Leveraging your community to pivot
A month ago, we decided to pivot to a new product.
Pivoting sounds daunting and dramatic. But you can use your early-stage velocity and community to turn things in your favor.
Pivoting is actually a healthy answer to low / no signals of Product Market Fit, as long as you don’t use pivot as an escape door as soon as you hit a wall in terms of growth.
And by the way, we should probably talk about idea iteration rather than pivot for Hera given the stage we’re at.
Let me give you some background: we’ve started working on Hera 7 months ago and built a Mac OS app to help people take actionable notes in their meetings. We had c.100 Weekly Active users on the app 3 months after we launched.
One month ago, we decided to iterate on our idea quite drastically:
We’re building the next generation of calendar apps, made for remote work and virtual meetings.
In this article, we’ll look at our recent pivot through the lenses of the community and see how it helped us go through each step.
Knowing when to pivot
Qualitative and quantitive interactions with our users opened our eyes on a potential pivot.
Make something people want
We kept hearing this mantra at YCombinator, this summer.
It’s surprisingly easy to create a reality where you persuade yourself that everyone will want or need your product.
At Hera, we’re using some tactics to make sure we stay away from this flaw.
First, we use analytics to de-risk our biases: we rigorously track activation and retention metrics as well as specific features usage. This way, we have early signals on whether we’re heading towards the right direction or not. Numbers don’t lie!
Second, we engage deeply with our users to get qualitative insights. It’s actually mandatory when you are early stage because the few data points you have are not enough (small number of users, small period of time).
3 weeks after the first line of code of Hera was written, we launched a private beta and created a slack workspace with the first few beta testers.
We now have 500 users on this slack and are getting feedback and hearing their thoughts on a daily basis.
This is how we started to get weird signals on our value proposition (actionable note taking during meetings)
We wanted to remove frictions for people but ended up adding more (e.g. you take your meeting notes in Hera but the rest of your notes somewhere else).
We managed to make c.40 users very happy but the pain point addressed was too narrow to build sustainable growth.
Users joining the community recently were not joining for note taking but rather for the “one-click” join feature and the actionable view of their meetings for the day.
As founders you need to understand why users do (or don’t) love your product because it might be different from what you have in mind.
That’s when we started product discovery with the community to validate a new market idea. And this is the killer feature of communities:
Communities help you take several shots and see the impact right away.
Making sure you land in a better place
You can pivot for a lot of wrong reasons: running away from doing hard work, repeatedly changing ideas and giving up on them before launching and doing sales, etc.
You need to assess as thoroughly as possible what the new product and/or new positioning will bring you before going full steam on the pivot.
That’s why before deciding to refocus on the calendar rather than the note taking, we confronted our idea to the community to assess their excitement.
Results spoke for themselves!
Once you decide to pivot, I think one of the biggest danger is NOT to bring the community with you (i.e. they don’t understand the new version, they are frustrated ….)
To avoid this pitfall, we have created the “Hera Calendar committee” — 20 selected users getting early access to the new product and shaping the product with us.
In our case, creating this calendar committee was also a way to thank our community for sticking with us since the beginning and showing them that their voices would always be heard.
It’s a win-win partnership:
- They get the opportunity to shape the product they wish they had for years
- We get ongoing feedback to bridge the gap between our vision and what users want
Launching after the pivot
Since we made sure to bring the community with us in the building phase of the new product, we have also been able to share the excitement and ambition we have for this new version!
My conclusion is: Building a community around your product is the best way to always stay in touch with the reality of your product 💜
We’re launching our new product in less than a month and going back to controlled onboardings since our situation has changed. We want to make fewer users very happy before releasing Hera to the world ⭐️
If you’re tired of a bloated and not actionable calendar, just sign up here to get priority access!
And if you have any follow up questions, you can reach me at: louise@hera.so
Thanks for reading! And thanks to Bruno for the feedback! 👋
