Your Inability To Pivot Will Kill Your Startup

Welcome back to NoteLoft Newsletter - the shortcut for founders who want to go from MVP to scale. Every week (ish - I’m working on it), my goal is to share what actually works when building software, so you can spend more time on deals, growth, and going to Pilates.

If you need help taking your product from MVP to scale, get in touch! We’ve grown our tech team, and we can’t wait to help you.

Let’s get into it!

Being a startup founder can be tough. Because you’re not just a startup founder when you become one; you’re also a person with a full life: A career you’re trying to escape from (or possibly love), a family that depends on you, friends that you don’t see enough, hobbies you should probably pay more attention to. So if you’re going to take time away from all the people and things you love to build a startup, you should do it right.

But you're gonna kill it anyway, aren't you :)

In order to do that, you’re going to have to master the art of the pivot.

I’ve seen this with some of the most successful startups I’ve worked at. Take Priori Legal for example; I was a software engineer there for 2.5 years. They hit $7.8M revenue with a 57 person team in 2023, but that would have never happened without a big pivot.

Priori Legal was founded in 2013 by Basha Rubin and Mirra Levitt; they attended Yale Law School together (yes, I made several legally blonde references during the interview process. They hired me anyway). The first version of their product, Marketplace, was built to connect small businesses with fixed-fee legal services.

But they eventually did the smart thing; they pivoted to a product that would make them more money: Scout. Scout was built to help corporate in-house legal teams find and manage vetted outside counsel through their original business model.

Because let’s be real…a business like Meta, Hearst, or Stripe is going to pay more for a piece of software than a small business owner.

I highlight their success, not to say that every founder should chase bigger customers or enterprise contracts. My point is this: the version of the business you start with is rarely the one that survives. And that kind of success requires a pivot.

The real work, the work that separates great founders from okay ones, is learning when loyalty to the original idea becomes risk. If you’re going to ask so much of your life—your time, your attention, the people who tolerate your absence—you owe it to yourself to build something that will be a great success. Sometimes that means letting go of what you first imagined, so the thing can finally become what it needs to be.

So I’m going to leave you with some homework:

Step back and ask what actually isn’t working—and be precise. Is it the product? The price point? Or the customer? The idea, or the way it’s being executed? The technology, or the team required to support it? Is growth slow because the market is wrong, or because the system underneath can’t scale?

A pivot doesn’t always mean creating a new product. Sometimes it’s about changing who you build it for or how it’s built. And sometimes—hardest of all—it’s changing who builds it with you.

If you’re realizing the problem isn’t the idea but the team, the architecture, or the way the work is being done—that’s where NoteLoft comes in. We help founders step back and make clear, grounded decisions about what kind of tech team they actually need before they hire, rebuild, or scale.

Sometimes the pivot isn’t adding more engineers. It’s hiring differently, restructuring the work, or fixing what’s already there. If you want help making that call—with clarity instead of urgency—you can work with us.

See you next week,

LaToya