What Do We Do When We're Struggling?

What do you do when things aren't working, when you're struggling to attract enough customers and convince partners to work with you, when time and again, you aren't meeting your KPIs? Do you try to push forward, or do you stop? Do you make a significant change or a small change?

You never want to be the one who gives up on the right idea too early, but you also don't want to be the founder who failed to save her company by pivoting when there was still time and money.

To determine what to do, we need first to revisit how we've gotten here:

• Customer-Problem Fit: We started with the customer and problem in Steps 1-4, looking for a specific pain point or need to address.
• Problem-Solution Fit: We created solutions to address those pain points in Steps 5-8 by testing different products and business models.
• Product-Market Fit: Finally, in steps 7-10, we have a solution that effectively meets our customer's pain point and seems to be taking off. Hence, we grow and scale that solution with technology and go-to-market strategies.

This pyramid structure comes from Selcuk Atli's post, "How to Pivot Your Startup the Right Way -- Using Growth Marketing Mindset" (link). Each layer is built on the previous from the bottom up.

This structure illustrates that we can't start with a product idea without clearly understanding the customer and their need. It would be akin to building a second floor without making sure you have a solid first floor and foundation. This is also why we don't focus on Step 9: Growth until we've first established a problem-solve fit for our solution and customer.

While this pyramid captures the prioritization of different building blocks of your company, it is by no means meant to be a linear process. You will be moving up, down, and sideways in this pyramid A LOT as you experiment with your way to product-market fit and beyond.

Every two layers pair together: customer & problem, product & business model, technology & technology. You tend to have to work on them in pairs, as they affect and build off of each other.

<aside> 🙌 Tip: If you ever feel stuck, it's likely because you're experimenting within a single tier for too long, move to an adjacent layer and experiment there to get unstuck.

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So back to what happens when you have built and launched your product but things aren't working...

We can push forward and make small adjustments, or changes called iterations, or we can make some significant changes, called a pivot, that shakes things up and may change the direction of the company. Where exactly iterations cross over to becoming a pivot depends on who you ask. Here at Female Founder School, we like to draw that line between problem and product:

Pivoting is changing the customer or problem, and thus a more fundamental shift in the value we're looking to provide.

Iterating is changing the solution (including product and business model) or growth (including technology and go-to-market) and can leverage any existing learnings about the same customer & problem.

<aside> ☝ Note: If you're pre-launch or pre-customer, then we wouldn't call it pivoting; otherwise, you'd be pivoting every other day. At that stage, you're simply ideating.

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