We Made a Twist and Learned a Lot: Navigating a Startup

Hello! My name is Alexey, and this article is about my and my teammates’ path over the last year. There are a lot of “we” in the text, not because we are a faceless company, but because we are a team that is responsible for its collective decisions.

Running a startup might be tough. Actually, I think it IS tough. There is a lot of uncertainty. And you are so free that sometimes you are not sure what to do or where to start at all.

We started a year ago with the idea of microapps. It’s an idea of fast and cheap building of complex applications by combining smaller ones. For example, a mixture of followings, likes, direct messages, product listings, and purchases creates a social marketplace as a result.

We've got a couple of happy startups-customers who use this approach and have already acquired their own customers. It’s super cool.

However, we have been having growing doubts about product/market fit because our feature delivery felt more akin to custom or consulting development.

And as we are still a startup, we have to check our ideas constantly. So an incredibly inspiring and also totally terrifying word came to our minds.

Ideal Storm

The majority of our microapps are built around e-commerce and marketplace concepts. So we decided not to throw all this working and reusable code out the window. We just wanted to reshape it to make it easier to use and understand. And this is where AI comes on stage.

Why not combine GTP with e-commerce? And we did it. We implemented an MVP for a whole e-commerce website out of a single text prompt. We were just testing another idea, but the result turned out amazing.

We got huge social approval for our scale and drew some conclusions from that. I hope they will be useful for your startup too. 🙏🏽

Idea Simplification

You should be able to explain your startup idea during an elevator ride. It’s called an elevator pitch. So we needed a quite tall building to explain all the advantages of microapps, to mention that you are not locked into our code and why, and not to forget to highlight that it’s super simple and fast.

“AI-generated marketplace” sounds much easier, right? And it is. And as a huge bonus, it requires less effort in any direction to get the idea across to people.

A bit of numbers to prove this thought.

For 10 months, we built 2 complex applications on our microapps basis. We learned that there is a demand for such solutions. But we also learned that it’s pretty hard to stand out from development agencies and prove that we are not an agency at all.

On the other hand, we launched the AI tool within a couple of weeks. And in another couple, we got 30 stores generated by our tool. We might get even more, but Mark Zuckerberg decided to release his Threads, and we got a little lost in the shuffle. 😄

You may say, “30 is not a lot,” and you will be totally right, BUT it’s 15 times more customers or potential customers that we had for 10 months who we can get feedback from. We have 15 times more traction for experiments. 15 times more visitors to check out our ideas. It’s amazing, I think.

Niche Narrowing

Do bigger niches have more potential users? In absolute numbers, they definitely have more people, but that doesn’t mean that a lot of them are underserved in your target area. Also, the bigger the niche, the more players there are. Especially big ones.

Are you ready to compete with huge competitors?

It’s great if you are, but you have to be smarter, quicker, and more flexible to win. And one of the smart, flexible decisions you can make is niche narrowing.

For us, it went the following way. Firstly, we had such a niche idea: “any startup in the pre-seed stage with non-technical founders.” It was quite a broad niche, and we tried to solve the pain of any startup, but it was a kind of loss of focus.

You can try to solve several problems at once, but it is best to start with one.

So our new direction is “tiny or small sellers of goods who need lightweight solutions for their store.” We’ll see where it leads.

There Is No Need to Burn the Remaining Assets

We might be afraid of pivoting because we have some users we don’t know how to engage in a new pivot system. But actually, it’s not an immediate process. And not a one-way ticket to Mars, as it might seem at first glance. So you are not betraying your current customers if you have any.

Rather than abandoning them, the pivot can be seen as an opportunity to provide an even better experience for them. It shows that the startup is committed to continuously improving and evolving its product or service to meet the needs of its customers.

Our Takeaways

Eric Ries wrote in his book:

Ask most entrepreneurs who have decided to pivot and they will tell you that they wish they had made the decision sooner

I think it’s like wishing to be smarter yesterday than you were. My opinion is: It’s not always possible without the experience you gained before the pivot. So I regret nothing, and I’m glad we’ve done it at least.

We are only at the beginning of our pivotal path, but it looks very promising already. If you are hesitating about whether your startup needs a pivot, it might need one because you’re already thinking about it. Take care, and good luck! ✌🏽

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