. Especially for B2B startups, the best way to come up with an idea is to wor…

PG is one of those who strongly advocates for "throw it up and see what happens". He is probably more influential to the movement than any young engineers, and he is decisively neither young nor inexperienced.

SV is but a very very small slice of the tech world and is not in any way representative, despite the fact that that is what you are hearing all the time. The linked article has a nice line about that.

What SV does have is a very large percentage of the successful internet start-ups. But there are so many more lines of business where untold billions are being made by companies that go for non-sexy non b2c approaches.

What works for YC and what works on the web is a very visible very thin slice of the software world as a whole. In a way you're making your life harder if you pursue that particular niche because even though that's where all the easy PR and the most visible success stories are it is also where the competition is fierce.

B2B is a lot less likely to make you billions. But it is more likely to make you tens of millions. So if you want to reduce the luck factor and increase your chances of success then b2b would seem to make good sense. It also works better if you will have to work without access to capital or a presence in a place like SV.

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