Yesterday, Andrew Chen from Andreessen Horowitz shared a short list of unfortunate startup pivot patterns in his newsletter. Here’s an overview:
1. Transitioning from B2B to consumer
2. Adding chat/social/notifications to a non-working product
3. Integrating AI, web3, or other trendy tech into your product
4. Zoom out to support “any customer segment”
5. Switching from paid to free
I agree with Andrew and would like to add a few more:
6. Adding another product for a different target group to the range of your offerings
7. Moving to a different country if the home market fails
8. Joining forces with another struggling company
9. Building hardware if you are a software company
10. Trying to become a platform without any killer use case
More on Andrews thoughts here.