Product (or business) life extension is a boon when you learn marketing and strategy in business school. But for an undercapitalized startup without a full time marketing brain, it can just prolong the pain. You can’t fail fast if you are continually creating new use cases and finding new doors to knock on!
Waiting seems virtually impossible, and as a result, new use cases, verticals, segments get added to the initial hyphothesis.
When working off a common core (eg. target segment, product functionality, team etc.), it’s natural to try repurpose, adapt and even reinvent. In the right circumstances, a pivot can have the effect of geometric progression along the path to product-market fit. Having said that, unlike the clean break one gets with closing down and starting fresh, continuing with the same team, same space or even same name can instead, be a mixed bag. Unless there’s only one shareholder (you), it’s seldom simple. Possibilities drive everyone around me nuts – I always can see multiple angles to something.
Life doesn’t stand still when you’re running a start-up and business and personal strategy intertwine often. In addition to adapting to market feedback and conditions, funding and your own sanity, team and family also influence the direction of the business.
Taking a leaf from my own fintech start-up journey, it seems as if we’d been working on 3 start-ups under the same name, and while the ‘mission creep’ happened as a result of market circumstance, I would never have imagined it playing out this way when we began. Working off what is already there saves time and money, and allows you to experiment using some of what’s already built.
It isn’t necessarily about code or branding. It can be the mundane as well.
Paperwork is always a pain, and avoiding the drudgery of the admin required to shut down a business can be appealing. For example, it took us 3 months to open a business bank account and fill in lots of paperwork, so the thought of not having to go through that again was added to the plus column. It was only a year later we discovered that the reason for our account opening pain was that our no-money start-up was classed (and processed/charged) as corporate banking account customer! Their online banking interface was so unwieldy, time-wasting and irritating that I swore to make this the focus of my next start-up. Little did I know at the time!
We had first launched the business as an invoice finance platform to help businesses use their invoices to get funding from factors, invoice discounters and commercial financiers. The product was effectively a small business loan origination platform with light invoicing, cashflow and receivables management components. 1 main product and 3 minor ones effectively!
This evolved into a working capital platform when we saw that many businesses did not really know what type of debt funding was suitable for them. More product adapting than pivot and we started to delve into ‘why’, rather than just ‘how’. It was the next step that saw us take a major turn away from what we started.
More in part 2.