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When do you stop pivoting?

Dear community,

I wonder when, during the customer development and subsequent pivoting, you decide to freeze the model and go for implementation.

For sure, there are time and money constraints which might limit this refining process. However, I would like to understand what can guide the closing, beside the usual gut feelings.

What is your experience?

Thank you

Fabrizio

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Permalink Reply by Tendayi Viki on May 8, 2012 at 1:18pm

The search for a sustainable business model should ideally stop when you have found one. So you stop when you have product-market fit (http://www.ashmaurya.com/2009/11/achievingproductmarketfit/). Which means you must specify what that looks like in terms of financial numbers (e.g. customer conversion rates, price points, cost of acquisition etc). Without specifying before hand what a successful business model will look like in financial terms (or customer engagement), you can't really even know whether to pivot or not... Gut feeling is exactly what customer development is meant to remove from the process. Sure, there is some level of judgement for you to make, but this must be informed by key metrics identified early in the customer development process....