3 questions to ask before scaling or pivoting your business
Stop looking to others for answers — just because they’re verified on Twitter doesn’t mean their advice is relevant to you
1. Do I really have a product-market fit?
The best way to judge product-market fit is this:
Answered yes to all of the above? Seems like scaling up is an option. If not, you should consider a pivot — then ask, rinse, and repeat.
2. Ok, I have product-market fit — how do I scale, and how can my size not be a competitive disadvantage?
A lot of this depends on how big your target market is, how expensive your product is, and how easy it is to get going. If you have a small market and expensive product, you are going to need to pick up the phone. If you have a large market and a more variable price, you have lots of options, including self-serve and high-velocity inbound teams.
Important:Don’t feel locked into repeating how your competition went to market as you may end up putting yourself in a head-to-head battle with them unnecessarily. Can you go after a submarket to gain traction? Can you go bottom-up vs. top-down?
The fact is, your competitors got to where they are now in a different competitive or market reality, so trying to go to market the same way may not be the smart move, and won’t always put you in a competitive position. One size does not fit all.
When I joined Atlassian, for example, their main competitor was selling $500k+ software top-down through big-budget sales teams. By comparison, we were a tiny Australian startup with no name recognition or access to capital.
So, we leveraged the internet and sold our product bottom-up to lower-level buyers through self-serve at just $800. No one thought that was a smart strategy at the time, but it totally worked, and we eventually won the market.
Always look inward at your product and your customers for direction. Also, don’t assume that there is already a dominant player in the market. There are so many examples of smaller companies knocking big Goliaths off their pedestals in just a few years.
3. Am I doing everything to make my customers successful?
At the end of the day, word of mouth, references, and happy customers are the most powerful accelerants to any successful business model.
Ask yourself — can I lean heavily on my product for customer success? Or do my customers require lots of additional services and hand-holding to be successful? How do my customers feel about my product? And if you’re not sure… just ask them!
Meeting your core customers where they are, understanding them deeply, and building trust and empathy with them will help you find more answers than social media ever could.
Should I stay or should I grow
Whether you decide to pivot or scale, know this: to grow your company, you need to be constantly improving, in order to best serve your customers. As part of this improvement, you’ll likely need to evolve or scale in some capacity to see continued growth.
Remember to read the cues — assess market fit but always look internally, and continue to check in with both your team and your customers every step of the way.
Asking yourself questions doesn’t stop with pivot vs. scale. As a successful business, you and your team should continually be asking, “what do we need to be doing to get to the next level?” Always celebrate the wins, but don’t let them make you complacent.
Story byJosé Morales
José leads Freshworks' global GTM strategy, helming the sales, customer success, segment marketing and partnerships and alliance organizatio(show all)José leads Freshworks' global GTM strategy, helming the sales, customer success, segment marketing and partnerships and alliance organizations. José specializes in driving revenue for high-velocity and hyper-growth companies and has a 20+ year record driving success at notable technology businesses.
Before Freshworks, José helped scale Atlassian’s annual revenues from under $100M to $1.8B growing the company’s topline as it moved from a startup darling through IPO to a successful publicly traded cloud powerhouse. As head of global field operations, he led sales, partner programs and other key go-to-market functions, building and managing global teams across the U.S., the Netherlands, France, Germany, Japan and the Philippines. During his time at Atlassian he also ran Corporate Development where he led the acquisition of many companies and ran the HipChat product line for several years.
Before Atlassian, José held global go-to-market and sales leadership roles with venerable Silicon Valley software companies including PeopleSoft, Inc., Epiphany, Inc. and Jaspersoft Corporation.
José is on the board of Escuela Bilingue International and is an avid skier and windsurfer. He holds an MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.
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