What Is a Pivot? When and How Should a Startup Change Direction?

Bath, 13 March 1781. William Herschel, director of the Bath orchestra, is scanning the sky with a telescope he built himself in the garden of 19 New King Street. A point in the constellation of Gemini catches his eye: it doesn't twinkle like the stars, it looks like a small disc.

That night Herschel writes in his notebook that it is either a nebulous star or a comet. Four days later the object has moved. He notes: "It is a comet, for it has changed its place." On 26 April he also reports to the Royal Society that he has found a comet.

Yet the data said something else. The Astronomer Royal, Nevil Maskelyne, wrote to him, "I don't know what to call it"; he had seen neither a tail nor the fuzzy coma typical of comets. Anders Lexell, working in Russia, calculated the orbit: almost a circle. This was not a comet but a new planet orbiting beyond Saturn. Herschel accepted this in 1783. The planet we now call Uranus was the first planet discovered since antiquity.

The less well-known side of the story is Herschel himself. He was the son of an oboist in a military band in Hanover, and came to England in 1757 at the age of nineteen. He composed twenty-four symphonies. From a book he read on sound he moved to optics, and from optics to building telescopes. He polished mirrors for up to sixteen hours a day, while his sister Caroline fed him and read to him.

But he didn't give up music. While he gazed at the sky at night, he carried on conducting concerts and teaching by day. Only after the discovery, when King George III granted him an allowance of 200 pounds a year, did he leave Bath in 1782. William and Caroline's last concert was that year too. Herschel the musician became Herschel the astronomer not in a single leap but step by step.

Comet or planet?

In entrepreneurship, this kind of turn is called a pivot. In Eric Ries's lean startup approach, a pivot is defined as a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy or engine of growth. In other words, it isn't wiping everything in a panic; it's hearing what the data says and correcting your direction.

Failory's list of twenty-five startups that shut down because they couldn't change direction in time is full of stories where this correction was either never made or made badly. What they have in common is this: most of them renamed the object in front of them far too late.

When should you change direction?

When demand on paper and real behaviour diverge

According to Failory, Flowtab was an app that let people order drinks from their phones at bars without queuing. On paper, every bar would want it. In reality, deals were hard to close; the company charged users 1 dollar per order, and most users opened the app once or twice a month. After several pivots, it shut down.

People saying "great idea" is a signal; people using it again and again is data. When the two diverge, think about renaming the object, as Herschel did when faced with the orbital calculation.

When the only reason to carry on is the effort you've already put in

"We've put in so much work, are we going to quit now?" is the sentence that delays pivot decisions more than any other. Choose your next step based on the road ahead, not the past.

How should you change direction?

Keep one foot on the ground

In basketball, a player pivoting can turn in any direction, but if the pivot foot moves, it's a travel and the ball goes to the other team. Herschel's music was his pivot foot. As you turn in a new direction, don't let go of what you're strongest at: your customers, your technology or your team's craft.

Don't leap too far

According to Failory's analysis, Aria Insights, which made rugged drones, switched in January 2019 from building drones to systems that made sense of the data they collected. The fact that a few of its partners had this need didn't mean the whole market wanted the same thing. The company shut down that same year. A pivot shouldn't be a step further than the evidence in hand can support.

Count what you've learned, not how many pivots you've made

Margaret Rostamian, who built a platform for beauty services in Armenia, told Failory in an interview that when the pandemic brought the sector to a halt in 2020, they turned to many different ideas. When the fifteenth pivot didn't stick either, she decided to close. Looking back, she says she wishes she had tested the basis of the idea with simple prototypes before having any code written. If each pivot isn't built on something learned from the last, you're not changing direction, you're going round in circles.

Pivot and mihver: the fixed point of what turns

The word "pivot" passed into English from French in the 1610s. According to Etymonline, in Old French it had meant the pin of a door hinge since the 12th century, the shaft something turns on; its origin is uncertain. The sense of "the point on which a matter turns" is recorded in 1813.

The Turkish equivalent, "mihver", paints the same picture. According to the Nişanyan etymological dictionary, it comes from the Arabic "miḥwar": a spindle, axis, pulley or wheel hub. Neither word describes movement; both describe the fixed point around which movement happens. In a good pivot, too, everything turns, but the shaft stays put.

What makes it so hard to wrench the shaft out has a name in psychology: the sunk cost fallacy. In their 1985 study "The Psychology of Sunk Cost", Hal Arkes and Catherine Blumer showed that people are more inclined to keep going with something once they have invested money, effort or time in it. While trying to save what won't come back, we miss what could.

A final word

In the fifth book of the Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, reflecting on the things that get in the way of his work, uses a verb: "περιτρέπει", meaning to turn around, to reverse. The full passage reads:

"The mind turns around every obstacle to its action and makes it serve its purpose. What stands in the way of the work becomes the work's progress; what blocks the path becomes the path itself."

When Herschel accepted that the object he took for a comet was a planet, he didn't lose; he grew. Could there be something at the end of your telescope that you're still calling by the wrong name? And if you change direction, which foot will stay on the ground?

If you're curious about the stories of startups that couldn't change direction, take a look at the Startup Graveyard.