[HN Gopher] A story about pivots
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A story about pivots
Author : james_impliu
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-01-22 13:53 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (posthog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (posthog.com)
| tylermenezes wrote:
| To me the biggest takeaway is, as always, you should care about
| what you're building, or you're unlikely to find success.
| thisisbrians wrote:
| Stated another way: the goal shouldn't be to build something,
| but to solve a problem for someone. Building should be a means,
| not an end.
| herval wrote:
| This is a gem! They did _exactly_ what one should do to build a
| new business: find market fit _before_ spending a ton of time on
| an idea, even if you're "passionate" about it. As engineers, it's
| very easy to get overly attached to an idea or project, specially
| when it seems you're the only one it resonates with, or you've
| invested a lot of time on it already.
|
| Best of luck to PostHog!
| baxtr wrote:
| There's is a fine line though. They actually spent a lot time
| on building things. You could even argue they could have gotten
| there earlier in some cases. But in general I agree!
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| My favorite story of a pivot comes from anon on HN [1]:
|
| In 2009, the startup where I was working was hitting the skids,
| and our investors (correctly) were not willing to back us. We all
| kept grinding for a month or two in honorable futility, but after
| a while, my bank account depleted and I had to go.
|
| To make various ends meet and to keep my mental health during the
| wind down however, I took up some contract work that I found
| through various friends in the SF startup scene. One company that
| I really liked and did some small stuff for was Burbn, which was
| a mobile-only location check-in that was hinged around taking
| photos of your location.
|
| Missing my friends in NYC (I made a lot of friends in SF, but my
| inner circle were my college buddies from CMU; I went to tech and
| they went finance, sigh), I decided to leave SF to head to NYC
| and get a fresh start.
|
| As I was leaving, I wanted to tie up a few loose ends, so I
| emailed my contact at Burbn and said I was likely to be
| unavailable for any more work, but that I liked the project and
| hoped for the best for him. He responded and said that he was
| near funding on a small pivot, and that if I was interested,
| there might be a full-time role available. I declined - I was
| mentally done with SF and the startup scene (Larry Chiang, 111
| Minna, the rise of FB spam-crap like RockYou, etc.) as it was
| then.
|
| That person was Kevin Systrom; that pivot was Instagram.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18063362
| wpietri wrote:
| I really appreciate when people are transparent. There's a lot of
| good wisdom here.
|
| A decade back I co-founded a startup. My cofounder, a brilliant
| product manager, had what seemed like a great idea. Great enough
| that he quickly got a fat check for the whole seed round. We
| could have just started building, but both of us were big fans of
| using user testing to guide product development, so we instead
| did a lot of user tests.
|
| Six or eight weeks later, we were down at Sand Hill Road for our
| first board meeting. At this point, according to our VCs,
| normally they'd just hear about plans. But my co-founder got up
| and explained that of the 6 key assumptions in our product, 2 and
| maybe 3 were false. The thing they'd given us money to build was
| a bust. The room was very quiet. Then he went on to explain the
| next idea we'd come up with and got them excited about that.
|
| Something we learned later is at the same time we'd raised a seed
| round, two other companies raised large A rounds to go after
| basically the same idea. They spent the next 18 months (and north
| of $10m) trying to make it work.
|
| Not only did that make us feel a lot better about having pivoted,
| but it was an important lesson to me: _the best failures are
| those with the smallest craters_. We bought the same knowledge
| for less than 1% of the money spent.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| Would you be willing to expand a bit on the user tests?
| surveys? Counting signups for interest? I'm wondering about
| other ways to test without a MVP
| exdeve wrote:
| I bet they just talk to people, show them the app and watch
| how they use it. This is the quicker and meaningful user
| testing I know
| wongarsu wrote:
| It also doesn't require actually building the app, the user
| can just tell you which action they take and you draw the
| next app state on a piece of paper
| wpietri wrote:
| Sure! It depends a lot on the product. But in our case, a key
| interaction was on Facebook. So we pretended to be doing
| market research on social media and brought a lot of people
| in for user tests. Eventually we'd have them log in to
| Facebook on our test computer, asking them what they though
| of various posts.
