Different founders, different playbooks. Here's how each answered — preview first, full take one click away.
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Finnlay Morcombe
Fluency · EP 23
Before Fluency's current form, Finnlay's team did SOP creation and "didn't feel the product market fit" — "everything felt like grind," "like Copus pushing the ball up the hill." When they shipped the work-mapping version, "within one week we're like okay we're hard pivoting because the reception was completely different."
See Finnlay Morcombe's full take
The earlier product "got a decent amount of revenue got some decent customers but it wasn't we didn't feel the product market fit. Didn't even feel like we really had inklings of product market fit." The core problem: "the user wasn't really the buyer and the buyer didn't have that much pain associated with the user."
The new version was hard to build — "how do you define what work is" is "subjective," and "a process is really like a human applied definition for a pattern of action" — but once it worked and they went to market, the signal was immediate: "within one week we're like okay we're hard pivoting." The old documentation product still exists but is "like 10 basis points like .1% of the new product."
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Jevon Le Roux
Keeyu · EP 21
Jevon's approach was to stay "very grounded on solving problems rather than like select solutions," adapting quickly to customer feedback and to AI trends. They were "never afraid to release an imperfect product" and didn't try to build "the gaudy cathedral in its entirety" — they released parts of it in real life and iterated.
See Jevon Le Roux's full take
The pivot from passive detection to agentic resolution came directly from talking to customers constantly. When a customer revealed they had hidden problems they never knew about, the team asked whether they could automate the fix — "that's where the penny dropped for us." Jevon frames this as pivoting super quickly while staying anchored to the underlying problem rather than any one solution.
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Joe Zhou
StrongRoom AI · EP 17
Joe says the team is absolutely fantastic but everyone had simply had enough — staff demanded pay rises that the previous administration had promised but never delivered. He calls the engineers who stayed through the administration period absolute superstars, and says retaining the sticky customer base was the bigger win.
See Joe Zhou's full take
When Joe took over, all the remaining staff wanted pay rises — one told him, in effect, "I'm the last person that understands this product, like if you don't give me this pay rise I just couldn't go." The previous administration had promised to look after them and "never did." Despite that, Joe says the team is fantastic and the engineers who stayed through the administration period are "absolute superstars." He also points to retention: "during all of this that has happened there's very little churn — customer churn very little, the product so sticky." Because switching off StrongRoom is one of the most painful things a customer can do, the cost of switching is really high, so the first three months were all about focusing on retention.
When the people you're building for won't pay or commit. Vivek and John pivoted off an affiliate-relationship-management idea after a company "led us on," signed an NDA, then ghosted — realizing the not-paying was the signal.
See Vivek and John's full take
Their original idea was helping affiliate marketers understand and grow their affiliates "like a flywheel." The pivot trigger was a company that dragged its feet "for like a month or two," signed an NDA, said it was excited, and then ghosted after "four or five" follow-ups. "We should have almost immediately realized that the fact that they weren't paying for this... we were just kind of clinging onto hope." They moved to compliance because "it was like a more specific problem that we could solve" — across all the people they talked to, affiliate marketing had "so many random different problems," but with compliance they knew "the No. 1 thing" financial companies care about is making sure affiliates "are actually saying the right things, following the guidelines." It also fit John's experience in the space.
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Hung Bui
AIducation · EP 10
Hung's team pivoted from a mental-health product to education without starting from zero — they kept the tools and learnings and rebuilt with a deeper understanding of what customers wanted, shipping a workable platform in a four week run of basically two sprints.
See Hung Bui's full take
When Hung realized the product wasn't working, he and his team "had to basically take a very hard look at both our product and ourselves to see what were our wrong assumptions." Rather than patch it, they decided to "throw all this away" and rebuild — "we have the ability to rebuild quickly, so why shouldn't we." Crucially, they weren't starting over: "we now have all the learnings and understandings that a year ago we did not have," having talked to schools, parents, teachers and students. They created an entirely new repo and in a four week run of basically two sprints had a workable platform that this time got a different response.