Have you ever pivoted your business / idea? 💡

Pivoting was a big theme for us before we found product-market fit. We originally built what’s now dibsido.com just for one client to manage their company pool cars. That’s when we saw the potential to offer it to others. But once we hit the market, we quickly realized every company handles these bookings differently, and it wasn’t going to scale easily.

Talking to potential customers opened new doors. One of the first real shifts was adding parking booking as a standalone feature. Then COVID hit, and suddenly companies were asking if we could help with desk and meeting room bookings too, and ideally, all in one place.

So yeah, it wasn’t a straight line. But listening to the market and evolving the product around real needs made all the difference. I’d say we’re on the right path now!

TL;DR: We pivoted by listening, learning, and building what the market actually asked for :)

Great question — that’s something I think about every day. At Octopus, we’re constantly exploring new pivots to expand our audience. We originally built it as a simple sitemap tool, but later we added features like page content and asset collaboration. That turned out to be a valuable direction that significantly broadened how people use our tool.

But the journey is full of surprises. In fact, most experiments won’t work out as planned. For example, we recently launched a website publisher that lets users generate a basic site from their sitemap and content. It sounded promising, but the results didn’t meet our expectations.

My advice: always keep looking for ways to grow your audience, and test pivots with as little effort as possible. Try to visualize what success looks like — lower churn, higher retention, or new user acquisition — and let that guide your experiments.

I started six companies and pivoted six times, some were successful (1 IPO, 3 M&A) and one totally flopped so I think I am qualified to talk about pivots :-)
I captured what I’ve learned in this blog post: Persist or Pivot? The Founder's Hardest Decision.
It’s a simple framework to help you decide when it’s time to pivot.

TL;DR: Do it sooner than you think...

Maybe not a full-on pivot, but something very close!

While working on a tool to manage prompts for LLMs, I kept wishing I had a fast, minimal speech-to-text solution. Something that would just sit quietly in the background and spring to life only when needed. Most tools I found were subscription-based, which felt excessive for something that could run locally on a modern Mac. And respect user privacy and wallet as well.

So I ended up building the tool I needed. What started as an idea for a utility inside the prompt manager became its own product: Harker. I already had the OS integrations, the global shortcut, the paste automation... so a bit part of the core was there. I just focused on making it solid and invisible.

The Product Hunt launch didn’t blow up like some of my past ones (launching the same day as Cursor 1.0, Vercel, and Eleven Labs didn’t help 😅), but Harker was featured in the Product Hunt newsletter, which was an incredibly nice surprise!
And more importantly: a lot of people are finding it useful and integrating it into their daily workflows, as I do. I use it every single day, including right now to "write" this comment!

Fun twist: I’m now using Harker even to rebuild the original prompt manager it came from. (Stay tuned for that)

The product vision didn't pivoted per say but it took us a while to define what is the problem we are solving. We started with mental health, but it was too generic, depression but it didn't sound very urgent, authenticity ... no one wakes up in the morning and decided "today I will become my authenticity self". Finally after over 6 months of back and forth we defined the problem that people were able to understand straight away - loneliness.

Not exactly pivoting, but

1) I re-built the whole UI to make it more simple,
and

2) Removing a lot of features and reducing the scope of the first version.

Yes, I do. In 2022, I was building QuickTable, a no-code data transformation product. After interview some potential customers, I found that the product is still complex to Non-Technical guys. But in Dec 2022, I decided to try if I can do SEO for this website using AI and we built an internal tool to create SEO-optimized blogs using AI. The result is pretty good and we can have more than 3000 clicks per day in March 2023. Then we make the internal tool as a product named QuickCreator and pivot to this product. We have been working on QuickCreator for more than two years and have more than 1000 paying customers and around 50000 sign up users. Because we have a lot of enterprise customers now, we are adding more content marketing capability in our platform now.

Yes, I’ve pivoted based on user feedback and evolving needs. Each pivot brought more clarity and alignment with the problem worth solving.

Yes, I’ve pivoted to better align with user needs and market demand. Each pivot helped refine the vision and build a more impactful products.

It's completely normal—once you realize a path isn't working, you should pivot quickly. This reminds me of our experience building a knowledge management product in China. Initially, we aimed for the toB market, but soon realized that success in this field depended more on business owners than end users. Many business owners didn't recognize the value knowledge management could bring to their companies, which made it difficult for us to gain traction in toB. Faced with this challenge, we decisively shifted our strategy to focus on toC, targeting note-taking and small team collaboration scenarios. Our product quickly gained popularity among individuals and small teams. This strategic shift eventually led us to a new toB approach—starting from small teams, expanding to multiple teams, and ultimately reaching entire organizations

We did! We started out building a feature-heavy productivity tool customizable dashboards, integrations, analytics… all of it. But early users didn’t care about customizing anything. What we kept hearing was:

“Can you just do this for me?”

That insight forced us to step back. The pivot wasn’t about adding new features it was about removing friction. We shifted our entire thinking from “tools to manage tasks” to “commands that complete them.”

That’s exactly why Tiny Command resonated. It doesn’t teach the user to do more it does more for the user. It’s not just a product pivot, it’s a mindset pivot. And it’s surprisingly rare.

Love the direction you’ve taken.

Completed pivoted in an interesting way.

Was giving consulting services in Sales, Gen AI and Software Delivery.

Through my consulting in sales, I was solving winnability and long sales cycle problems. I had been able to convert 70% deals in my life but it was always tough to have others adopt the same method.

Then one day the 3 services mingled in my mind and gave birth to 2 products which are now close to launch.

I had never thought that there could be a product to solve those problems. For the first product, I was not convinced that it was good -- so I kept it on the back burner. Only when I myself had the need for that product at least 2 times in next 3 months, did i pick it up again.

And then there was the grind to find ways in Gen AI that did not exist (I was surprised to learn that despite all the hype, we were still not there). But it was immensely joyful working through all the challenges and finally having it all ready.

Also, it's interesting that more than a couple of investors (2 big ones included) have approached me as they want to invest...even before launch. I have not decided to go on that path yet and continue to be bootstrapped.

Fingers crossed.

I'm currently pivoting from a product I worked on for 2 years to another, in the same field (language learning), but it's a relatively big change. Initial feedback is good, and I'm still of the belief this was the right call. Time will tell. My regret is not thinking about the business model in Take 1 with much more care initially, and avoiding a lot of time spent learning that the hard way. Same old story, right? :)

Yup - pivoted once, and honestly, glad we did.

We started with a tool that was supposed to streamline internal scheduling for teams. But while testing, we noticed solo creators and consultants hacking it for external bookings. That wasn’t our “target user” at all, but the use case was so clear we couldn’t ignore it.

So we leaned into it. Redesigned the product for outbound scheduling, stripped the bloat, and now it’s a free alternative to Calendly with all the premium stuff unlocked.

The pivot didn’t just change the product, it clarified the problem we were solving. And once that clicked, everything else got easier- messaging, growth, feedback, all of it.

Sometimes the market tells you where to go, you just have to listen.

Yeah, big time. Started with a study app, but users kept asking for social features — so we pivoted to a study group hangout instead. Way more engagement, way less solo grind. Totally saved the project.