I’m Marie, my startup just pivoted and rebranded, AMA 🔥

Hi @chris_muth ! Early on, Hiten and I didn't divide that much because we were building the foundation of the business. Later, we ended up dividing who owned what by category, like Sales, Marketing, Product, Legal/Compliance, etc. And just because one of us owns something, it doesn't mean we won't collaborate on some of the tasks. The framework we use is simply, who is Batman and who is Robin on a given segment or set of tasks. And we also allow the responsibility splits to change over time as the organization grows. For example, Hiten might own one set of tasks, but as we scale and hire people it may move over to me. We also make sure to play on our innate skills and our knowledge base. For example, I am super detail oriented and have a lot of experience working on contracts and with lawyers, so I end up owning all things legal and compliance related.

Thanks @marie_prokopets !

@5harath Hi Sharath! Thanks for having me :) "1. From a mental state, how did you take the pivot?" I was so very excited! We had found an opportunity that was even larger than the initial document search opportunity. And we were having so much interest from IT teams, so it was clear signal that people would buy our product. But then, enter in the doubt. I was worried - were we wrong? Would we regret focusing on document access control and stopping our work on document search? The doubt was quickly demolished by logic. We dove right in to understanding the rationale for changing directions, and why the new direction was way more appealing than the old. FOMO can pop up, but it's easy to get rid of, too. "2. What advice you give for founders who are still in PMF phase and also thinking about pivoting?" My advice to founders who are thinking about pivoting is to be absolutely sure about the pivot. Ask yourself all the questions - the hard ones included. Are you sure it's the right direction? Is your hunch backed by data and customer insights? Can you build the product you want to build? Will people buy it? Why are you dropping the other thing you were working on before? Why are you pivoting in the first place? Is it for the right reasons? Inquiry should help you get to the right answer - document what you learn and make sure you're being real and unbiased. And of course, make sure you've talked to customers and done your research.

@melissajoykong Hey Melissa! I love that you've identified the social pressure to have one "thing", and that you see yourself as a "multi-passionate person". Knowing you and your interests, I would absolutely call you a multi-passionate person, and I think that's beautiful. It's so wonderful that we as humans have the skills to be good at many things at once, to shift our careers and lives, to learn new things, and even start over in our 50s or 60s with new skills. I think oftentimes we can create lots of stories about why something we're doing is wrong or bad or will be negatively perceived. I've had my fair share of stories. "If I tell people about my raunchy comedy scripts, they won't think I'm professional" "If anyone finds out I'm into crystals they'll judge me" "How can I be bad ass at business and also woo woo spiritual?" "I need to dress uber professionally for anyone to take me seriously, even if I hate what I have to wear." These are literally just stories and not based in reality. It's your brain trying to keep you safe. You can either ignore the stories, or rewrite them. For example, I am a multi-passionate person and people love me for it. Or, I've got a lot of passions and I'm even more of a gift to the world thanks to them. You are awesome no matter what you do Melissa! And the fact that you can do so many things and have so many interests makes you even more amazing, because it's the truest manifestation of who you are. My advice to you and anyone else who has or hasn't figured out their "one thing" is just to be yourself. Unapologetically yourself. That's what will make you happiest and makes the world a better place!

@aaron_chiandet Hi Aaron! Take a look at my answer to Jonathan's question above yours, which covers being customer obsessed and answering specific questions for the team based on customer learnings. The key for us at Nira is to focus on the customer and share learnings with the team. That way the alignment is automatically built in. And if you hire folks who really care about the customer, they'll be engaged too! Another thing to consider is, what makes you so sure about the idea/course of action? If you can help explain your thought process and what evidence is keeping you engaged and contributing to your decision, the team should be able to get there too. It's all about context and taking them on the same journey you've been on.

Hey @makohn ! Very good question :) I don't like to close the door forever on products we've built... So anything is possible in terms of reviving older products or building new versions of them. Primarily it's all about the customer - is this something the customer needs? Is it solving a painful problem for them? Do we have the bandwidth to work on that problem? What are we sacrificing by doing that? We also still use the products ourselves, like Draftsend and what used to be FYI (the document search app) so in that sense we still get value out of the products ourselves. As for products we've pivoted from, I will take the learnings from those any day over changing history and not doing what we did. We learned so so much and every iteration got us to the next. We literally wouldn't have been where we are with Nira had we not build the enterprise search app and learned everything we did. So on my end, there are no regrets in terms of products that we stopped focusing on.

