The Art of Pivoting a Startup that’s going Downhill | #HelloMeets
a meetup with Karthi Mariappan, Founder & CEO, Hippo Video | at Facilio, Chennai
In this Blog, I am just sharing my experiences from the meetup that was organized by HelloMeets.
Karthi from Hippo Video started off the session with an introductory note on how he moved from Zoho to bootstrap a company along with his friends.
He kept the audience engaged by kindling the curiosity of “what next”, as he started narrating how he hit the road-block with his new firm, and found the necessity for Pivoting.
So, Karthi along with 2 of his friends kicked off this start-up with their flagship product — Learning Management System (LMS) that presents entire range of features for educational institutions — from Quizes to Libraries.
While other partners were working on the product and engineering part of it, Karthi was the one taking care of Customer Service and Marketing. Hence, he was able to see much ahead of others that there was no traction and it soon dawned on him that the start-up is going nowhere (“Zombie State”, as he calls it). This, he said, is the moment of realization for Pivoting.
He also explained how Pivoting is usually seen with a negative connotation or seen as yielding to failure but in reality how it’s actually not.
Only after this brief introduction did he start casting the slides.
First, he showed the life-cycle of a firm - comprises of 3 stages
- Formation
- Validation
- Growth
The Validation phase is the appropriate stage at which any firm should Pivot, claimed he. Pivot, he said, is a shift in business strategy to test a new approach for startup business model or product after receiving direct or indirect feedback. He went ahead and explained various types in it:
- Zoom-in Pivot
- Zoom-out Pivot
- Customer Segment Pivot
At this point in time audience couldn’t stop themselves but ask out loud — as to how they should be realizing when is the right time to Pivot.
With a smile (announcing “I know you would ask that…”), he switched to next slide — (with the title) “PMF”.
He explained that Product-Market-Fit (PMF) is the Barometer.
PMF is when people understand & use your product enough to recognize its value; you should be able to replicate this positive experience with every new user.
He also threw light on what is right pivot and how to do so.
Right Pivot:
- ideas represent some kind of progression
- if in each new idea you’re able to re-use most you built for the previous ones, then you’re probably in a process that converges.
- whereas, if you keep restarting from scratch, that’s a bad sign
How to Pivot:
- Encourage Employees to develop new solution
- Build a basic prototype before pivoting
- Make sure you are iterating all the time
- Don’t be afraid of Change
- Keep your Investors Informed
Karthi presented various interesting case-studies:
- How — Stewart Butterfield co-founded Ludicorp to develop Online Multiplayer Game — “Neverending”, which did not launch, but a feature from it was launched separately (Zoom-in Pivot) that became a huge hit — Flickr (later acquired by Yahoo).
- How — Stewart Butterfield again invested his time and money in Gaming — founded a new company — TinySpeck, which launched Glitch. Even this time he hit failure and had to shutdown Glitch. This time, he identified the instant-message-based communication tool feature and launched it as a product (again Zoom-in Pivot) — the product is nothing but Slack (which in its IPO was valued at 23 Billion Dollar).
- How Twitter was born from a podcast idea — Odeo
- How a location based social sharing platform — “Burbn” turned out to be Instagram.
- How YouTube was initially planned as a dating site, but turned out to be Video Mammoth.
- How Zoho started off with Network Management System (NMS) — a tool used for monitoring network health & effectively managing the network resources. How Sridhar (CEO) decided to scrap off the product completely and create new product — Zoho Office Suite applications (which is the market leader in SMB market-space).
- Finally, Karthi touched upon his own story of how his LMS firm shredded all the features and concentrated with laser-focus on developing a single feature — Personalized Video. He narrated how it started gaining traction soon after the feature was hosted as a browser-extension in Chrome-Store, how he relished the moment of customer engagement shooting-up and inquiries on new use-cases started pouring in. This is the moment he realized how his new Product — Hippo Video has turned out to be a huge success.
Fun-fact is Hippo Video has been integrated with the World’s Largest LMS as a white-label product, proving that life goes full circle.
