A letter from a first-time founder who pivoted after Series A

Given our recent milestone of $1.5M ARR after our pivot (1.5 years back), we have decided to distribute additional 1.17% of the company in the form of Esops to all the employees currently working with us, which made me write this letter.

I wanted to share my learnings with the world! Hoping this could help.

So, back in September 2021, we raised our Series A from a fund in India, it happened right after six months of raising our seed from YC and other angels. We decided to pivot close to about seven months after our series A and officially onboarded our first paying customer in November 2022.

The pivot seemed obvious and a smart decision to me and my co-founder (because it was not essentially a pivot, it was an upscaled product in the same (ecommerce) ecosystem and a GTM to sell it to mid-market and enterprise customers).

Fast forward to today, April 2024 - we have almost touched ~1.5M$ ARR

There were learnings that I would like to reflect and share with you all:

• Trust YOUR intuition and gut, not others!: It is right when it feels right. You would get multiple advices from multiple folks - some would say to not pivot, some would say they don't see the potential on the next thing that you have in mind, some would even say that since you couldn't scale up the first, problem must be in you! - But ignore all! Founder always is the best person to know the answer, because you are the closest to the customer.

• Ignore media noise: Usually, media likes to write what they are paid for or what could become a clickbait. When you pivot, there will be lot of things in haywire, and that gives an opportunity for folks to use it and turn it into a negative story. But trust me, ignoring is the best remedy, ignoring is your strength, focusing heads down on the product that you are trying to build should be the only thing in your mind. There would be multiple times when folks around would use it to de-motivate you, but that should become your strength and motivation to shut them all!

• Do sales yourself, don't try to fit in your existing sales team to the new one: Because product will take time to get built and you can't just try using your past product's sales team to sell again for you. Its time for you to jump into the ground and do the sales!

• Have a PMF metric in your mind before you take a final decision to pivot: For me, personally, the metric was to hit $1M with $0 marketing budget, if we are able to achieve it, we would at-least in our minds consider it a successful pivot and early signs of PMF. :) And oh boy, we did it. ;) To re-iterate this could be a different metric for every startup and founder!

• Pre-empt the pivot instead of waiting too long to make a decision: Pivots are hard, usually because of the inertia from the outside world. Indian startup ecosystem is still not very mature to look pivots from a growth lense, so you are going to get a lot of push backs, especially if your revenue is growing in your current product, which was the case with us! We pivoted when we had >80% of our capital raised in bank, and our revenue was growing MoM. But as a founder, you foresee the trend, the TAM, and visualise a map which can help you to make the pivot sooner than later.

• Communicate hard and constantly with team: Given your mission statement might change with the pivot, aligning everyone whom you had hired earlier to this mission is going to become one single major task that you would need to take care of. Best way to do it is by starting to become as transparent as possible, celebrate small wins, celebrate each little product development cycle and make sure everyone hears the noise of early deals that you have started to close! Lead by example, by picking up things end to end. But obviously, there would be cases where you clearly see no alignment with your new mission, I feel best remedy to this is to part ways in the journey as early as possible to minimise the damage. This is one lesson we learned with time :)

• Last but not the least! No pressure mate! Its entrepreneurship, its a ship that you have jumped in to build something incredible, that adds value to universe, every challenge that you are going through is already being navigated by another similar entrepreneur, you already would have a lot of pressure from external world, but become your best friend in the journey. Have your team as your number 1 support system and your co-founder as your darling friend. It will all turn out well eventually.

PS: The blessing in disguise about pivots is you slowly realise who are your real supporters, backbone, and believes in you fully irrespective of whatever you pick up! Its easier than ever to build your circle of trust! - which imho is the most important part of any entrepreneur's journey.