I’m Marie, my startup just pivoted and rebranded, AMA 🔥

Hi @lylemckeany! Love this question! Thank you! I've found that my writing goes in stages, depending on where I'm at in my life. - When I was a child, I loved writing poetry. And angry notes in my diary about my parents (sorry Mom and Dad). The writing was essential in helping me process emotions. - When I was working in consulting, I wrote bits of a few satirical graphic novels about the corporate world. I loved creating fantastic worlds out of the mundane. - During my time working in the alcohol industry (and after), I wrote multiple comedy screenplays and TV pilots. Though I loved my job, I wasn't fully satisfied. I used any extra energy I had outside of work (and my social life) to write. It was glorious and brought me so much joy. I do hope to get back to this type of writing again soon. - As a founder, it's challenging (at least it is for me) to devote large swaths of time to creative writing. Plus, I am pretty singularly focused on solving painful problems for customers and building a massive business. So my writing has shifted to blog posts, all the things I write for work (I love making documents!), and then - and this is key for me - journaling / self development work. I do a ton of writing about what's arising in my life and what my emotions are. It helps me work through issues, realize things about myself, learn/grow, be able to reflect. It comes out in a variety of ways - sometimes poems, sometimes regular journaling, sometimes stories. For me, writing means exploring the self. It's about processing experiences, observations and thoughts. Writing needs space and time, and I do believe that creativity can be forced (i.e. scheduled for a certain time). I believe that the more we write, the more we can process the things happening in our lives and grow as people. It's also a brilliant method for capturing one's state of mind in order to look back at it later.

@marie_prokopets Thanks for the thoughtful answer! Writing has done all those things for me too. I write what I call personal, vulnerable, and sometimes funny stories about the messiness of life. There's been a marked difference in my mental health since I've made creative writing a priority the past year. It's magic.

@lylemckeany That's beautiful! Thank you for sharing :) Writing really does have the power to heal / help us grow / bring happiness! I'm so glad to hear you've made it a priority in your life.

@marie_prokopets Totally agree with "the more we write, the more we can process the things happening in our lives" 👍 One Q about journaling: are there any routins around this? Something like weekly review when you re-read all notes of past week etc. Thanks!

@pavel_ivanovsky I don't have a routine as it relates to journaling, but if you figure one out I'd love to hear it! Typically I just journal as things come up. Though your question makes me wonder if I should set some scheduled journaling time :) Another method I've tried is from The Artist's Way: https://www.amazon.com/Artists-W... You do what's called Morning Pages where every morning when you wake up you write down 3 pages worth of journaling, in order to clear all the crap out of your brain so you can have more room for creativity.

Hey @smalter! Thanks for describing the cycle you go through - sounds exciting and also a bit maddening 🙃. And I can totally relate! Our path went like this… dogo (pitch deck software) ---> Draftsend (PDFs with audio) ----> FYI (document search) ----> Nira (document access control for IT). For the first two of those ideas our excitement fell off a cliff as soon as we launched. I attribute the drop in excitement for us to a lack of understanding of the customer. With those first two products, my co-founder and I did minimal customer research. We really didn’t deeply understand their problems and existing solutions to the problems. We were shooting in the dark a bit. And so once we launched, there was nothing solid supporting the products. We could have made them work with a bunch of effort and time, but the foundation of customer needs was missing, which meant the products were doomed. FYI and Nira were totally different. We lived and breathed the customer. This focus on the customer automatically bakes in learning, and also begets constant improvement of the product. We did all the research you can think of. Surveys (NPS, product/market fit, feature value analysis, pricing), customer research calls, sales discovery calls, user tests, user research calls, analyzing usage and funnels, competitor research. Because FYI and Nira started with the customer, our excitement never waned. We did, however, end up pivoting away from the document search product. That’s because we found a much bigger opportunity to pursue, and were pulled there by the customer (IT teams). And thanks for the excitement about Nira :) We’re excited too! And I can’t wait to see what you’ve been building too.

@marie_prokopets huh! that's really interesting because i saw a high level of customer obsession and research with dogo and draftsend, at least compared to what i would normally do 😛

@smalter Definitely not that much for dogo and Draftsend :) We just did a bit of UX research, and had a few conversations with users and potential customers but they were pretty biased.

@smalter @marie_prokopets Thanks for sharing the journey of learning. From the perspective of Activity Theory, Pivot means the Transformation of Object.

@smalter @marie_prokopets this is so excited to read, It actually normalice the different stage of struggling but how we need to keep going and focus on the customer until finding the right path.

Hi Matthew! Absolutely, we took tons of qualitative data (about competitors, the market, features, sales discovery calls, user tests and surveys) and made it quantitative (by counting it all and assigning values to each item) to make sure we were solving the right problem. We didn't have usage when we first started to work on our new product, so the only inputs we had were external.

@omerperchik thanks for the question! Hiten and I loved building the document search app, and would have continued working on it, except a better idea presented itself. We stumbled upon the idea for Nira (our new brand) when we were talking to one of our document search app customers. He was literally freaking out because people who shouldn't have had access to his company documents still did have access. Our tool showed him that, even though it wasn't what we built the tool for. In some cases, the people who were able to get into his documents had maintained access to company documents for years, even though they no longer worked with the company. We created some mock up designs for a new product that would solve the access issues, and shared them with some IT folks. That's when we realized that we were really on to something. Every IT team we talked to had the issue we wanted to solve. We were completely pulled to pivot. The toughest choice was deciding if we should build the IT tool in addition to document search, or focus entirely on the IT tool. So we took a bit of time to think about whether we should drop the document search tool. Here were a few things that helped us decide to focus entirely on the IT tool. - Committees ruled the buying process: In trying to sell our product to companies, we quickly learned that there was no one buyer or single owner for document search tools. Instead, there were committees. The committees, unfortunately, struggled to get consensus and make decisions. We met with committee after committee and saw enterprise search initiatives die again and again. - Too many apps: The need to build integrations for different collaboration apps was huge because every company used a different set of apps. Google Workspace, Office 365, Box, Dropbox, Dropbox Paper, Miro, Notion, Coda, Figma, and more. This meant we had to integrate with app after app. We ended up building 24 integrations before we paused the effort. - Inadequate APIs: We learned that early and new APIs, while exciting, are a drag. Some products took years to add APIs, and once they were ready we quickly realized their functionality was inadequate for what we needed to build. Plus, even the APIs of more established apps were missing information we needed to populate our interface. It became a never-ending mountain of work and even then it would lead to an inconsistent experience for our customers. - Adoption issues: Our goal was to have widespread adoption of our tool across an organization. It’s usually called “wall-to-wall” adoption. But oftentimes departments use specific tools in isolation from the rest of the company. Even though a company might use G Suite, the legal and finance teams might refuse to use it and instead collaborate on Office 365. How could we expect our search tool to get full company adoption if the collaboration apps can’t in the first place? - Locked down auth: Our strategy was to get adoption from the bottom up within companies. A groundswell of employee app usage would mean that we’d be able to sell in at the company level easier. Except many companies lock down the ability for employees to authenticate with apps without permission. Some even lock down the ability to download apps or install chrome extensions. We realized we wouldn’t be able to scale the business and get wall-to-wall adoption without a top-down sales motion.

@omerperchik @marie_prokopets Hi Marie, Typically (at least in my view) companies store documents internally and delegate employee access via Active Directory group membership/account. So your solution is for companies that store documents outside their networks correct?

@omerperchik @john_mirochnik you can check out our website here to learn more about how we solve the problem for IT teams: https://nira.com/. this is a problem that companies of all sizes have with their cloud-based document apps. as you can imagine we've built our product based on a ton of customer research, the method you mentioned where access to documents is clean and based on Active Directory groups isn't one that we've heard used by companies. in reality, document access is extremely messy and there's a ton of risk that companies are managing.

@marie_prokopets you mention that you and Hiten " loved building the document search app, and would have continued working on it, except a better idea presented itself." >> I'm curious what advice would you give someone entering the document search space? Is it a dead-end? It seems that the problem is real (I've seen it first hand!) and there aren't really good solutions out there (except for usefyi of course).

@dmarquez we believe that document search is still a massive opportunity. what we discovered is that in order to create the best possible experience possible for customers, it would take a level of engineering and product effort that - at the time - we were not willing to invest once we found the opportunity with Nira. The advice I would give to someone who is trying to build in the document search space is to really narrow down what apps they integrate with, deeply understand what the user and buyer personas are, and make sure the APIs they need to work with can enable the functionality for their target customers.

