This week on The Review is all about pivoting. We’ve curated a resource to help founders navigate this crossroads with lessons from successful pivots.
The Pivot to Product-Market Fit: How Plaid, Clay, Lattice & Other Startups Broke Out
Startup lore is long on pivot stories but short on details. You’ve heard them: Slack was a gaming app, Twitter a podcast platform, Brex first pitched Y Combinator a VR headset.
But these kinds of stories aren’t very instructive because you rarely hear the steps founders took to get there. If you’re a founder searching for product-market fit or stuck in its lower levels, it can be agonizing to decide whether to stay the course — or accept that something has to give.
To fill that gap, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite pivot stories we’ve told here on The Review, diving deeper into exactly how founders like Vanta’s Christina Cacioppo, GOAT’s Eddie Lu and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig landed on new directions and the signs that told them that what they’d built wasn’t working.
In our own study of the process of finding product-market fit, we developed a twist on the “four Ps of marketing” to identify the levers founders can pull to get unstuck:
- Problem: The fix your customers badly need (or don’t realize they need yet).
- Persona: Who’s buying your product, which can either be an individual decision maker (like a CTO) or a company profile (like a thousand-person manufacturing org).
- Promise: How you articulate your unique value proposition.
- Product: The solution that’ll deliver on your promise.
It’s a helpful framework to isolate the individual variables at play in the PMF process — as an alternative to the “throw spaghetti at the wall” approach, which often isn’t feasible if you’ve already dedicated a good chunk of time, energy and money to your startup. Here’s a preview of how these founders changed one or more of these four Ps and leapt from middling traction to breakout growth:
- Lattice realized people leaders had a bigger problem than OKR planning. The startup originally built on an OKR product for HR teams, but retention was low. Customers liked it, but they wouldn’t pay for it because employees stopped using it after one planning cycle. So Lattice switched to a performance management tool instead, and the difference in customer appetite was immediate. “More often than not, if you're working on something that is not getting great traction, you’re probably not a 10% adjustment away — you’re probably a 200% adjustment away,” advises co-founder Jack Altman.
- Clay focused on GTM teams after building for everyone. Co-founder Kareem Amin spent years building a horizontal tool for data enrichment, but among such a broad ICP, usage was inconsistent. So they pivoted to building specifically for outbound sellers because all companies needed it, and it was a faster starting point for them to gain traction and learn. “This is the line of reasoning that helped us climb our way out of the use case spiral: How do we get customers as quickly as possible, so that we can learn as fast as possible, so that we can improve as quickly as possible?” he says.
- Rupa's focus on root cause medicine didn't change — but its product had to. Co-founder Tara Viswanathan was determined to make holistic health more accessible, but it took a few failed products to find a solution that stuck. “Every product iteration we launched got us closer to the right answer. So the faster we could put products out into the world, the faster we’d get to something that works,” she says. “Insights and feedback from that first product helped us get to where we are today, but if I’d been rigid on sticking to that solution, we would have never gotten Rupa off the ground.”
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors