For a while I’ve been building a business around security as a service, managed firewalls, vpn, secure cloud access etc but it’s hard to get commitment from potential clients that they actually follow through on. Another problem was vendors not following through, not taking me seriously and not taking any effort to provide what they committed to.
So I pivoted to build other ideas within the same ecosystem, with the intent of bringing the original ideas back at a later time.
That pivot has somewhat moved form deployed products in customer environments to hosting models all the way to SAAS products to, but the catch is all the ideas have one central theme at the core which I didn’t realise till half way through, which is building an aggregation ISP. So not an isp in the traditional sense but an aggregator, similar to an IX, but more for business services than telco interconnects.
I have put significant effort into building a SAAS which I wish I had when I was at my previous jobs, which is around infrastructure management, with the feature that annoyed me replaced with fixes and functional things that architects and operators alike always complain they don’t have. I don’t want to go too much into it, there are other products out there but the most popular ones are in the hundreds of thousands if not millions per year, or are free with clunky features, built just enough to claim it works. If you’re in the industry you probably know it, they have a great IPAM solution though which is out of my scope.
Anyway pulling back form the high level technical and my story, to my question, where did you start, where did you settle and how many times did you iterate (or start, close, repeat) before you found a product and or service which was sustainable, viable and in demand?
How many times did you pivot before you settled into something which worked?
byu/Stegles inEntrepreneur
Posted by Stegles
2 Comments
I’ve never put a business plan together that I’ve ever met the expectations of. When it comes to vision and where you start and where you finish. For me it’s always an never-ending perpetual moving goal….
I’ve gone through a few pivots, but most of them weren’t full resets. They were more like cutting away anything that didn’t serve the core problem I kept bumping into. What helped was shortening the validation loop so I wasn’t spending months building things that only made sense in my head. Any time I felt myself drifting into “this is cool tech, but who actually needs it,” I forced myself to run a small test with a specific user segment. The pattern I saw was that the core insight stayed the same, but the delivery model shifted until it finally aligned with how buyers actually purchase and adopt. It sounds like you’re circling one underlying problem set, so you might already be closer than it feels.