If your organisation operates on the Lean Startup Model, chances are you’re running regular experiments, testing new ideas, products, and potential directions for your business model. Based on the results of these experiments, you usually have a choice: pivot, or persevere.
But how do you know which approach to take? How do you know you’re correctly interpreting the results of your experiment? And, most importantly, how do you know that a pivot won’t end up in disaster?
It’s been called one of the hardest decisions an entrepreneur will ever have to make. But with a little nous, it doesn’t have quite so daunting.
Interrogate your falsifiable hypothesis
In previous articles, we’ve talked about how important a falsifiable hypothesis is to running a successful startup experiment.
It is, essentially, a statement of the expected outcome of the experiment. The degree to which you achieved that outcome, determines how successful the experiment was. That’s why you make your falsifiable statement as exact as possible. It makes it measurable, allowing you to extract exact lessons from the experiment.
It is these lessons in turn, which will determine whether you pivot or persevere.
If the experiment was generally successful then you should probably persevere. If things didn’t work out as planned, then you should probably pivot.
Keeping it lean
The beauty of the lean startup approach is that you’re conducting these experiments almost constantly.
That means you’re constantly refining your offering, choosing to pivot or persevere any number of small aspects of your business.
Experimenting, for instance, allows you to pivot or persevere with your customer acquisition strategy, your CRM software, or your development stack.
The great thing about this approach is that it moves the idea of the pivot away from the drastic, product-style pivots that are the stuff of startup lore.
How many entrepreneurs, would be brave enough to change from podcast discovery to social networking (Twitter) or online gaming to photo sharing (Flickr)?
It also gives you a scientific basis for persevering, which is much more likely to succeed than simply trusting your intuition.
These micro-decisions to pivot or persevere, get you used to the idea of your startup as a grand experiment. That, in turn, means you’re more likely to know whether or not the big things in your business are working.
Different pivots for different problems
By using the Lean Startup approach, you also get used the idea that there different kinds of pivots.
According to Lean Startup founder Eric Ries, there are as many as 10 different kinds of pivot. By constantly experimenting, you’re much more likely to know which one, if any, is right for your business.
If, for example, your product has several features but people are only using one, then you might execute what’s known as a “zoom-in” pivot.
On the other hand, if you get a lot of people requesting to use your consumer product in their businesses, then you might to do a “customer segment” pivot.
You aren’t stuck
No matter how big or small, your pivot or persevere decision is, it’s important to remember that you aren’t stuck with it.
As long as you think of it as just another experiment, you can keep building, keep measuring, and keep learning.
Remember, businesses don’t come into existence fully-formed. Their growth is evolutionary in nature.
Using the Lean Startup Method, you can foster that evolution in a way that’s cost — and time — effective.
Ultimately, there’s very little chance that any business will end up looking like it did in the ideas phase. Pivoting is a natural part of any business’ evolution. All that changes is the degree to which it happens.
If you need help figuring out whether to pivot or persevere, contact innoway here.
