Pivoting to reach success.
Alliv Samson is the co-founder and COO of Kami, a digital pen and paper software for classrooms, helping students learn, create, and collaborate. Kami is one of the hungriest startups in New Zealand, and they have the results to prove it. The company has already surpassed over 2 million users, and have established themselves nicely in the US market. We chatted with Samson on the Kiwi Founder Series webinar, discussing the multiple pivots that Kami has been through.
As most founders know, vary rarely can you get the idea right the first time. Mostly it’s a process of trial and error, adapting your idea to reach product-market fit. This was very much the case for Kami, who had two major pivots along the way. They began life as Notable; a similar concept to Kami, but one focused on the higher education market in New Zealand specifically. Notable gained some traction, but progress was slow, so the team pivoted to Kami; switching focus to the US and targeting anyone who used PDF documents. After this pivot they were growing well, but were stretched far too thin trying to service so many verticals with such a small team. So they decided to pivot again; narrowing their focus on the fastest growing vertical, education. This worked tremendously well and Kami’s growth increased significantly, helping them surpass 2 million users.
Whilst the pivots worked out really well, Samson does admit that the team were a little slower to make the decision than they should have been. “I think we should have pivoted earlier. We were too afraid to let go and move on… I wish we pivoted earlier, I wish we were more courageous and open to assessing what needed to be changed. At the time of our second pivot to focusing on education we were growing really well with Kami, but we were doing too much. We were trying to focus on too many markets. We thought that we could do it, but the truth was there is only four of us, and we couldn’t… That’s one of the biggest lessons I took, that we should have pivoted as fast as possible, and actually assessed our difficulties earlier.”
Watch the webinar here:
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