Hey @makohn ! Very good question :) I don't like to close the door forever on products we've built... So anything is possible in terms of reviving older products or building new versions of them. Primarily it's all about the customer - is this something the customer needs? Is it solving a painful problem for them? Do we have the bandwidth to work on that problem? What are we sacrificing by doing that? We also still use the products ourselves, like Draftsend and what used to be FYI (the document search app) so in that sense we still get value out of the products ourselves. As for products we've pivoted from, I will take the learnings from those any day over changing history and not doing what we did. We learned so so much and every iteration got us to the next. We literally wouldn't have been where we are with Nira had we not build the enterprise search app and learned everything we did. So on my end, there are no regrets in terms of products that we stopped focusing on.

@vishals If only starting a new alcohol brand were as easy as celebrity endorsement or marketing :) A ton goes into it, here are a few of the points: Category: Which category is the brand in? Is the category growing? Is the product you want to make going to fit well into the category? Will it be differentiated? Brand: What does the label design look like? What's the name of the product? What bottle shape will it have? Packaging design: What's the packaging going to look like? This includes the label, and any elements of the bottle like the glass and stopper/cork. This will need to all be considered with the lens of materials cost, too. Flavor profile and liquid: What's the product taste like? Is there a special way to produce the liquid? Does it take time and sit in barrels first? For how long? Are there special flavor notes you're trying to create? Sourcing / supply chain: Where are you getting the packaging? Is it cost effective? Is the quality there? Can they give you the quantities you need? In the time you need them? How about the liquid - how are you going to create that? Do you have a good facility to produce it? How do you get the final package to the distributor? Finance/Planning: You'll need to figure out how much everything costs, how much you need, how much you'll sell the product for. Sales: Who is selling the product for you? How do you get it to distributors? Are they incentivized to sell it in to retailers? Marketing: There's a ton of positioning work to be done on the brand before it launches. How much money do you have to spend on this? How will you reach people? What marketing are you doing in the store? There are a million ways to market alcohol brands, so there are a lot of choices to make. This is also where celebrity endorsements/deals come in. Legal / regulatory: There's a ton (at least in the US) to do on the regulatory landscape. You'll need approvals from the TTB and that can take time.

@melissajoykong Hey Melissa! I love that you've identified the social pressure to have one "thing", and that you see yourself as a "multi-passionate person". Knowing you and your interests, I would absolutely call you a multi-passionate person, and I think that's beautiful. It's so wonderful that we as humans have the skills to be good at many things at once, to shift our careers and lives, to learn new things, and even start over in our 50s or 60s with new skills. I think oftentimes we can create lots of stories about why something we're doing is wrong or bad or will be negatively perceived. I've had my fair share of stories. "If I tell people about my raunchy comedy scripts, they won't think I'm professional" "If anyone finds out I'm into crystals they'll judge me" "How can I be bad ass at business and also woo woo spiritual?" "I need to dress uber professionally for anyone to take me seriously, even if I hate what I have to wear." These are literally just stories and not based in reality. It's your brain trying to keep you safe. You can either ignore the stories, or rewrite them. For example, I am a multi-passionate person and people love me for it. Or, I've got a lot of passions and I'm even more of a gift to the world thanks to them. You are awesome no matter what you do Melissa! And the fact that you can do so many things and have so many interests makes you even more amazing, because it's the truest manifestation of who you are. My advice to you and anyone else who has or hasn't figured out their "one thing" is just to be yourself. Unapologetically yourself. That's what will make you happiest and makes the world a better place!

