Last Updated on August 31, 2023 by David
That is the question.
This question comes up so often for entrepreneurs that the default answer is almost always to keep pushing forward. When you haven’t yet exhausted all your ideas, resources, and physical/spiritual might, the default answer is always to keep pushing forward.
One comforting fact when you’re faced with this question is that it is normal and marks an important stage of starting your own business. More crucial than knowing what else to try is the ability to sense when it’s time to try something else. Changing course too early or without understanding your industry and product marketing/sales strategies well can be catastrophic. Here are some good questions to ask yourselves:
- Do you have a concrete plan in place to measure your own metrics and determine whether growth is faster or slower than what you expect? Who or what are you comparing against? If you can’t answer this, there’s probably more room for learning and it’s not yet time to try something else.
- Do you have a goal (or goals) in mind to help validate and prove your efforts if you decide to push forward? Are you even asking the right questions regarding your target goals? For example, before deciding to try something else, give PPC advertising a try to try clicks to your product. Can you spot a trend?
- Are you seeing lifecycle signs that your current growth path is potentially limited? For example, decreases in revenue, high customer churn, product irrelevance, competitive market share has changed, etc can all be key indicators. If your product or service’s maturity phase has not yet begun, trying something else might be a bit early.
- Do you have alternatives in mind if you do decide to “try something else”? With any alternative you try, a whole new shift in approach, thinking, and planning is required. Are you ready for that? It might be more efficient and ROI positive to settle in and narrow your focus to one or two channels for distributing your existing product than jumping ship.
These decision are not easy. You need to establish a concise build-measure-learn loop for all your activities before you can make a decision with relative comfort because “growth” alone can be both a blessing and a curse. Absolute growth can make you feel like you’ve experienced success while solving a real problem for your customers even though that it might not be sustainable. Relative growth on the other hand can indicate a strong emergence in your target market but execution in various aspects of your business ultimately decide how successful you’ll be.
At the end of the day, “trying something else” does not guarantee success. In most cases, you’ll end up exactly where you are before the pivot. Pivoting does not mean instant growth. If you do find more success, other factors such as a better product-market fit could explain the difference and not the mere fact that you pivoted.
As entrepreneurs, it’s important to get in the rhythm of establishing a consistent set of hypotheses to test and validate (or invalidate). The scientific method can help with this. Deciding whether to push forward or to try something new will be one of the hardest decisions you’ll have to make as an entrepreneur. It’s a series of hard work, tests, and random ass guesses. That said, it still only boils down to one decision and you’re the best one to make that call.
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