Hey all,
Happy Sunday from beautiful NYC!
I’m coming off a wonderful wedding weekend for my best camp friend, Seryna, who married her soulmate, Brad. We met at camp when we were 8: shoutout Bunk 5.
What a beautiful privilege to witness the people you love commit to eternal love!!
One of the biggest reasons I moved from Austin to NYC in 2024 was to be here for these exact life milestones: engagements, kids, career moves, heartbreaks, sleepovers, finding “our places,” and the inevitable majjjjjjor crying sessions.
Being surrounded by the people who have known me my whole life for this chapter has been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
We are about to enter a phase of the ultimate pivot.
What is a pivot?: Any switch you make that changes your company’s business economics.
When capital flows into a category, everyone starts launching. And in AI, a lot of these companies are starting to look very, very similar.
We’re about to watch a lot of startups realize their original chapter isn’t the one that wins. There will be winners and losers, and ultimate failures and multi-billion dollar empires.
This means:
1) You can keep your costs low enough to have a cash-positive business with a significant but not overwhelming market share
2) You can become the category leader (e.g., Kalshi)
3) You attempt #2 but are forced to pivot after losing as the category leader and also not doing #1
This pivot doesn’t have to mean rethinking the entire business and starting from scratch. You can simply adjust your core product offering OR your leading marketing offer.
Leading marketing offer: Using a feature or offer that’s different than your core product thesis to drive people to the product. It’s really fun to discover these growth levers, but be aware that if not merged correctly once the user is actually in the product, this can lead to churn.
Example: I used Citizen’s Registered Offenders feature to drive insane demand at sub-$1 CPMs for 1.5 years with millions of new users. This was a leading marketing offer but NOT the core offering of the product (real-time safety alerts).
🎯 Today, we’ll cover:
How to architect your conversion funnel to define your pivot
What is the most cost-effective way to validate your pivot with conviction?
How and when to broadcast your pivot
🔥 Related newsletters that are bomb 🔥:
Death by Bad Timing: How and when to scale marketing spend before you scale on an unreliable product (Aug 2025)
Blink & You’ll Miss It: How can you make fast & right product bets when everything is moving so quickly (April 2025)
How to Build Smarter Customer Touchpoints & Spot Hidden Patterns: Outsmart products to get exactly what you want and copy winning product moves (June 2025)
Architect Your Conversion Funnel to Define Your Pivot
People are going to have to get really, really good at pivoting.
There isn’t room in the world for this many similar VC-backed companies to exist because venture-scale means ultimate unicorn.
A pivot doesn’t need to be a 180-degree change, and that’s what most early operators don’t understand. It’s more like you’re hiking and choose to go down a new trail.
There are two critical parts to the pivot:
Knowing when to pivot
Knowing how to pivot
When: I cannot specify when to pivot. But there are signs.
You’ve reached a ceiling on scaling revenue
Your competitor(s) are obliterating you
You can’t get the marketing to drive the demand you need for strong YoY growth
Your sales motions aren’t working
How: WTF do you do when you need to pivot?
Breathe. It’s awesome to have the privilege to recognize you need to pivot AND pivot before your company dies.
Architect your conversion funnel - EVERYONE READING THIS SHOULD DO THIS NOW
Map out the entire customer journey in a FigJam. It will look something like this:
Start with every single marketing touchpoint (social, OOH, referrals, etc) → flows into landing pages → flows into demos or checkouts → flows into lifecycle → flows into trials → flows into subscriptions → flows into retentive users (and thus, LTV)
In between every step, write the conversion percentage (%)
Look at the biggest drop-offs
Figure out what to inject to make the worst drop-offs better
P.S. The lower-funnel you go, the fewer customers you have to work with
Find the core issue; typically one of the following:
Product (is it retentive?)
Marketing (does it drive new customers)
Sales (is it cost-effective, a short enough cycle, scalable)
Figure out how everything is connected and how to uplevel with a pivot. Examples:
New features
New pricing models
New bundles btw features + pricing
Redo your branding + positioning
Condense your funnel or expand your funnel
To reiterate: pivot is anything that fundamentally changes the unit economics of your business.
How to Validate Your Pivot with Conviction (& Cost-Effectively)
Before you validate anything, you must do the above step of architecting your conversion funnel and user journey. If you take away anything from this newsletter, take away that exercise. It is critical to understand what to pivot to and how to test the pivot.
