Pivot

A pivot is a deliberate change of a startup's product, market, or business model while keeping what the team has already learned. It is not a restart. The usual trigger is evidence that the current approach will not reach product-market fit: flat retention, a market smaller than assumed, or one minor feature drawing all the usage. Common forms include zooming in on a single feature and making it the whole product, switching customer segments, or keeping the technology and changing who it is sold to. Slack began as an internal chat tool inside a struggling game studio, and Instagram narrowed a crowded check-in app down to photo sharing. More recently, many SaaS companies have repositioned around AI features built on top of data they already held. A pivot works when the team knows why the old approach failed and can name the specific insight carrying over. It fails when it is really an escape from a hard problem, repeated every few months until the runway is gone. Investors read frequent pivots as an absence of conviction, so the decision is usually tied to burn rate and how much time remains.