Sacrificing revenue for a pivot

We said no to revenue and made a pivot and you might find yourself in a similar situation down the road too!

Our product is remoteworkly

This was necessary for several reasons:

• Plain and honest, we were not passionate about meeting "optimisations", we were solving for our own itch and got distracted and ended up in this. PG highlighted this as one of the reasons startups usually don't work. I was very cautious of this and make a quick shift

• The "Initial User Reputation Risk" was high. Whenever you do B2B, you need to find that one believer in the business who's willing to risk their reputation to introduce your product to the business and team. This is perfectly fine, but this meant the sales cycle was longer.

• We solved real problems (we have direct competition) but the problem solution lacked that oomphf, or that wow factor (activation) which is vital in a product

• Engineering the product for growth, yes the app had a network effect feel to it, but resistance barriers were still high when getting people to add their company counterparts

Even though we were hitting our metrics it came at a cost of high effort to the outcome. With all this being said, I'm much happier with the direction we're taking, more importantly, because we've steered back to our original direction and we've simultaneously solved for all of the above

• Its a problem very near and dear to us as a team so we're super passionate about it. As a distributed team we always struggled with different timezone communications

• We've completely removed the IURR factor by allowing people to use this all by themselves if they want. And share it when they see the deep value. Users can record threads and share it with their team, no one needs to sign up to access it.

• The value proposition is achieved FAST and very quick. So the wow factor is presented to the customer within 3 clicks. User signs up, uploads a thread and shares it with their team, automatically getting a transcript as well as avoiding a meeting

• The goal of recording a thread is literally for someone else to view. So each product utility leads to product dispersion