Now, if you’ve done this correctly, it’s time to validate your pivot.
Although we all love to have raw conviction, nothing solidifies a pivot more than the foundational data you gather to justify this change in the business.
Map out the impact of this pivot → what will your revenue be in the best, worst and moderate scenarios
Estimate the revenue shortfall you’re willing to embrace while you bring this pivot to life (assuming it will outweigh the current business model, obvi)
Map out the resources necessary to implement this pivot → eng, marketing, sales, design, R&D funds
Map out the ICP you think will be the most lucrative to capture with this pivot (example: consumer, midmarket, enterprise, etc.) → then go as deep as possible by characteristics/titles/verticals
Design the communications to bring this pivot to life (visual look, messaging, internal comms, comms to existing customers, marketing videos, case studies) → AKA why TF does this matter, make sense + why is it SO epic
Test out the pivot MVP style
You need to actually validate that this pivot is a good idea before going all-in
Set aside test budget and resources
Draw up an MVP (minimum viable product)
Make multiple variations of the MVP across different pricing, designs, value props, and user flows
Make custom funnels for different marketing segments
Make sure to do one broad funnel
Then build ~5 funnels for the specific ICP groups you think will be the stickiest users (this means group-specific creative, landing pages, email sequences)
Sure, it’s scary and takes conviction to try new stuff.
But, isn’t it better to stomach the pain, keep the business alive, and grow into something entirely new than have too much pride in something that isn’t working, that you’ll kill your company?
Embrace the pivot and give useful feedback to your founder friends who are exploring these new roads.
How & When to Broadcast Your Pivot
I’m always a fan of planning your product pivot (e.g., getting strong early user signal that this is the right move) before broadcasting it to the world via marketing.
What properly planning for your pivot launch looks like:
Beta testers who are retentive and paying
A working product that isn’t buggy and doesn’t break
Fire marketing and knowing which channels to push things out on (e.g., memes on X, employee posts on LinkedIn, UGC in paid ads on Meta)
Have a ballpark CAC and LTV so you can know what good looks like
Some sort of referral system
Worst mistakes you can make (fyi, of course, there are outliers):
Broadcasting your pivot to the entire world before having a strong early user signal
Not knowing your unit economics (at X scale, the pivot will bring $X to the business with the current pricing) – of course, forecasting is always a bit bullshitty, but it gives you a rly good mental model to know if you’re tracking to what the business needs
Not testing out different messaging
You might have a killer product, but if it’s not paired with killer marketing that speaks to a specific initial target ICP, the product won’t get the inputs it needs to run properly (bc you’ll need to iterate on the product and for that to happen need sufficient data = sufficient customers coming in)
Make a Figjam of all the user personas and different messaging that is already resonating with them
Tip: Check social media comments to see how people speak
There are often golden, repeated complaints in these comments that you can directly tie your product to as a solution
Tip: Find out where these communities live online and build in them
How to broadcast your pivot:
Test phase:
Make multiple flows that are specific to this new pivot (starting from marketing → thru product + lifecycle, like we mapped out earlier)
Run organic + paid content against this pivot
Monitor the user journey
Once validated:
Start to transfer internal comms and product messaging to include a hierarchy that now supports this pivot
Example: We launched a podcast feature at beehiiv, which is slaying beyond and now is something we are doubling down on 5x, so this feature is now in a bunch of product messaging
PR
Creators
Imagery + vibe of the pivot
Blast this pivot to the world!!
Share updates about how this pivot is ebbing and flowing into your long-term product vision and roadmap
Well, How’d I Do?
Pivoting….What? Like it’s hard?
The best product builders are masters at pivots because they feel like a seamless evolution in the company’s journey. Now you know how to:
Architect your conversion funnel to define your pivot
Validate your pivot with conviction
How & when to broadcast your pivot
It requires incredible mental strength to lean into risk. Pivoting is that.
Shoutout to YOU for knowing when to pivot, what to test, and how to turn the next chapter into the winning one.
P.S. Happy Mother’s Day! I was meant to be my mother’s daughter in every lifetime.
I hope you have an incredible and productive week until we speak again on Sunday.
Julia
