In 2011 we raised $2M from some of the top investors in Silicon Valley. Our startup, SocialWire (later renamed Manifest), helped online retailers instantly personalize the shopping experience when their customers signed in with Facebook. However — we soon learned that it was hard to convince the big retailers to add our product recommendations to their websites which they’ve been optimizing for years. We also found that not enough customers wanted to sign in with Facebook while they were shopping online to get a more personalized experience.

With most of our $2M still in the bank, and a technology that was good at matching Facebook users to the right products, we decided to pivot on the problem we were solving for the same customer and rebuild our product. Instead of generating product recommendations using Facebook — we would dynamically generate personalized product ads on Facebook. This new direction resonated with online retailers and the company was eventually acquired by Rakuten.

Searching for Product Market Fit

Finding product market fit is hard. Most companies fail while searching for it. Marc Andreessen, in his 2011 essay, introduced the term as a moment in your startup’s journey where things start to work. More and more customers demand your product and you achieve sustainable growth.

When you have product market fit, you know it.

Most successful companies go through several pivots to find product market fit. What makes it work is usually not one major pivot, but a series of experiments across customers, problem, product, technology and growth channels. Is there a process for entrepreneurs to experiment across these areas of their business in an efficient way?

Growth marketers already figured this out. Great growth people are not necessarily the most knowledgeable marketers — they approach marketing like scientists. They have a thesis on how their idea (e.g. new advertising channel) will lead to growth, they run the experiment, look at the data and if the experiment is successful — they make it repeatable. I strongly suggest you read this by Brian Balfour, check out this talk and spend time on growthhackers.com to understand the growth experimentation process.

Growth experiments are the tip of the iceberg — that is your startup.

But growth experimentation is the tip of the iceberg — that is your startup. How can entrepreneurs apply this process of experimentation to other areas of their business, and pivot to find product market fit?

Introducing the Pivot Pyramid

Enter the Pivot Pyramid. It is a visual guideline to help founders make changes and run experiments in different areas of their business to drive growth. As investors, this is similar to how we ask questions and evaluate your startup. As founders, you could use the same guideline to come up with ideas or pivot your startup.

Customers

Customers are the foundation of your startup. The problem you solve, the product you build, and the technology it’s built with — all depends on who your customer is. You may change and pivot your customer, but when you do, you will need to re-evaluate everything above in the pyramid.

Problem

Maybe you have identified the right customer, but you are solving a problem that doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter that much. You can pivot here, but you’ll need to re-evaluate and change your solution, tech, and growth strategy. If you have the customer and problem right — you have a market.

Solution

You’ve identified the problems that matter to your customers. Now you have to build a product that resonates with your customers better than existing solutions in the market. Like any other changes in the pivot pyramid, changes you make in product must target quantifiable growth.

Tech

Your technology is just a means to build your solution. Even if your product resonates well with your customers — your technology choices may be hindering your growth and retention. For instance, one of the main reasons Friendster failed as the first mainstream social network was because they couldn’t keep their servers up with demand.

Growth

All changes in the pivot pyramid must lead to growth. But some experiments do not require any significant change in your product or technology. These changes reside at the top of the pivot pyramid. A great marketer should frequently experiment with new growth tactics. This is needed because most growth channels get saturated or become too expensive over time.

Famous Examples of Pivots for Each Stage

Key Takeaways from the Startup Pivot Pyramid

Frequency of Experiments

Changes you make at the bottom of the pyramid won’t be frequent. For instance, you can’t change who your customer is the problem you are solving often. The pace of experimentation increases at the top of the pyramid. This is especially the case as your startup matures and you find product market fit.

Start with the customer and problem

A common mistake entrepreneurs make is that they start with their product and technology without truly understanding who their customer is. If this is broken — nothing else works. That’s why you shouldn’t focus too much on marketing before you nail the customer, problem and solution. First, you have make something people want. You don’t want to put jet fuel in a car with a broken engine. Fix the engine first.

Pivoting below, changes everything above

The changes you make at the bottom of the pivot pyramid, will impact your decisions above. But the changes you make at the top, don’t necessarily require you to change things below.

For example — if you pivot on your problem, you will need to change or re-evaluate your product, technology and marketing channels. On the other hand, if you changed your technology stack, your customers may not notice any changes in your product. Similarly, experimenting with a new marketing channel may not require any changes in product or technology.

You can’t have multiple types of customers

A common mistake that kills early stage startups is focusing different types of customers at once. The changes you make at the bottom of the pivot pyramid will impact the decisions you make above like product, technology and marketing. So if you focus on more than one type of customer, you are literally building multiple startups at once. As you mature as a company and achieve product market fit — it is to have more than type of customer (e.g. SMB and Enterprise). As an early stage startup, you can’t afford to do that.

Marketplaces (e.g. Uber, Airbnb) are an exception to this. Marketplaces have two types of customers from day one: Sellers and Buyers. But that’s why building marketplaces is really hard.

All experiments must lead to GROWTH

One of the most important things founders can learn from growth marketers — is the scientific process for experimentation. That is also the foundation of the pivot pyramid. If you have an idea for a pivot like “testing a new marketing channel” or “implementing a referral program” (GROWTH) or “migrating your servers to AWS” (TECHNOLOGY), make sure it is closely tied to a measurable goal to help with growth. Have a thesis, run a low cost experiment, measure the results, and if it works — implement change.

What is your Pyramid?

So, what is your Pivot Pyramid? Tell us about your pivot stories and how they made an impact in your business.In the mean time, be sure to follow us if you want to hear about real examples of successful pivots from companies in the 500 Startups portfolio.

You can also find this post on Selcuk’s blog and follow him here.

Here’s the full Pivot Pyramid deck on SlideShare:

* Special thanks to Dominic Coryell, Mathew Johnson, Andrea Barrica, Susan Su, Yonas Beshawred, Sahin Boydas, and Carl Fritjofsson for reading drafts of this, providing feedback and suggesting edits.

startup pivot

The Startup Pivot Pyramid