pivotingA wise traveler once said, “You can’t reach your destination, if you don’t know where you’re going.”
Knowing when to choose between a fork in the road (aka “pivoting”) and deciding you’re heading in the wrong direction (aka “rebooting”) is often much harder to do than just picking somewhere to go. Restarting from “scratch” is very hard to do, but it’s often harder to realize this is the best way to success.
How do you decide when to pivot and when to bail for a new destination? ___ RELATED: The Difference Between a ‘Pivot’ and a ‘Reboot’
I can only answer this according to my experience.
The reasons I bailed a startup before and which I think are good reasons are:
It seems the good reasons for bailing are internal reasons that you realize while working on the project. The good reasons for pivoting are external reasons i.e. your customer doesn’t like the product etc..
While it’s good to analyze pivot vs. reboot on market size, growth rate, competitive landscape, speed to market, team strengths/suitability, satisfaction of existing customers, and so on, I think emotional introspection is as or more important.
Steve Jobs’ describes this in his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech (the whole video is worth watching):
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html
‘[F]or the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.’
(I might tweak his answer to say, “outside of being with friends and family and doing a lot of drug-fueled partying.” :) )
Really, though, I think how much you’re generally enjoying your daily work is the most important factor in whether you should keep doing it.
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