The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [66]
Luckily, the Path team had the courage to ignore this fear and focus on what their customers said. As a result, they were able to get essential early feedback from actual customers. Path’s goal is to create a more personal social network that maintains its quality over time. Many people have had the experience of being overconnected on existing social networks, sharing with past coworkers, high school friends, relatives, and colleagues. Such broad groups make it hard to share intimate moments. Path took an unusual approach. For example, it limited the number of connections to fifty, based on brain research by the anthropologist Robin Dunbar at Oxford. His research suggests that fifty is roughly the number of personal relationships in any person’s life at any given time.
For members of the tech press (and many tech early adopters) this “artificial” constraint on the number of connections was anathema. They routinely use new social networking products with thousands of connections. Fifty seemed way too small. As a result, Path endured a lot of public criticism, which was hard to ignore. But customers flocked to the platform, and their feedback was decidedly different from the negativity in the press. Customers liked the intimate moments and consistently wanted features that were not on the original product road map, such as the ability to share how friends’ pictures made them feel and the ability to share “video moments.”
Dave Morin summed up his experience this way:
The reality of our team and our backgrounds built up a massive wall of expectations. I don’t think it would have mattered what we would have released; we would have been met with expectations that are hard to live up to. But to us it just meant we needed to get our product and our vision out into the market broadly in order to get feedback and to begin iteration. We humbly test our theories and our approach to see what the market thinks. Listen to feedback honestly. And continue to innovate in the directions we think will create meaning in the world.
Path’s story is just beginning, but already their courage in facing down critics is paying off. If and when they need to pivot, they won’t be hampered by fear. They recently raised $8.5 million in venture capital in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In doing so, Path reportedly turned down an acquisition offer for $100 million from Google.2
THE PIVOT OR PERSEVERE MEETING
The decision to pivot requires a clear-eyed and objective mind-set. We’ve discussed the telltale signs of the need to pivot: the decreasing effectiveness of product experiments and the general feeling that product development should be more productive. Whenever you see those symptoms, consider a pivot.
The decision to pivot is emotionally charged for any startup and has to be addressed in a structured way. One way to mitigate this challenge is to schedule the meeting in advance. I recommend that every startup have a regular “pivot or persevere” meeting. In my experience, less than a few weeks between meetings is too often and more than a few months is too infrequent. However, each startup needs to find its own pace.
Each pivot or persevere meeting requires the participation of both the product development and business leadership teams. At IMVU, we also added the perspectives of outside advisers who could help us see past our