How we decided to pivot after 4 years

After four long years of grinding, building, fundraising, and hiring, we decided to pivot. I wanted to write down my thought process and timeline because I wish I’d seen more honest pivot stories when we were stuck. Not just “we pivoted and everything was instantly great” but the real version where we kept trying to make the original idea work for way too long because we already put so much into it.

I went through YC S20 (the first COVID batch) as a solo founder working on @Basedash. After YC, I did what you’re supposed to do. I talked to users. I built product. I did founder-led sales. I hired a great team. It felt like progress because I was constantly busy and the product kept getting better.

But then… the graph didn’t move.

Here’s what our MRR chart looked like over the first four years:

Looking back at this chart is pretty embarrassing. At first glance it looks fine, until you realize the time span is four years. Somehow we spent the entire year after YC without growing revenue at all. Even later once we got better at selling, growth only happened when we pushed crazy hard on it. The moment we stopped pushing, growth stopped.

It’s a weird trap because it feels like progress from the inside. There’s always something you can celebrate: conversion is up a little, churn is down a little, the product is cleaner, customers are happier. You’re doing startup things all day, but you zoom out and the KPIs are basically flat.

Over time, we got better at converting effort into revenue. Near the end, we sort of figured out how to grow, but it didn’t feel like a machine. It felt like pushing a boulder up a mountain, not chasing it down. And once you’ve felt that for long enough (4 years in our case), you start asking the question you’ve been avoiding:

Maybe it’s not execution. Maybe it’s the idea.

People love to say that startup ideas don’t matter, execution does. I get why. It’s a useful correction for founders who think their idea is a secret that needs to be protected. But after working on both good and bad ideas, the difference is night and day.

Before pivoting, we were hill climbing an ant hill. It felt like we were doing everything right, but the work didn’t compound. I’m confident we could have eventually turned it into a $10M/year lifestyle business, and that’s a fine outcome, but it wasn’t what I wanted to spend my life doing.

So, we pivoted.

And here’s the part where we did something that sounds “wrong” in startup land. With the new product, we didn’t build in public or launch our MVP as soon as it was ready. We spent 10 months interviewing 100+ companies while we built out our product in stealth.

These conversations gave us an incredibly detailed understanding of the problem and allowed us to build the best BI product in the world (imho). We bet everything on a huge launch going well, and it did. We had paying customers literally within hours.

One year later, here’s what our revenue chart looks like now:

In just one year since our (re)launch, we’ve done 4x more revenue than in the entire 4 years before the pivot. That’s still wild to me because the difference wasn’t some clever growth hack. We were already working hard. The only difference between the two charts is product-market fit.

Sales conversations flipped overnight. Instead of 6 month sales cycles for $2k/year, people self-serve for $12k/year. When we do talk, they immediately get it. There’s less “convince me” and more “how fast can we roll this out?”.

And this is the part I keep coming back to: why work harder than anyone in the world on a bad problem? Imagine working just as hard on a really, really good problem. It’s so much more fun.

So… zoom out on your company and be honest with yourself. If you’ve been doing high-quality work for a long time and the business still won’t move, don’t assume you just need more discipline or a new growth hack. You might be on the wrong slope. The sooner you admit that, the sooner you can find a hill worth climbing.