Trust Your Gut to Pivot

So for us, the pivots came early, right? So I share this idea of putting a coach on the phone. Eddie and I made a huge mistake and I'll take credit for it. We thought our way out of that idea. So that's the business now. But for a year and a half, Toby, we pivoted into what looked like in Excel, a better business model with better margins. Because putting a coach on a phone does not sound like a very lucrative business at all. Turns out we were wrong. But at the time, we're like, that's what could. Your margins can't be 90%. We better do like a broad based consumer play and then upsell you into it. And so we built what I joke with our employees is maybe the worst app ever built. It was duolingo for life skills and it was terribly unengaging. And the first, this was from Eddie's mba. The first module was conflict negotiation. So you literally could do duolingo for batna. Be like, what is my batna? Drag and drop. No one used it. We didn't like it. No one liked it. But like, in Excel, it looked like an amazing business. And so we actually pivoted out of that when we ran out of our like, kind of of initial capital that we had put in the business ourselves. And we're like, we have nothing. Oh my gosh, our whole business just fell apart. 18 months I had pitched like 70 VCs, got no yeses. They were smart enough not to invest in that. And then it was like, what can we do? I guess maybe we should go back to this one crazy idea I had a year and a half ago and just like put coaches on Google hangouts and see if people will like text message them and talk to them. And we were using Asana to do the homework at the time. We didn't even. Couldn't even like code the thing. And so it was like I hadn't touched code in like a decade. At that point I was like, I can fire a php, but man, I think this is just gonna be faster to string a bunch of stuff together and have Ryan build a landing page. And so then we were doing direct to prosumer, I would say it was called. So the first pivot was out of an Excel model into like, really our gut was what we wanted. And that's a good first heuristic if, like, you don't have a strong sense of what the market wants, like, do you even want to use this? And if you don't, chances are your friends don't Then what we found from our users, one of the first early insights was we did user interviews. We only had, like, 25 users in the first couple of weeks. We do user interviews, and we found that these people were going to their office using their better up coach at lunch, in their car, in the parking lot. And we were like, why? Why don't you just do it at your desk or, like, book a conference room? They're like. And I still remember this line in our data. It's like, well, it feels like I'm cheating. And in the interview, Eddie's like, what does that mean? Why are you cheating? It's like, my manager doesn't know. I have this super power behind me. Called my coach coach name there, propping me up, like, helping me. And I just feel like if they did, they may think I'm not good at my job. And we were just like, whoa. Like, they would never. I haven't been an executive. I never would have thought that. So we, Ryan and Eddie and I had to, like, eat a lot of crow. And we're like, is this the world's first business? I joke, where the user experience gets better by going enterprise instead of worst. Like, maybe it would be free for people if their employer paid and their employer would sanction it. Whoa. How could that be? So it was like an existential crisis for Ryan and I were like, no, no, no. We said we'd never be enterprise. Thou shall not. We can't do it. So we basically just had to go through a list of, like, what has to be true for us.