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I totally agree with you that often times your first set of users aren't the users you end up serving at scale. There are so many examples of this that they ar
by mwseibel 10y ago
I totally agree with you that often times your first set of users aren't the users you end up serving at scale. There are so many examples of this that they are hard to count. What is great about your example is that Uber made a strategic decision to open up to a new user base. Pivoting and serving new users/usecases is totally okay. Where startups get in trouble is when they move from niche usecase to niche usecase blindly based on a customer request.
- Fordrus 10y agoWhat I think the parent poster is saying is that in hindsight, you can easily say which customers you were right to pivot for and which your were wrong to pivot for, but going in from the front no one, and I mean NO ONE can actually, really tell which customers are weird customization cases and which customers are revenue-bridges that will lead you to better market fit. There are always obvious cases in this mind of thing, but the larger point is that we could easily have been looking at an alternative history where Uber was on the scrap heap, and we would all stand here, wagging our beards, berating them for "moving from niche use-case to niche use-case" instead of doubling down and building something of long-term use and value, of executing on their vision. Instead, we're saying that Uber was an instance of a GOOD pivot, but at Uber, at the time it was happening, anyone could've made the argument, "Hey, aren't we just filling a really niche use-case here, of regular people who are willing to trust their lives to unlicensed strangers for a ride?"
- wruza 10y agoYeah, what scares my reasoning in such discussions is that anyone can be simply under survivorship bias of the other company. How does one extract the real truth from here?