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5 Comments

When is the best time to pivot / quit?

I have been reading a lot of posts here that briefly talked about pivoting or quitting but there seem to be vague answers about the decision point. What should be there to finally say - this is not working? How long should you wait / chase? What if you still have runway from your investors? I heard some even return the money. Thank you! I just launched my website - www.startupintaiwan.com , what I'm currently building. cheers!

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    Maybe best to look at it more as 'what am I doing this week?' point of view, not necessarily folding the old project.
    Identify your problems and consider why you have the problem, and ways to fix that including possible pivot.

    Do you lack access to target customers?
    Do you get traffic to a landing page and it doesn't convert? (maybe stop calling your customers 'foreign'..)
    Do you get high churn? (maybe value falls off)
    Is the cost of user acquisition currently higher than LTV? (often a problem in early saas)
    Is covid just impacting things for now..
    Is $0 'marketing' impossible in your niche. (access to rich people is rarely free)

    The reason a lot of pivots are successful is because you now understand the problems better and are able to build on things already done in initial project.

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      Thank you for these Rick, I will evaluate my weekly goals based on your questions. Cheers, Paolo

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    If you’re wondering whether it’s time to pivot/quit, it’s probably time to pivot/quit.

    Why?

    Because if you’re still getting your idea to the point of validation, or if you’re determined to push through to the bitter end regardless, or if you have such product-market fit that your customers are begging for your product, then you wouldn’t be asking yourself whether it’s time to pivot/quit!

    If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again, and if at last you still don’t succeed, for the love of opportunity cost, pivot/quit ;-)

    1. 2

      Thanks for this Mark! Yeah, I love that you mentioned opportunity cost. I read that as as long as I think that my project is worth it vs the options around me, than I should stay. Maybe I should have separated pivot and quit. Just thinking through... I haven't thought of quitting at this very early stage of my site. Also not pivoting yet. :D

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        Good to hear that you’re still full speed ahead. Good luck with it!

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