@pradipcloud Hi Pradip! On the customer learning and execution side we really didn't have any obstacles. We were lucky to get large customers early and to learn from them and keep iterating the product. The biggest obstacles we hit was making a quick decision to put all of our focus on Nira, instead of working on the document search app. Initially, we wanted to build everything. Which included new features for the search app, plus the entirely new business. Hiten and I got pushed by one of our investors about that decision, which helped kick off our thinking seriously about choosing one direction over another. We were super super super convicted about the document access product. So the question was, was it worth pursuing the search app anymore? The answer was a big no, after we reflected more about the category and what it would take for us to keep building a product in it. We still think we build a really powerful product, but the choice between building a product for IT vs the search product was quite easy for us to make! As for SOC 2 (and now ISO for us too) experiences, I cannot wait to share more soon :)

@marie_prokopets Thank you, Marie 🙏

@scott_hanford Hi Scott! There are 3 different types of pivots: - Product Pivot - You learn that one part of your product is way stickier than the rest, and your customers care a lot more about it. - Customer Pivot - You learn that there is a new segment of customers willing to pay more for your product than your current customers. - Problem Pivot - As you talk to your customers and do research, you discover they have way bigger problems than the ones you’re trying to solve. The way you end up thinking about the pivot and the frameworks you use depend on the type of pivot it is. Ours was a Problem Pivot - there was simply a way more painful problem for us to solve, and for a very specific customer (IT). I'm pasting a bit from my response to Sanchit Korgaonkar here to explain how we validated the need to pivot and what our decision matrix was: - Customer Need - Is there a customer problem and need? The problem was there and super painful. We had folks lined up to use our product, and had interest from large customers and hyper-growth companies. It was very clear, and the more we dug in, the more conviction we had to pivot. - Technical Chops - Did we have what it would take to build this product? And do it really well? The answer was absolutely yes! We had learned all about working with APIs from the search app (we integrated with 24 collaboration apps). And we had a ton of knowledge that we'd learned over the years that we could use on the document access control product. We basically had years of experience, knowledge and tech that fit perfectly with the new direction. - Our Interest - We as a team had to be interested in the new direction. Or else, why build it? We were already in the document space, so it was an easy switch. We also love solving customer problems, so in that sense it was so so easy to shift our focus, since the customer problem was clear. And very painful for customers!

Hi @designerbaniya So glad to hear that you followed along in our emails! Check out my response to Scott Hanford about the frameworks we used to determine if we should pivot. In terms of how folks responded, I've covered how our team responded in my response to Jonathan Ng. The customers for the document access control product were totally different from our document search customers, and we kept the document search app working for folks, so there wasn't anything to handle there. We of course made sure that the new problem we were going after (helping teams protect company documents) was painful and worth pursuing. We did this through a lot of customer research and by actually acquiring early customers with hundreds and thousands of employees. Our investors took the news incredibly well, because we had the customer research and adoption to back it. As long as you start with the customer problem and need (and in as unbiased a way as possible), you'll be able to take people on the journey with you.

@abrengues Great questions! "Do you think that you could have avoid this pivot with a stronger research approach? Do you have modified your research approach with the insights you gained from this experience ?" No additional amount of research would have caused us to pivot sooner. We didn't drop the document search focus because it was a bad idea or a bad product. Instead, we had to pursue the product for IT because the opportunity was even more massive. Every single thing we learned in building the search app was incredibly useful to us in building the document access control product. We couldn't have even figured out the opportunity for Nira had it not been for the enterprise search app. And we did TONS of research. I wouldn't change anything about the research and we haven't changed our methodology at all. In hindsight, I wouldn't change a single thing about our entire journey with the search app, except maybe deciding to focus on the new product about 2 weeks earlier than when we eventually decided to go all in on it.

@ronaldf91305352 Thanks Ronald!