Max Mullen, Instacart co-founder, breaks down why startups pivot: the Friday night problem (users don't come back), the vitamin vs. painkiller gap (nice-to-have vs. essential), and trying to be everything at once. Find your aha moment, cut everything else, and double down. Real product-market fit looks like people paying, switching from competitors, and telling their friends.
Chapters
Pivoting an idea or a product is a really interesting topic as well. And what is a pivot? So a pivot is the idea of taking something that you, that you have learned and then changing around your idea a little bit. And so I want to paint the picture of the situation in which you might want to consider pivoting your company or your idea. So this is a recipe for disaster. If everyone you talk to thinks your idea is really good, But then you give it to them and they won't tell their friends about it. And no one hates your product. Haters are great. When you have haters, that means you have people that love your product. So you want to polarize your customers and you want to find the ones that really, really care. You want to focus all your energy on them. Don't worry about the haters. And you know, there's lots of problems that you might run into as you start to launch your company. Here are some common ones that I've heard about from other entrepreneurs. So there's one that's really interesting called the Friday night problem, which is if you have a service or product or a business that is really only valuable to customers once in a while, maybe it's only valuable when you're going out on a Friday night, or maybe it's only valuable every time you want to cook at home and you need a certain kind of special ingredient, you want to avoid a product that's only useful Periodically, because you want to build a habit. So if you think about apps like Facebook and Snapchat, those are things you use every day. So you want your product to be like a toothbrush. You want to use it twice a day or more. And that's great if you can achieve that. Another interesting problem to try to avoid— and if you run into this problem, you may want to think about changing your product— is called the single-player problem. So if you launch a product, and the only way for any of your customers to get any value out of it is to have a large number of their friends already using it, then you have a chicken and an egg problem. And so if you have a single-player problem, you want to have a solution to that problem which lets the first person in a friend group that uses your product get a lot of value out of it. So what did Facebook do? They had an aha moment, and they realized that for people to stick with Facebook, they needed to have 10 friends within a certain amount of time after creating their account. So figure out what your aha moment is and how do you get people arranged around using your product and avoid the single-player problem. Another interesting problem is the vitamin problem, which is sort of the opposite of building a painkiller. You want to build something for which there's a dire need, for which there's a problem that you're solving. And if you build a vitamin, well, that's OK. Some people take vitamins and that's fine. But what you want to build is a painkiller. You want to solve a problem for someone and make their headache go away. And if you can find a really hard problem to solve, and you can solve it in a really great way that's different than the way that anyone else has solved it, and especially if your solution can be 10 times better than anything else that's out there, then you've built a painkiller, not a vitamin. And then the final interesting problem is what I call the rainbow problem. And that means if you have a company that's everything to everyone, it'll be nothing to anybody. And so you want to focus in on one thing and do it really, really well and build a core group of customers. That really care about what you're solving. You don't want to build a company or a product that does 7 things kind of okay. So if you do need to pivot, here's how to do it. Take what works the best from what you've built, get rid of everything else, and then talk to your customers about that thing. When I started my first company, we did 2 different things. And when we did the first thing, people said they liked it. Some people used it. But ultimately, we didn't get the success that we wanted. And the way that we solved that was we took the one feature that people really, really liked, and we built an entirely new company just around that feature. And that was our pivot. And then finding success. So maybe you find yourself in the fortunate situation where you don't need to pivot. People are using your product. They're paying for it. They're telling their friends. And that's really what this situation looks like when you know you've found success. It means that if someone's doing something else, they'll go out of their way to switch to your product. Maybe it's more expensive and they'll still use it. They're willing to pay for it if it's something that can be paid for. And finally, people rush to tell their friends. At Instacart, we've never had a problem getting customers because our customers love us so much that they tell all of their friends. And we also have some programs in place to reward them if they tell their friends so then they get free money off of their groceries. So, Tim,
