In this article, I share my humbling experience of starting up with an idea and pivoting to another.

TLDR; Pivoting my startup taught me a lot about the actual factors that affect such a decision, such as the idea itself, the problem statement, our team’s expertise and most importantly, that inner voice.

The Start

I remember the 6th of March 2017 vividly. It only seems like yesterday when I quit my job and had this vague dream of “starting my own thing”. I did the mandatory first things, which every entrepreneur (more like a wannapreneur back then in my case) is supposed to, to read the classics.

Idea shifting literature such as Zero To One, Parable of the Pipeline, Paul Graham’s essays, Valve’s employee handbook were some of the texts that I read. I found myself aware more than enlightened to say the least.

Most literature on starting up taught me that the most important thing was to find a problem that bothers people, a problem worth solving. So I found one. Curating content and design of CVs or resumes.

Entrepreneurs’ should fall in love with the problem and not the solution, they said. So we did. We did our market study and found that (broadly speaking) many Indian students and professionals faced problems with maintaining proper CVs.

This simple problem and an inkling (more like whim) of learning the art of machine learning and AI, got me into creating a solution. And so, CVNova was born. We quickly whipped up a functional website and developed a simple spell checker and grammar correcting tool and went live in 2 weeks.

We focused on doing the simple things right, service quality, customer interaction, getting the UX right for the website, handling our social handles, waking up with a new found energy daily. We even pitched to a few investors and got interest, much to our surprise.

Traction was good, investors saw value in us, we even earned enough to cover up our co-working space costs and seemed to have found our product market fit. Things were great. However, I felt the passion drain. Not because business wasn’t a-boomin’ (or what qualified for boomin’ at the time), but because I felt disconnected with the idea itself. Disconnection would very soon turn to indifference I felt and this was a major problem.

The Pivot

Being honest with myself, I evaluated the (sane) things that interested me the most. Information & learning was what I connected with.

I was going through this mental ferment whilst still working and giving it all on the CV curation thing. The idea of information, sharing information and transforming information to knowledge, just wouldn’t leave my mind. On the other hand, I didn’t want all the previous work to go to waste. It took weeks of introspection and collecting thoughts to find that Goldilocks zone.

I looked at the tangibles we achieved with thus far:

we learned to be disciplined and got (somewhat) habitual at it

we learned to function as a team (rather small, but a team nevertheless)

we learned to keep our cool when required and channelize panic into productivity.

Even more tangible, we got better at writing agile software, I learned somewhat about AI & ML. But most importantly, I overcame the fear of failing and latched onto a life changing concept:

“Having a job doesn’t mean you work and not having a job doesn’t mean you don’t work”

Might seem senseless or even trivial at first, but coming from a background where the only way to earn a living known to me, was to perform well at a job, this wasn’t so obvious to me. That and the fact which I unashamedly admit, I actually loved working in a job; this made it difficult for me to escape the matrix, figuratively speaking (mildly interesting: I name my company after Neo of the Matrix universe!).

I pivoted a thousand times in my head before we actually did as a company!

Having shared this with my co-founder, we ‘discussed’ at length our vision. This time, we worked on our vision, our principles, our wants, our interests and whims even before we sought to fix a problem. We were clear in our heads about the way we wanted to run our company, about being an engineering & design company first (Elon much?), about projecting quality.

The Idea That Was Promised

After weeks of wandering in thoughts and actions, the idea struck. We wanted to help people with their careers and not just their CVs. We wanted to disseminate quality information to people, information that helped them in their careers and life decisions. This seemed like a problem worth solving, a problem that was aligned with our inkling, a problem with enough academic interest (personally for me).

The whole “an idea is like a virus” concept did its thing on us. We were focused on our principles, which was to make it somehow easier to turn information into knowledge. After weeks of studying, brainstorming and boozing, *drum rolls*, Preadr was born.

We wanted to create an informative content discovery platform for users that offers all formats of content: blogs, videos, podcasts, news. An interest based internet.

We felt that, the internet has evolved with a bunch of really good content platforms: Reddit, Medium, Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, Spotify (9GAG?) and more. But with a lot of noise as well. Adding to this, most Indians (let’s be honest here) don’t have awareness of good internet resources.

Almost everyone, never forgot to mention that we were looking at a very competitive space and it was foolish to compete against Facebook, Google and the other Goliaths. They made sense though, we listened, conveniently ignored the banter but focused on what they told us.

We spent the initial two months learning and applying relevant design thinking processes, conducting market research, competitor analysis and all the startupy stuff you’re supposed to do.

There were times when evidence suggested to just walk away. Being a passionate pseudo scientist, I wanted to go with the data (data backed decision making, am I right!?). But the kind of people we were, we just couldn’t ignore our inner inklings. We decided to go with our passion, heart first, head along, cause the other way around didn’t quite work earlier.

We refined and reworked our problem statement, to the following set:

- The internet has evolved with good content, but also with a lot of noise. - Many Indians have access to internet now, though lack awareness of good internet resources - Content discovery was surprisingly new for many Indians (something that came across in our user study) - Quality content discovery is a challenge - Developing healthy reading habits is a challenge - A single platform that offers all formats of content (blogs, podcasts, videos, news) was not readily available to many Indian users

These set of problems are interesting to us. More importantly, I visualize myself waking up as an old man still working on Preadr and I loved it!

Preadr, an informative content discovery platform, that aggregates, categorises and personalises content for users. More over, a general knowledge processing platform. A platform company, not just a Product company!

This idea fascinated me. There was enough intellectual stimulation for everyone in this, soon we aligned our thoughts, our re-actions and actions to this idea. We rallied up our team, drew up our battle plans and prepared ourselves.

The idea aside, one wonderful thing happened.

As weird as it seems, things weren’t as tough as everyone (including ourselves) said it would be.

Sure we had countless sleepless nights, fights, rants and no grants, hours of work resulting in negative cash-flow, but still, things weren’t as tough!

Interns joined us with only the promise of learning and no earning, people began encouraging instead of discouraging, users said good things (after shitstorms though) about our product. We enjoyed what we were (and still are) doing.

This ‘pivot’, felt right.

Conclusion

Only in retrospect did this entire journey seem like a “pivot”. I learned important things about myself, my team and several other things (even important stuff like making money and whatnot!).

I always thought pivots were structured and planned moves, convoluted strategies at play that ultimately lead to those 40X growth rates them VCs talk about.

What I discovered was that its much greyer than what it seems. There are several factors that play a pivotal role in these decisions which are different and possibly unique to different co-founders and teams. I explicitly mention co-founders and teams and not companies because I feel an early stage pivot is more personal than professional.

Intuition, and not deduction, was the all important factor for me.

This was surprising to me, since I’ve always believed in the whole-data-backed-decision making school of thought. Though, it takes a lot of work, and rightly should, to build on top off an intuition.

We aren’t even near perfect by any means, but we find ourselves working with more passion and calm than ever before. We have an alpha live at Preadr and a chrome extension. I’d be grateful for your feedback!

Understanding humans, content and what content means to humans, is what we will concern ourselves with in future, slowly but surely.

I’d conclude with a thought that helps me every time: