Hello, Pivoting!

"But we now have to get to a mindset that technology means experimentation, experimentation means failure, and failure means learning. Indian leaders and business mentors need to talk about failure openly.

Here in the US, they even have a word for failure — ‘pivoting’."

That was super prolific professor, researcher, columnist, business advisor and serial entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa in an interview to me in July last year.

The word that drew me back to this interview was "pivoting".

Primarily a US startup phrase, it means the act of changing your original business model once you find that customer or revenue traction was hard to find.

Here's a great post that explains the concept of a pivot.

For many years, the concept of a pivot didn't exist among Indian startups. You either did extremely well, middled along towards eventual irrelevance or failed abruptly.

But as Valley-style venture investing and entrepreneurship has taken off in India, we're beginning to see the rise of pivoting among Indian startups too.

So Ibibo which started off in 2007 as an India-focused social networking site later pivoted to becoming an online gaming site. It's now also trying to become a travel site.

inMobi, the mobile ad network that pulled in a staggering $200 million in venture funding in September 2011 started out as mKhoj, a mobile search engine in early 2007. They pivoted.

SMSGupshup, an SMS-based social networking service that has seen runaway growth in India started out as Webaroo, an ambitious software to download websites for offline viewing in 2006. They too pivoted.

Then there's July Systems. When Rajesh Reddy started it in 2001 it was meant to be a "wireless superstructure" to deliver all kinds of mobile content. Six years later he was forced to pivot his business model to becoming a white label mobile app maker for businesses.

Guruji.com launched in 2006 as an India-specific search engine. After being unable to make a mark with its original goal, Guruji pivoted to becoming a music-search engine two years later. After getting sued by T-Series for encouraging copyright infringement, Guruji shut down the music search service and pivoted, in April 2011, to becoming a platform for real time bidding on mobile ads.

Another India-specific startup, Minglebox, also started in 2006 with the goal to become a social network for the youth. In two years it had pivoted to being an education portal for teens and college goers.

While I don't have conclusive evidence to say if Ibibo, Guruji and Minglebox have achieved success after their pivots, the others in the list seem to doing quite well.

The obvious learning from pivoting is this: a startup brings together tremendous talent, energy, ideas and products. Just because an initial idea failed doesn't mean all of those should be disbanded.

The trick is to pivot in a direction that best utilizes the work that has already been done and the lessons that have already been learnt, while significantly increasing the size of the potential market.

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.