After you've gone through the product-market fit pyramid for what you believe to be the final time, or at least the final time for the foreseeable future, you have three options. Persevere, pivot, or quit and we'll talk about each of those. So the lean startup process model we've talked about this build, measure, learn, loop. It starts with the left-hand side of the chart. You've envisioned some problem, you've envisioned some solution perhaps and you've gone through the process of building, of measuring, and of learning. Now based on that learning, a couple of things could've happened. You could get to the point where you still have some work to do. You're going to pivot, which will take you back to the beginning. Or you're going to persevere and go back and build it or scale it, or you might quit. Let's talk about each of those. Persevere is staying in the course. Your user-testing has provided you a measure of confidence that you have achieved product-market fit, build that product, and you should be able to introduce it successfully in the market. What's a little bit common is some pivoting where you need to change one or more factors that are fairly significant factors. We're not talking about making a red button purple or a square button round, we're talking about something fairly significant. Different target customer, different value proposition, different feature set. That's what we mean by pivoting. You've got to make some big changes and cycle through that product-market fit pyramid one or more times. Or you could quit. Now in a lot of the traditional literature on achieving product-market fit they don't talk about quitting. They have a forever pivoting orientation. I'm less of a fan of that I think that your time is valuable, your resources are valuable. This probably isn't the only product ideal that you're ever going to come up with. Probably not the only problem that you're ever going to identify. Quitting is fine. Recognizing the concept to some cost, putting it aside, tabling it, and moving on to something else is an okay outcome. Particularly if you've reached to a point that you just don't really know where to go from here. If the user-test are unsuccessful, if you've run out of pivoting ideas, table the idea, table the concept, and move on to something else. But let's talk about pivoting through a few examples. There was a game called Neverending. They came out to some level of success. Started in 2002 online massive multiplayer, online role-playing game. Similar to some of the other games that you might be familiar with now, but this was an early version of this. As part of the feature set within the game, the developer's introduced a tool to easily share photos on Webpages. This was the initial version of Flickr. They essentially stopped the Neverending part. They stopped the role-playing game because of the popularity of the photo-sharing feature. They strip the game down, focused only on photo-sharing. Flickr 2004, nominally two years after they launched the initial product, is what that became was acquired less than one year later for a $35 million by Yahoo. So started as one thing, one feature stood apart, that feature led them to a broader market with different needs. They pivoted to that and had a very successful event not billions of dollars, but three dozen million pretty good return for less than a year of being in business under the re-branded and re-purpose Flickr. YouTube retained their name, but they're very different than the YouTube of its origin. YouTube started as a dating App. Started as a dating site like the Match.coms and the Hermes not the YouTube you know now. What was different with YouTube, in the dating community was that they allowed video profiles of you could go in, create your dating profile, and you would record a video of yourself that you would put on the platform instead of just text or pictures. They realized that the video sharing for non dating purposes was a bigger and better opportunity and so they ditched the dating element, pivoted to the video sharing element. Today, annual revenues of over $15 billion on a pivot. Started as a dating site, became something very different. You may find again, that you want to persevere. That's completely fine. That is almost the ideal outcome. If you found something and you're right based on your user-testing. Pivoting, not uncommon. You're close to right but you've got to change a few things, maybe a few big things. Quitting, an option. Sometimes the right choice after you've tried to go through a few pivots. But again, remember each of these and consider what your next step might be.