|
| What they didn't know was that we used Greasemonkey to alter
| the Facebook page, inserting fake feed items using their real
| friends. (We told them at the end if they didn't figure it
| out.) Some people liked what we were doing, but a lot hated
| it. So many that it was clear we'd never get the market
| penetration we wanted.
|
| My cofounder did a 5-minute video talk about it if you'd like
| more details. https://vimeo.com/24749599
|
| As an aside, surveys are worse than useless for this. Look
| for things that let you understand live user reactions in
| circumstances that are as real as possible. Signups are a
| good metric, especially if they'll give you a credit card
| number up front. But if you can, always back the metric with
| live user tests and discussion with real users. If you're
| patient and ask good questions, you can learn a ton.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > the best failures are those with the smallest craters.
|
| what a fantastic quote!
| Winterflow3r wrote:
| Would you be open to discuss points 2 and 3 - the key
| assumptions that were wrong - a bit more?
| wpietri wrote:
| I honestly no longer recall. My cofounder gives a short talk
| here that will give you an idea, though:
| https://vimeo.com/24749599
| baxtr wrote:
| Great story! What happened to the two other companies? Did they
| fail?
| zhoujianfu wrote:
| One is Uber and the other is Lyft.
| keithwhor wrote:
| One is Dropbox and the other is Box.
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| They did fail. For what it's worth, we did as well. I think
| our eventual product idea was much better than our first one,
| though, and I think our fatal mistake was not about lack of
| user demand, but on building too much on the theory that we
| could use Facebook for viral growth. As we were about to go
| for our A round Facebook changed a lot of things to de-
| emphasize apps and posting to people's feeds, so our growth
| numbers fell off a cliff. Turns out investors only like
| hockey sticks when they go up.
| Jugurtha wrote:
| Hey, James... Thank you for offering me a code to get a PostHog
| mug shipped, but I won't use the code now. I'll use it when you
| get to a few billion dollars of revenue. It's rude to turn down a
| gift and I want my mug : D
|
| All the best to you and your team :)
| afterwalk wrote:
| posthog looks like a great product. But it's interesting that a
| product offering with "open source" and "on your infrastructure"
| still has "cloud" as the first tab in the pricing. (Not a
| criticism at all, just pointing out the interesting dynamics of
| the open core business model)
| james_impliu wrote:
| We're about to change our deployment strategy actually!
|
| We think the future for open source is offering private cloud,
| where we have some sort of control pane to manage upgrades
| without needing access to your data. That's a win for privacy
| reasons but mean we don't have to go at the pace of our users
| with the least powerful on premise servers.
| afterwalk wrote:
| That sounds interesting. Out of curiosity does AWS have
| streamlined support for vendor deployments? (I don't work in
| large organizations so have never seen how non-saas
| deployments work)
| progre wrote:
| How much can you change an MVP and intended customer and still
| call it a pivot?
| wpietri wrote:
| Eric Ries, the guy who coined the term, has 2 categories:
| pivots and leaps. The analogy he used is basketball footwork.
| If you keep one foot planted, it's a pivot. Reviewing the
| article:
|
| 1 -> 2: Pivot, as it's still in sales.
|
| 2 -> 3: Pivot, as they kept the sales focus and "predictive
| analytics".
|
| 3 -> 4: Seems like more of a leap.
|
| 4 -> 5: Pivot, as it's still developer surveys.
|
| 5 -> 6: Leap.
|
| Both are fine, honestly. But one should favor pivots over
| leaps, as you have less to re-do. A leap is a desperation ploy.
| progre wrote:
| Nice to learn the origin of the term in this context. My only
| other exposure to it is through SQL
| james_impliu wrote:
| Ha! I never thought of the terminology this way - some of these
| are hops some are pivots!
