I was pivoting faster than I was learning

Around this time, I watched a Y Combinator video called Building Confidence in Yourself and Your Ideas. A large part of it was about founders pivoting too quickly. They contact a few people, do not get the response they hoped for, and conclude that the idea or customer is wrong. Then they move to another idea and repeat the same process.

I recognized some of that in what I had been doing. From the outside, it looked like I had done a lot of customer discovery. I had sent around 200 Product Hunt emails, made hundreds of calls, recorded personalized videos, sold SEO services, and tried several kinds of customers. But the number of attempts was not the same as the number of useful repetitions.

Most of the Product Hunt emails were the same shallow experiment repeated many times. The founders had not expressed an SEO problem, and I did not learn much from each rejection.

The personalized videos were better because I had to study each business and received more replies. But even there, I sometimes treated the outreach as a way to decide whether a segment was good or bad, rather than staying with the segment long enough to understand how people bought, what they expected, and what would make the product genuinely useful.

I would form a hypothesis, do some outreach, build something, get a mixed response, and move to the next customer: SaaS founders, e-commerce companies, local business owners, more technical business owners, an AI-native agency, freelancers, and agencies. Some of those changes were necessary. Every phase taught me something real.

But I also started to wonder whether I had sometimes changed direction before earning the conclusion. Maybe the problem was not always the customer. Maybe I simply had not put in enough good repetitions at that stage.

I had not talked to enough of the same kind of person. I had not watched enough people use the same workflow. I had not tried enough versions of the same pitch. I had not stayed with one narrow problem long enough to develop judgment about it. It is easy to say that something “did not work” after trying it a few times. It is harder to know whether the idea was wrong or whether you were still bad at executing it.

This time, I am trying to get enough repetitions

That realization changed how I am approaching agencies. I am currently building closely with one local SEO agency with a team of around ten people. Instead of starting with a long list of features, we are taking one workflow they already perform and going through it in detail.

The first workflow is finding competitors for a local business. Even this contains many decisions that are usually hidden inside an SEO specialist’s head: which services matter most, which locations should be considered, and whether a business is a competitor because it ranks for the same query, offers the same service, targets the same type of customer, or all three.

There are judgment calls inside what first looks like a simple task. Should a premium clinic be compared with a low-cost clinic simply because Google places them beside each other? What evidence makes an agency confident that a competitor belongs on the final list?

I am watching how the agency currently answers these questions, building the first version, showing it to them, collecting corrections, and changing it. Then we run the loop again.

At the same time, I am speaking with as many local SEO freelancers and agencies as I reasonably can. Working deeply with one agency gives me detail. Talking with many agencies tells me whether that detail represents a common problem or only the way one team happens to work. One gives depth. The others give comparison.

I am also trying not to turn every conversation into a new product direction. When one person asks for something different, I write it down. I do not immediately rebuild the product around it. I wait to hear the same problem again, understand how important it is, and compare it with what people actually spend time and money solving.

The goal is no longer to reach a quick conclusion that the idea is validated or invalidated. The goal is to accumulate enough real repetitions that my decisions become less random.

Enough conversations to ask better questions. Enough outreach to understand why people reply. Enough sales attempts to improve how I explain the value. Enough workflow reviews to notice which steps are truly repeated. Enough product iterations to develop some taste for what an agency will trust.

Looking back, I do not think the pivots were wasted. They brought me closer to the current customer. But I no longer want pivoting itself to feel like progress. This time, I want to stay with the problem long enough to become good at solving it.