Hi @vartikamanasvi, I really really love these questions, thank you for asking them! Q: How do you find focus in this world that is noisy and chaotic? I think of the world as having lots of channels that I can tune to, and I then choose the channels I want to focus on. For example, one channel I avoid indulging in too much is social media. I never have the Facebook app installed on my phone. I also delete Instagram every time I notice myself spending too much time on it. And I don't put Twitter on my phone either! Any social media apps go into a folder on my phone called "Say aloud before opening" so I remind myself to be present to the fact that I'm going on them by literally calling it out, out loud. I also know what channels I want to focus on, like my business, coming from my heart, being happy, productive, laughing, relaxing and filling myself up (like with nature), and my friends and family. When my life deviates from the things I want to focus on, I do a lot of reflection and look to figure out why and what I can do to get back on course. It's not easy work at all, but it's absolutely worth it. Q: I'm curious how do you think about your life's work and purpose? As a general rule, I believe that the more I work on myself, the better person I will be for all the people I encounter in the world. Even when things are tough, I hold on to this belief, and the knowledge that I will come out of tough situations as a better person who can make a bigger/better positive impact on the world around me. I do this through a lot of self development - things like journaling, identifying patterns I want to change, thinking about how I can evolve/grow, being present to how I am in each moment. Years ago a dear friend taught me about the concept of being a gift to the world - the aim is to be the best gift to the world that you possibly can be. This enabled me to be happy, go after achievements, learn, and live life how I wanted to. All because it would result in a positive impact for those around me. This is how I look at my life's work and purpose. So one simple question to ask yourself is, how can I be the biggest gift to the world? On a more practical level, I allow myself to have goals and desires, but also allow for my path to be shaped by chance (and perhaps a bit of destiny, too). I've had a bit of a meandering career (undergrad in business, MA in english literature, consulting, corporate strategy/innovation, comedy writing, startup founder). In some cases I failed to do the thing I wanted to do, which led me to change paths. And in others I chose a different path when something new was presented to me. What helps is to release attachment to the outcome, and to allow what arises to arise. I also think it's OK to not have a clear answer about one's life purpose and work. It's OK to figure it out as you go. The journey is full of learning and growth - and (in my opinion) that's really what matters the most.

Hi @chiew_soon_aik Totally understand your surprise, we were very bullish on the opportunity we were pursuing and we didn't have to walk away from it, we chose to. Said another way, we could have kept going with document search and built that business and been happy. But we found a much more appealing opportunity in document access control. In terms of what we would do differently to ensure a higher success rate, we wouldn't do anything differently. We wouldn't be where we are today without things being exactly as they were. Businesses evolve and it all happens based on learning, so in my opinion the pivot was a normal part of growing and building a startup. I also answered a similar question to yours here: https://www.producthunt.com/disc... Also stay tuned for more insightful and transparent updates soon :)

Hi @inboundy! Here’s what I look at when it comes to M&A and investment. I may have missed a few things, so feel free to ask followups :) Market - How large is the market today? How large can it be in the future? - What characteristics does the market have? - What about margins / financials? - What kind of complexities does the market have? (for example, lots of regulations, supply chain issues, high costs, etc.) - Are there tons of competitors? - Are there no competitors? Why? - What are the barriers to entry? - What are the market risks? What is the likelihood of those risks hurting the company? - Can the company overcome negative market dynamics? Why/how? Team - How kickass is this team? - Are they flexible? - How quickly do they learn? - What competencies does the team have? - What deficiencies does the team have? Can they overcome them? - How mature is the team? How well do they take feedback and evolve based on it? - Have they done this before? - Are they thoughtful? - Do they move quickly? - Do they handle setbacks gracefully/bounce back quickly? - What are their values? - For an acquisition, will the founders be involved? In what capacity can they help? Are they a valuable asset for the brand? Product and customer - What makes this product special? - Who is the customer? What are their attributes? - Who is the buyer? What are their attributes? - Does the buyer/customer have budget for this product? - What do customers think about the product? - What is the customer pain this product is solving? - Is the product hard to build? Growth potential - Why will this product become huge? - What is going to propel company growth? - Is the brand well known? - What can be done to grow the product even more? If the deal is an acquisition, there are also a bunch of considerations around why the team/brand/product is a good addition, like cost savings, upsells for customers, the addition of technical expertise, etc. All of this said, acquisitions and investments are often more emotional and less fact based. A competitor might be ominously looming, ready to snatch up customers, and so a company makes a less than rational decision to acquire it or another similar business. A brand has a cool factor that an executive really wants, so they make the deal go through. Someone wants a piece of technology, so they overpay to get it. As much as people try and try to objectively quantify, numbers can help tell the story that someone wants to project.

