The difference between Pivot and Iterate

I watched a video where Michael Siebel explained what he defines as pivot and iterate. This is extremely important to every founder working on MVP, so here’s my summary.

1. A lot of founders say: «Our thing isn’t working. It’s been two months. It’s time to pivot.»

2. What makes you think two months is enough time to know you figured something out? What impressive thing only took two months to build?

3. You’re building a new product for customers who might not have never used the product before. You’re often exploring the problem that you only know to some degree, or you’ve only experienced it personally.

4. The process of coming up with a solution for the problem usually takes around two years. If you are unsatisfied with significant progress in under two years, you’re probably doing it wrong.

5. It’s going to take time. You’re doing something hard. If it were really easy, someone else would have done it.

6. Pivot is changing the customer or changing the problem. This should be rare. This should happen infrequently. Many times this means you should start a new company.

7. Iterate is changing a solution. If you had the right customer, the right problem, but your MVP was shitty and didn’t work — you need a new solution.

8. Maybe your MVP was great but didn’t solve the problem — you need a new solution.

9. You showed the product to your customers, and they didn’t want to use it even though they have burning problems — you need a new solution.

10. Often, founders think in reverse — they think solution first. And when customers don’t like their product, they try to find other random customers who do. These founders believe their solution is a genius part.

11. The problem — is a genius part. Identifying a problem that other people haven’t figured out is worth working on — is a genius part.

12. Facebook wasn’t the first social network, and Google wasn’t the first search engine. Their genius was understanding that the people who came before them hadn’t solved the problem. And if they could solve the problem better, they can build huge companies.

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