Pivoting is NEVER Off the Table: Why Paying Attention to Your Marketplace is More Important Than You Think

Anyone who has operated in the tech world for any appreciable amount of time can tell you that a good idea ultimately means nothing if your marketplace isn’t willing to embrace it. You can objectively know that you have a product founded on groundbreaking technology that offers unparalleled functionality, but if the users just aren’t there you really don’t have anything at all.

At some point, all decision makers face one of the most important challenges that the tech sphere has to offer. Do you double down on your current efforts, desperately trying to convince consumers of your value? Or do you pivot in a new direction, taking that which you know works and using it to build something new?

Make no mistake: pivoting is NEVER off the table and paying attention to your marketplace is much, much more important than you may realize.

One of History’s Greatest Pivots

In 2005, podcasts weren’t the hugely popular entertainment medium they are today. They were, in essence, the purest form of “radio on the Internet” that you could find – audio files that you could download from various websites and services, sync to your MP3 player and listen to on the go. The problem was that actually creating, recording and (most importantly) SHARING these podcasts was something like a challenge. Where did you start? Where did you go? There was no one, centralized database that podcasters could use to get their content out into the world as easily as possible.

With the acknowledgement of that simple problem, Odeo was born. Odeo aimed to become that one centralized hub for all things podcasting and it actually found great success – for about nine months. Then, Apple’s iTunes Store embraced podcasting with open arms, essentially stepping in and knocking Odeo out of a market it had once cornered for itself.

So what did the team at Odeo do? They had a solid underlying technology that could effortlessly connect people together, but suddenly they were a solution in search of a problem. Instead of shutting down, the team was instead willing to pivot. They tore down their service, kept what worked and looked for a new direction. They happened to notice that thanks to sites like Facebook, social networking was on the rise. They thought they would try that avenue, instead.

And with that, a little site called Twitter was built from the ashes of Odeo. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

These days, Twitter is one of the dominant social networking sites on Planet Earth – second only to its older sibling, Facebook itself. But if the team at Odeo had been unwilling to pivot – if they didn’t listen very carefully to the marketplace to not only tell them that they needed to go in a new direction but also with regards to which direction to actually take – none of this would have mattered at all.

The Art of Pivoting

Twitter is just one of the many, many examples why pivoting is and will always be a good idea – in certain situations. Sometimes the lack of results you’re experiencing can be attributed to a product that isn’t quite where it needs to be yet. But at the end of the day, the most powerful asset you have as a company are the customers you’re trying to serve. If you can’t solve a user’s problem better, more efficiently or more enjoyably than whatever service, app or solution is at the top of the pile, rest assured – they’ll let you know. At that point, it’s up to you to know when a pivot is necessary.

There is no shame in this at all. In fact, it’s how some of the most successful companies in human history have been created.

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