@mrcpiras Hi Marco! Here is my favorite way to learn new skills: Do it! Diving right in to the new skill is the best way to learn it. Even if you feel uncomfortable. Even if you're worried that you can't do it. Just dive right in. The more you think "this is new and hard" the harder it will be to learn the new skill. If at all possible, don't even think about how you don't know much about the skill. My current Slack status is "Just get started" - the idea is if you just begin the task, you're more likely to get it done :) Repeat! Keep at it, even if initially you aren't as good as you'd like to be. Practice makes perfect :) Or at least, good enough. Be present! Observe how you're progressing at learning the new skill. Being present to how you're doing helps you understand where you should dig in even more. Observe where you can improve, and then focus there. Be kind to yourself! Don't get critical if you can't do something right away. Learning new skills can take time, and that's ok. Ask questions! This is key. Feel empowered to ask any and all questions you have. Getting answers to your questions helps you learn faster. Don't be embarrassed about the questions, and don't overthink it. Just ask! I do have to say Marco, you are great at this 😃 Seek knowledge! If it's possible, learn about the new skill from experts. Read about it from people who have done it before. At the very least, you'll feel more comfortable and confident, which will help you learn faster.

@marie_prokopets thanks Marie! Historically I've been more focused on learning from experts rather than trying to do it myself. Now I'm trying to switch my focus and spend less time learning from others and more time learning from my experience. Surely there's a balance and I'm trying to find what that balance looks like for me :) Interesting that you mentioned to be present to how you're doing. I journal my progress in... you'll like this: documents! I've a document for any skill I'm learning and I write down my biggest learnings there.

@mrcpiras I love this Marco!!! So good that you're keeping track of learnings. Also probably is helpful for you to see how much you're growing :)

@mrcpiras I started meditating as a kid! At the time, a thick paperback book about yogis drew my attention at the bookstore (this was back before buying books online was a thing or reading them on Kindles, of course). I really loved the pictures of people meditating in the book, and I would mimic the poses, sitting silently in lotus position with my eyes closed and focusing on my posture. I wasn't able to meditate for long periods then, but I did feel grounded and peaceful. So back when I first started, I didn't really have a knowledge base or discipline. Now, I'd say I'm much more confident and have a deeper understanding of what meditation means and does to me. Now, as soon as I sit down to meditate and close my eyes I drop in (to the quiet and the energy of it all) pretty quickly. I tend to meditate in silence without any specific methodology, but I do sometimes use a few practices (breath work, posture, visualizations, guided meditations). I do sometimes get caught up in my thoughts, though I do my best to be present to them and allow them to pass without attaching to them. I tend to like to meditate for 15-20 minutes at a time, though even a few minutes is quite helpful.

@marie_prokopets funny that what drew you to meditation initially were the poses. They're quite fascinating indeed! I started meditating because of the general health benefits and I've never paid much attention to the poses. Maybe that can be my next step! :D

@sharfunnisa_quadri I attribute my success across lots of different industries/jobs primarily to the many, many years I've had to do all of those things 😂. I've personally always optimized for learning, and doing so as quickly as I could. And when a certain planned path didn't materialize, I quickly switched to something else. This includes things like going from my MA in English Literature to a corporate writing job to consulting, as well as pivoting from dogo to Draftsend to FYI to Nira. So it's a combination of not being too attached to a particular outcome, and pursuing as many learning opportunities as quickly as possible. The idea is to learn and shift as quickly as possible. From a customer context, you should always be improving whatever it is that you've built to solve customer problems in the best way possible.

@5harath Hi Sharath! Thanks for having me :) "1. From a mental state, how did you take the pivot?" I was so very excited! We had found an opportunity that was even larger than the initial document search opportunity. And we were having so much interest from IT teams, so it was clear signal that people would buy our product. But then, enter in the doubt. I was worried - were we wrong? Would we regret focusing on document access control and stopping our work on document search? The doubt was quickly demolished by logic. We dove right in to understanding the rationale for changing directions, and why the new direction was way more appealing than the old. FOMO can pop up, but it's easy to get rid of, too. "2. What advice you give for founders who are still in PMF phase and also thinking about pivoting?" My advice to founders who are thinking about pivoting is to be absolutely sure about the pivot. Ask yourself all the questions - the hard ones included. Are you sure it's the right direction? Is your hunch backed by data and customer insights? Can you build the product you want to build? Will people buy it? Why are you dropping the other thing you were working on before? Why are you pivoting in the first place? Is it for the right reasons? Inquiry should help you get to the right answer - document what you learn and make sure you're being real and unbiased. And of course, make sure you've talked to customers and done your research.

