Positioning, vision and an open mind

What is your goal in starting a company? What does success look like? How important is the vision versus commercial success?

Those fundamental questions can come into play if you find yourself re-evaluating your product’s positioning. The whole point of re-evaluating positioning is that sometimes the product you actually create turns out to be better suited to a different vision — sometimes a very different vision.

In most cases, this doesn’t mean that you can’t win in pursuit of the original vision — if by ‘win’ we mean create a commercially successful company. It just means that it might be a lot harder.

So how important is the vision?

I was recording a podcast episode yesterday with a founder who started out with a very specific vision about getting developers to be more involved with security. When the product didn’t sell at first, he didn’t pivot — even though there were some signs that doing so might be a good idea. Because in that case, in this particular company, the vision was like a crusade. Delivering on the vision was just as important as getting to commercial success.

That’s a situation where re-positioning the product won’t likely ever be a good idea. You have a very concrete idea for how your product can build a better future, and you care just as much about your point of view being adopted by the industry as you care about whether or not your company becomes a unicorn.

How important is commercial success?

But what if your vision is not quite as precious, and you’d really just like your product to be commercially successful?

It’s entirely possible that the vision your product servces best is not the vision you started out with. Even when the vision is negotiable and commercial success is ultimately more important, this can be tough to swallow when it does happen — even if it is very clearly staring you in the face. If there are signs that the vision your product serves is not the vision you were initially thinking of — and commercial success is more important than vision — the best course of action is to adjust your positioning and go after a different vision.

How open is your mind?

This sometimes makes it sound like changing positioning is easy. Often it’s not. Some people will resist. I’ve often seen that founders are the most hostile to a true pivot compared with their leadership team, probably because they are the most invested in the original vision for the product and company.

So should you adjust positioning? It really comes down to the question of how important the original vision is. If you would rather pusue the vision like a crusade, and consider the company’s success or failure as a byproduct of how successful your crusade is, don’t change your positioning. If your primary aim is to create a successful company, however, make it easy on yourself and go for the market you see your product fitting in the best.

The other part of this is self-awareness. Don’t reject a change in positioning just because it’s scary or you hadn’t thought about it before, but do so because you’ve deliberately decided that something else is more important. That’s an excellent reason to choose a more difficult path to commercial success, but a closed mind is not.