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If you are a two-person startup, the last thing you should be doing in the face of a market disruption is protracted litigation. Pivot, just pivot.
by billbrown 5y ago
If you are a two-person startup, the last thing you should be doing in the face of a market disruption is protracted litigation. Pivot, just pivot.
- jmull 5y agoI think this is the pivot.
- adolph 5y agoIf patent troll doesn't work do legal concern trolling as a public interest research group serving suits.
- dahart 5y agoPivot to what? Their product is focused on a specific niche market with a specific niche problem, and the entire market is being closed. Why not take a moon-shot stab at fighting for it, when the sentiment for people stuck with these machines seems to be wildly in their favor? From my armchair it seems plausible there could be a legal outcome in Kytch’s favor because the sale and lack of adequate maintenance of these machines may be bordering on illegal.
- billbrown 5y agoThe chances of winning are slim, appeals will take a very long time with considerable expense, and they'll have wasted time and energy that they could've spent on an _actual_ pivot. (I don't know if you've been through protracted litigation as a principal trying to recover damages but it is a long, expensive, and painful slog.) An actual pivot would be finding a different niche market for the device or tweaking the device to serve the same market differently. Find an industrial machine to attach it to and use your notification system to provides alerts and reminders about its maintenance.
- dahart 5y agoCompletely agree this could be high effort on Kytch’s part. I mean launching a successful business is super high effort too, so there’s already evidence they’re up for a high effort long term play. I guess it’s not up to us to define what an “actual” pivot can look like. Certainly switching to a legal strategy is in fact a pivot from product development and traction metrics. This new strategy doesn’t seem crazy to me, having tried to launch a business myself. I agree it’s a moon-shot, but again, it’s plausible that they do have a leg to stand on here due to the history of problems these machines have. * edit BTW, I’d speculate wildly that there’s a very good chance Kytch was fully aware of the legal dangers of their plan, and went into the product development phase with eyes wide open in the first place. In addition to their plausible chances for success here, it’s also plausible that this legal fight was the expected outcome of their plan, and part of its design, long before it happened.
- ipaddr 5y agoWhy walk away from a billion dollar payout? Sometimes you pivot out. This looks like a pivot to litigation.