🌪️ Pivot Without Dying

👋 Hey — Egemen here.

I listened to a 9 year old podcast this week and it’s still relevant today.

Most pivots fail for one boring reason: they change the story without changing the truth.

Founders sense momentum slowing down, then reach for the fastest-feeling lever: a new audience, a viral feature, a trend, a “platform” narrative, or a cheaper price.

Those moves are emotionally satisfying because they feel like action.
They are also the easiest ways to waste months.

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🧠 Deep-Dive: Pivot Without Dying

I honestly don’t know why or how but I ended up going into VC dark web this week and ended up listening to a full podcast of a16z released in Feb 2017.

Jokes aside, a pivot that works is simpler and harder at the same time.

It is a deliberate decision to double down on what is already demonstrably working, then rebuild the company around that evidence.

Make no mistake, sometimes these things come as a last ditch effort for a story that’s about to end, but sometimes it’s vital.

So, here are two groups of pivots that you can go about:

• The common pivots that look rational but usually backfire

• The pivot types that tend to compound your existing strengths instead of resetting them

To avoid confusion, a pivot is not shipping more. It’s not “a new feature.”
It is not “building a new AI layer” for the sake of it.

A real pivot changes at least one of these:

1. Buyer: who pays

2. User: who uses

3. Problem: what job you solve

4. Approach: how you solve it (workflow, distribution, architecture, model)

5. Market frame: the category customers use to understand and buy it

For example, I’ve never seen any of these pivots working within my ecosystem:

• B2B → Consumer: Enterprise selling strengths, channels, and product expectations rarely translate to consumer distribution and habit-driven retention.

• Adding chat/social/notifications: Engagement layers don’t create demand when the core product isn’t already essential.

• Adding AI/Web3/whatever’s trending: Trend add-ons don’t materially change user outcomes, so novelty wears off and churn stays.

• Paid → Free: Low willingness to pay usually signals weak perceived value, and free scales indifference faster than adoption.

👉 The best pivots are commitments: fewer users, fewer promises, fewer features, clearer outcomes.

That is what creates speed without chaos, and change without dying.

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