The Advice That Made Us Agree To Pivot
Originally our startup was in the esports gambling industry. For simplicity sake of this article, I’m going to define esports as competitive video gaming. If you didn’t know, esports is the fastest growing spectator sport right now.
Our startup was taking a market with an explosive amount of growth and combining it with an established business model, gambling; What could ever go wrong?
The short answer is not having the funding to deal with regulation and lawyers and still not having a concrete plan to market to our target audience. If you’re familiar with the scene you might be thinking, “But there are companies already doing this and they are able to operate”
The current companies in the esports scene, AlphaDraft, Vulcun, Fanduel, DraftKings are focused around fantasy and not gambling. It might sound like just a choice of wording, but there is an enormous difference between them.
Time To Just Pivot To Something Else, Right?
The early days of our startup focused around esports gambling, but I was tinkering with an idea of building an esports media platform to solve our marketing issue. When we hit this roadblock with the esports gambling, I approached my co-founders pitching them to consider pivoting to this vague esports media idea.
It is risky, stressful and a mental toll to drop what you have been working on for the past ~8 months. There was also the situation with knowing that if executed correctly the gambling side would be insanely lucrative.
What are a bunch of founders to do in situations of doubtfulness? Call your advisors. That is what we did.
Us: We’re not sure if we should pivot. We’re thinking of pivoting from esports gambling to esports media.
Haseeb Awan (advisor): What do you want to work on if both ideas can make the same amount of money?
Collin: “Media”
Phil: “Media”
Me: “Media”
With everyone in agreement, we pivoted and the journey continued.
Wrap Up
When faced with a situation that doesn’t have a clear answer, reach out to your advisors for advice. In our case, that one question asked by our advisor cut through all the other factors that didn’t matter and aligned all of us on a decision.
