Pivoting a startup is a leap of faith. We pivoted Magpie twice in 2006. Here’s how it happened.
Fit for purpose?
Summer 2006, 10pm on a Tuesday night. Yet again trying to hack-fix a batch of bad alerts that ‘Search & Alert’ (our new product) was going to send. And realising that despite many days and nights spent listening to user complains and tweaking our algorithms, 80% of our alerts were still wrong. In short, the Alert of ‘Search & Alert’ was deeply broken, even unfixable. Or was it?
30 minutes of soul-searching later and I had the beginning of a plan: that the core of our product (how we were crawling websites) was wrong and that a key low-level change may fix it. But it was such an essential change that it put into question the essence of the whole product, how we presented it and what future features we could develop.
Sharing this later that night prompted mixed reactions: Giles, our great CEO, was really excited while our sales director seemed more … terrified. So we went for it and by noon the next day the new approach was coded, bad alerts promptly dropped to 10% and Alert was fixed.
Fixing our product required a complete technical pivot. This pivot was risky, but eventually successful. The risk of not trying it would have been much higher.
One more feature
Autumn 2006, 3 months later. ‘Search & Alert’ was working but still not selling. Our sales team had feedback and a request: clients need us to crawl this one important data source, let’s integrate it in the product! It’s just one more feature...
We challenged this yet decided to give it one last shot, with an unsurprising outcome. The one more feature was launched, we didn’t make more sales, didn’t even get more leads, and finally decided to fully pivot Magpie into Brandwatch, a whole new product and company.
Beware the ‘one more feature’ myth. The value of a great product should be pretty obvious, getting initial traction should not require endless new features. We should have pivoted 3 months earlier. Thankfully this didn’t stop Brandwatch from becoming an amazing success.
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