Not giving up vs reiterating/switching idea
How do you go about finding balance between not giving up and reiterating/trying new things. I constantly tell myself that I should be stubborn and stick to my vision but at the same time and not give up. However, at the same time, I know that it's important to reiterate and switch up your thinking to better adapt your products.
How do you guys deal with this?
Be stubborn on solving a problem but be flexible and iterate on the solutions.
Another way to see this is stay focused on helping an audience but keep experimenting with how you are helping them.
Hey @apoliaki see also my response to @makr below but I wanted to dive a bit into the pivot aspect.
There's a big difference between a radical pivot to something utterly new and picking a short-term goal that can be seen as an incremental step towards the vision.
One analogy I like is considering hiking to a distant mountain peak.
To get there, you go up a smaller hill that's in front of you. For a while, you're climbing upwards and from some perspectives it might look like you're ascending the desired mountain.
Then you get to the local hill's top and have to go down a valley. You're still heading towards that ultimate mountain but your local goal is actually below you. You might stay overnight in a town in the valley, then the next morning keep heading toward the mountain, first flat and then climbing again.
As a concrete tech example, I've been working on Touchgram nearly full-time since mid-2017.
The vision I started with was a new way of communicating, sending messages that are small interactive experiences. I pitched the idea as something for young, pre-literate kids to communicate with family members.
But
I realised fairly early that building a product for families and with the usability nuances for that audience was an even bigger deal.
I needed to get the core tech going in a general product.
I needed a way to monetise, either for bootstrapping sustainably or being plausible for investors.
From this, was the apparent pivot/new thing of focusing on a marketplace where people could sell interactive, digital greeting cards and all the support material needed.
I'm still heading to that mountain, but finding communities and building other things along the way.
If I had done a radical pivot, I might have picked up one of my other ideas in code-generation tools, or scuba-diving hardware.
I have five projects going. None of them is finished. I kept telling myself that I absolutely HAVE to finish at least one before moving to another. That lead to a serious burn out. I couldn't even look at the code anymore. Then something snapped and I just accepted my short attention span and decided to work on new projects even though many others sit at 90% completion. I felt defeated but at the same time my productivity skyrocketed. And the new projects helped my solve issues with the old projects because I always kinda do the same thing but a little different, iterate but always try something new. One day I will have all five projects ready and I'll probably release them at the same time. One day.
The key is testing your idea (and underlying assumptions), then doing some proper marketing, and finally moving on based on the results.
You have to give your ideas a chance and then move on if needed.
For example, if you build something, but don't get any users - do you move on? No! You have to talk to people who have the problem you are trying to solve (ideally before you start building). Then when you have gotten some validation from talking to people and have built an MVP, you have to market it.
These are the two key steps people often skip, especially people who are great builders/developers. Avoid getting stuck in a loop of building and starting over.
If you keep trying to solve a problem that no one has, are you even solving a problem?
Pivot when you feel necessary
Maybe you're actually bad at framing your idea of the problem? One thing I've seen many founders do, including myself, is rush to explain the problem and their solution.
There are two things that get skipped. One is finding out about someone's problems. That's a well-known issue and really well described in https://momtestbook.com
The less-acknowledged thing lost in these conversations is hearing what someone else thinks can be done with your tech.
If you give someone a rich context and full description of the main problem you think you're solving, they are going to frame their experiences as analogies of that problem.
You may learn a lot by just teasing out some basics of what your product offers and then see if it relates to anything they do.
https://medium.com/touchgram/the-foot-mom-e4bf3a65dfb0 is the story of how, for once, I managed to bite my tongue and achieve this. I got a great example out of it, to which about 90% of people can relate and became the corner of my pitches as I went through Founder Institute.
I have the same problem. I always switch ideas and I quit quickly. Just like you I haven't find solution to this, I still haven't find good project for me or something I care about so much not to quit
I asked myself the same question last week. I've realized that I have been taking user feedback as requirements. I immediately started making updates after having a call with users, what got me to 5 pivots in 5 months.
Now I realize I should balance it better. 4 Steps to Epiphany teaches you to look for different customers when rejected. Fix bugs, but stick to your product vision until you fail to find the right buyer persona.
In general it depends on how much data and reasons you have for stopping or changing direction. Perhaps you spoke with 100 potential customers. Based on their feedback you realized that the problem you are trying to solve is not a problem or your solution has some fundamental flaws. Then you should either pivot to a different problem or iterate your solution.