If the Shoe Fits: Scott Adams on Pivots
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
In the dim past (1980s on) when I started working with startups they were carefully thought out, market sensitive/smart, with much of the effort focused on being able to sell the product, AKA, generate revenue, whether hardware or software.
They rarely needed to pivot.
The rise of the Internet/web/cloud/mobile and the falling cost of software development, with a focus on iterations and eyeballs, created a different approach and pivoting became the name of the game.
While ‘pivot’ has many definitions, the one that seems most accurate in many cases is “throw it up and see what sticks.”
According to Dilbert’s Scott Adams, this is how to do a startup today.
Here’s the system:
1. Form a team
2. Slap together an idea and put it on the Internet.
3. Collect data on user behavior.
4. Adjust, pivot, and try again.
Thanks to Google Analytics, Optimizely, Bitly, and other tools for measuring customer behavior in real time, a smart team can try different approaches and different products until something works out. A start-up in 2014 is a guess-testing machine.
Adams says this is why good founders have to be good psychologists.
Every entrepreneur is now a psychologist by trade. The ONLY thing that matters to success in our anything-is-buildable Internet world is psychology. How does the customer perceive this product? What causes someone to share? What makes virality happen? What makes something sticky?
Much of what Adams says makes sense, but are these the ideas or solutions that can recharge our economy, juice the job market or solve humanities ills?
Image credit: HikingArtist