@abrengues Great questions! "Do you think that you could have avoid this pivot with a stronger research approach? Do you have modified your research approach with the insights you gained from this experience ?" No additional amount of research would have caused us to pivot sooner. We didn't drop the document search focus because it was a bad idea or a bad product. Instead, we had to pursue the product for IT because the opportunity was even more massive. Every single thing we learned in building the search app was incredibly useful to us in building the document access control product. We couldn't have even figured out the opportunity for Nira had it not been for the enterprise search app. And we did TONS of research. I wouldn't change anything about the research and we haven't changed our methodology at all. In hindsight, I wouldn't change a single thing about our entire journey with the search app, except maybe deciding to focus on the new product about 2 weeks earlier than when we eventually decided to go all in on it.

Hi @oyeakhil - Best of luck on your pivot! Here's how to confirm if you should pivot. - Tons and tons of research: Is the new problem you want to solve a painful problem? Everything from surveys (NPS, feature value analysis, pricing), to customer research calls, and sales discovery calls. Plus loads of user testing (5 second tests and regular user tests), user research calls, and robust competitor research. Quantify this research as much as possible (by doing counts) so that it's not biased. - Customer interest: Make sure that it's clear that people want your product. Do you have people agreeing to POCs? Are they ready to sign paperwork? Are you sure that what you're going to build will get purchased? - Technical Chops: Does your team have what's required to build the product you want to build? - What are you giving up: Are you sure the thing you're giving up on is worth giving up? Is this absolutely a better direction? - Team interest: Is your team interested in the new direction? Is it something you want to build? - Market: Is the market big and growing? Is there space for you? Are you creating a new market (if yes, do you have the chops to do that?)?

@pradipcloud Hi Pradip! On the customer learning and execution side we really didn't have any obstacles. We were lucky to get large customers early and to learn from them and keep iterating the product. The biggest obstacles we hit was making a quick decision to put all of our focus on Nira, instead of working on the document search app. Initially, we wanted to build everything. Which included new features for the search app, plus the entirely new business. Hiten and I got pushed by one of our investors about that decision, which helped kick off our thinking seriously about choosing one direction over another. We were super super super convicted about the document access product. So the question was, was it worth pursuing the search app anymore? The answer was a big no, after we reflected more about the category and what it would take for us to keep building a product in it. We still think we build a really powerful product, but the choice between building a product for IT vs the search product was quite easy for us to make! As for SOC 2 (and now ISO for us too) experiences, I cannot wait to share more soon :)

@marie_prokopets Thank you, Marie 🙏

@aaron_chiandet Hi Aaron! Take a look at my answer to Jonathan's question above yours, which covers being customer obsessed and answering specific questions for the team based on customer learnings. The key for us at Nira is to focus on the customer and share learnings with the team. That way the alignment is automatically built in. And if you hire folks who really care about the customer, they'll be engaged too! Another thing to consider is, what makes you so sure about the idea/course of action? If you can help explain your thought process and what evidence is keeping you engaged and contributing to your decision, the team should be able to get there too. It's all about context and taking them on the same journey you've been on.

Hi Avinash, we use customer development to address these sorts of challenges at Nira. This video explains the basics of the process:

@marie_prokopets Thanks!

Hi @hnshah! Surprising to see you here. 😹 What a question, too! "What's the #1 piece of advice that you wish that you could have given your younger self before you took your first job out of college?" My first job was actually after my graduate degree 2 years post college. I would have told myself then (and I'm sure you would argue that I could tell myself this same thing today) to be more sure of myself. Even though I didn't have the experience or the specific knowledge. Being sure of myself would have helped propel me forward faster. I would have asked for more money sooner, have been more confident and likely been promoted faster, have taken bigger risks and spoken up more. What would you tell your younger self right out of college? 🙃

@marie_prokopets thanks for indulging my question. I'd tell myself to learn how to ask other people to help you.