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Mentor Minute - The Only Goal of Pivoting According to Mike Maples, Jr.

Name: Mentor Minute - The Only Goal of Pivoting According to Mike Maples, Jr.
Uploaded: 2014-04-25T18:22:59+00:00
Duration: 1 min 26 s
Channel: Royston G King
Description: In this Mentor Minute, Mike Maples Jr. explains that a pivot is not about tactical experiments such as A/B testing, SEO, or blogging. Instead, a pivot is…

25 Apr 2014 · 1 min

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1:26

In this Mentor Minute, Mike Maples Jr. explains that a pivot is not about tactical experiments such as A/B testing, SEO, or blogging. Instead, a pivot is fundamentally about discovering a viable business model. He argues that a startup’s sole purpose is to find a business model that converts its innovation into economic value; merely shipping a product without a business model wastes that innovation. To avoid vague jargon, he offers a concrete definition of a business model as the way a company creates, delivers, and captures value.

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I like to define things by starting out with what they're not. So, I've seen some entrepreneurs come into our office and say, "Yeah, we really know how to pivot." And to me pivoting is not about A/B testing. It's not about SEO or blog. When I'm talking about pivots, It's not about that stuff. It's about something different. What a pivot really is about is driving business model discovery. And so in my view, a startup exists to do one and only one thing. And that is to find a business model. That's all it does. And so a startup doesn't exist just to ship a product. Because if all they do is ship a product and never achieve a business model, The innovation's wasted. And so a business model is the way that a startup converts its innovation to economic value. Business model is kind of one of those terms though, unfortunately, it's sort of terms like branding and positioning. It's sort of one of those kind of squiggly terms if you're not careful. And so we don't like terms like that. So we have a working definition of what a business model is. So specifically, In our worldview, a business model describes how your company creates, delivers, and captures value.