The art of the Pivot

I have a martial arts art background, during my time practising you learn that allow power comes from the bottom up so it’s important to have a strong base/foundation and weight distributed equally. Equally important in this is footwork. The pivot is overlooked and never gets the credit deserves for being an amazing defensive and offensive move. In kickboxing/taekwondo the pivoting of the leg is crucial to throw a great kick. The power comes from the pivot of the foot while you are on the balls of the hips & your turning over — there are other fundamentals but we are going to talk about business, not martial arts. Don’t rush the foundations or you’ll have to rebuild your house.

A pivot can mean a change of direction or a change of focus. I’ve undergone many pivots. This is because we have an initial problem we set out to solve, we didn’t do our due diligence and found that our method of solving was limited so we pivoted. We then found that new pivot was differentiated enough so we pivoted again. We pivoted again to select a certain market to act as the “land grab” and work with early adopter and techies to establish ourselves, find product-market fit because we set our sites on crossing the chasm and tackling the majority adopters

In my experience, the keys to us remaining sane during our pivots were the following

We were never married to our idea. We liked our idea but we’re okay with changing it if it wasn’t going to work

Our ideology is broadly understood to refer to the sum total of a person’s values, there are various and competing ideologies operating in a society at any given time, some more dominant than others. Being free from an ideology is ideal as you are able to not have an ordered view of the world, your place in it, and your relationship to others. When your views are questioned, rather than becoming defensive as you are married to your ideas so you interpret any questioning them as a personal attack on yourself. Rather than doing the above you can question your core assumptions and explore assumptions that no longer serve you

We aimed to remain objective and let the market and our potential customers/users guide us
We were set in stone on the greater problem we wanted to solve so any pivots that still tackled that problem we easy adjustments to make
We didn’t think we knew best

I say we knew these things, many of the following we learnt but learnt them quickly. The key things are staying focused on the problem, you’ll notice that pivots and ideas come and ago but at the end, you have a viable solution to the problem and you are set to hit the market

Talk to you soon ✌🏿
-AJ