5 Years, 12 Pivots

Summary

1 co-founder, 5 years, 12 pivots, YC, still not dead At the YC Alumni reunion, a few founders were surprised by the seeming randomness of our pivots. Here's how my cofounder (Aaron), and I navigated 12 hard pivots without hating each other. Our (current) 12th pivot is making BAML, a programming language for using LLMs 😅. We are still working on finding PMF, but for the first time in 5 years, we have a growing user-base that actually loves us. 1.5 years of half-assing it The general theme of this entire timeframe can be summarized by us using our $$$ jobs as a safety net and attempting to throw spaghetti at the wall hoping it would stick. We were looking for signal BEFORE we committed. Ideas we pursued: 6 months - An online coding bootcamp paid for by income share agreements. Motivated by wanting to make the world a better place. 15 users, but I pivoted cause no one would pay. 6 months - Interactive Twitch ads. Motivated by making $$ on ads and Aaron being a YouTuber in some past life. We had 0 users, did a lot of outbound and got 1 larger League of Legends streamer to want to use us, but didn't actually. (As a founder, I now know "want" is the most pointless word). We pivoted after our W22 YC interview ended in 6 minutes... Michael Seibel (a YC partner and co-founder of Twitch) straight up asked Do you guys even watch twitch? Spoiler alert, we did not. I swear I'm still haunted by that question. VIDEO 🎮 6 weeks - SDK to build massive multiplayer games. Motivated by games like Among Us + the idea of streamers and their audiences interacting more. We had 1 streamer try us out, but pivoted because neither of us really play games (noticing a pattern?). The last week was when Aaron quit his job @ Amazon. 💸 4 weeks - Let fans buy a creators' future earnings. We felt an edge given Aaron's prior youtube background, but pivoted because we couldn't make it happen. The economic incentives were very hard to realize. 📝 3 weeks - Employee engagement surveys — Motivated by making ...