A warning on “pivoting” away from your passion

Some entrepreneurs and builders are driven by the prospect of changing the world, satisfying their vision, and making the people they love (ultimately, their customers) happy. Others are motivated by acting on an opportunity and executing successfully. While I believe the best entrepreneurs have a healthy mix of both, if you find yourself only in the latter camp, this post is not for you.

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries and Steve Blank have opened our eyes and changed our world when it comes to the methodology behind building great companies. The ideas they preach and so many follow sound simple, but startups had long operated in exactly the opposite ways than is suggested by Lean before Lean was “cool”.

At its foundation, The Lean Startup teaches us to rapidly Build, Measure, Learn (and repeat), in the interest of identifying a need, developing customers, and delivering value. But if in the “measure” and “learn” phases, a startup concludes that are unable to find customers or deliver value, the original hypotheses can be effectively “debunked” and the startup is tasked with iterating or “pivoting” until they find the right product-market fit.

Don’t lose sight of your passion

While this methodology no doubt leads to better products, and dramatically increases the likelihood of a startup’s success, I’ll argue that it has the potential to come at the expense of passion and values. And when passion is drained from the founding team, a company’s longevity is at risk.

A founding team only interested in finding an opportunity within a given industry and pivoting accordingly until it strikes gold can easily be lead astray to the point where they are “stuck” with a product customers are buying and employees asking “so what?”.

Let’s consider Groupon’s case.

Groupon was by most accounts considered a “darling” of the startup world: they started small, iterated, found customers, and reached $1 billion in sales faster than anyone else in history.

But before Groupon became the go-to destination for half-price unibrow waxing, there was The Point. Andrew Mason, an activist and “do-gooder” had a vision that people with a common interest could pool their influence together and, through the power of the group, make an impact on the world. The Point was a virtual and scalable platform for activism.

Unprofitable and faced with the pressures of their burn rate, Mason and his team decided to pursue the idea of group-buying that they had already dismissed a year earlier when they decided it wasn’t core to their mission.

And the rest was history. Mason sold some pizzas, found millions of customers, won an monstrous IPO, and was evenutally fired when customers started to grow tired of salon deals and yoga packages.

I wonder how the story would have ended up if Mason had pivoted within the scope of his values? He’d no doubt be a less rich man by measure of net worth. But what about by measure of happiness and purpose?

My thesis isn’t extreme.

I simply suggest a fourth step in the lean startup framework: VISUALIZE. From Build, Measure, Learn, we should now Build, Measure, Learn, and Visualize.

If you learn, for instance, that there’s a huge market for group buying, visualize yourself in that market. Ask yourself: “Will I be content if I’m lucky and my hypotheses proves correct?”, “Will I want to use this product?”, “Will I love the customers it will attract?”

If you don’t have a passion for the problem you’re gearing up to solve, you may discover your motivation and that fire inside of you fading more quickly than you like.