| danr4 wrote:
| As a user and (recent) contributor to PostHog, I find it pretty
| incredible how good enough it is for such a young product, and
| the pace of releasing new features.
|
| I really hope you'll be able to sustain it.
| 147 wrote:
| Super impressed with your story and how much progress you've
| made. It sounds like you're constantly taking action, even though
| some might argue about the pivots or hops you've made.
|
| I'm curious about a few things.
|
| I'm most curious about the tactics you all used to find potential
| users and customers to talk to. Aside from using the YC network,
| were you going on LinkedIn and doing cold out reach?
|
| Less important but how crappy/embarrassing were the MVPs you were
| showing people?
| james_impliu wrote:
| The weird thing was that the people I'd helped with nothing in
| it for me ended up being the best place to start. It was often
| friends at startups who need a website building, or some
| friendly advice.
|
| That's not super helpful if you've not already done that:
|
| * Real life groups were pretty helpful. You can't go to these
| aiming to sell, but if you go aiming to learn and genuinely
| just get advice, they work well. * LinkedIn was pretty good,
| looking for people that I knew through others and asking them
| really nicely if I could talk about something we wanted to
| build. When we had better ideas that solved pain points they
| had, that were more unique, the response rate was much higher.
| This doesn't work well for "recruiter-saturated" user profiles
| like developers, who just ignore a lot of what goes on there.
|
| The MVPs weren't that bad - they'd work smoothly on the things
| that were new and special BUT they often totally lacked core
| functionality. We built with django so we could use django
| admin to do things like add users/change passwords.
| snarkypixel wrote:
| One pro-tip when building a product that you don't yet have
| product market fit for is to be a bit more general in your
| technology choices and naming conventions.
|
| Ideally, you don't lose 100% of the work you've done in the past
| when pivoting. The database should ideally stay the same with the
| infra, deployment tools, etc. The code structure should stay
| similar with various internal libraries (i.e. logging, synching
| data, etc.)
|
| In a way, it also help to make good architecture decisions
| because rather than hack a one-off, it's easier to spot the right
| abstractions that can be re-used across products.
|
| Same with naming.. instead of naming all your things based on the
| product name, just use fun/code names, so when you pivot or re-
| brand, you don't have to rename everything or need to deal with
| legacy product names.
| ignoramous wrote:
| Great write-up.
|
| > _Along our journey ( /series of failed ideas), we got
| frustrated having to send all our user data to 3rd parties to
| understand our product usage. It felt wrong and it meant we'd
| lose a bunch of user data that would have been quite useful. So
| we built PostHog._
|
| I wouldn't call PostHog a pivot, but rather focusing on something
| else entirely, and really solving one's own pain-points; often a
| well-trodden way of finding product-market fit [0].
|
| > _There were a load of features we wanted conceptually - but it
| was when we realized that the strategy was being open source
| first and foremost that we felt more excited than we ever had
| before. When that clicked, we knew we 'd just fallen in love with
| this idea. We started building on January 23rd, 2020._
|
| Given 'tis the season of FOSS projects pivoting to non-FOSS
| licenses; as a FOSS developer, I am interested in PostHog's pivot
| from "FOSS alternative to Heap / Amplitude" to "source-available"
| [1] instead :)
|
| [0] https://archive.is/66opo#selection-118.161-118.162
|
| [1] https://github.com/PostHog/posthog/blob/master/ee/LICENSE
| timgl wrote:
| We do have a completely FOSS version here:
| https://github.com/posthog/posthog-foss :). The only difference
| is support for Clickhouse and some advanced permissioning
| stuff.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| Is the mom test actually worth the money? I've seen it touted in
| a few places and again here.
| snarkypixel wrote:
| yes!
| foxgrover wrote:
| Yes
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(page generated 2021-01-22 23:01 UTC)