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Hey everyone! This week we’re diving into a topic that we’ve covered a couple of times before: the pivot.

For startups, the initial business plan rarely survives first contact with reality. The story isn’t very different for Graphite, the developer platform that recently secured a $55 million Series B.

You often hear stories of start-ups that go like: we first tried x, it didn’t work so we tried y, and we became billionaires. Today, we’re speaking about how (specifically) successful founders go from x to y, without losing everything they’ve built.

Merrill Lutsky and his co-founders first idea was (kind of) simple enough: build a tool to help mobile developers bypass the App Store for quicker rollbacks. But when they hired engineers from Meta, these new team members had what Merrill called an "allergic reaction" to GitHub's workflow compared to Meta's internal tools. That was their first signal to pivot.

Doing what engineers do during a company hackathon, their engineers decided to rebuild the tool they missed. (Are you picturing that scene in the Social Network too? We are, cause we’ve never been to a hackathon).

Word spread through the ex-Meta community, and soon Graphite began receiving unsolicited requests for this internal tool. As Merrill recalls: "We'd be demoing the iOS app rollback tool, but engineers would say, 'Yeah, this iOS thing is cool, but tell me about the stack diffs thing. I really want that tool.'" This pattern became too strong to ignore.

WAIT! If you’re thinking of clicking away - don’t. Keep going to check out our Required Reading session filled with stuff that founders like Merrill relied on when they were at the start of their journey. We’re sure you’d find it useful.

Rather than immediately abandoning their original direction, Graphite implemented a methodical experiment. They gave themselves a strict one-month trial period to validate their potential new direction.

S**t in, s**t out

Merrill’s biggest fear when thinking of pivoting was that they’d continue building both products simultaneously and indefinitely and therefore end up building neither to its full potential. 

But the way they tested whether the pivot made sense mattered the most. After all - if your testing system itself isn’t great, how can you rely on the results?

This meant running a time-bound experiment with strict, tangible goals: 

• 1 month long 

• Get 20 engineers at well-known companies using the tool daily

• Have these users join a dedicated Slack channel for community building

• Secure commitments for weekly 30-minute feedback calls

"We purposely set a very high bar," Merrill explains. They focused entirely on making the code review tool available to other companies for that month, preventing the common startup trap of spreading resources too thin.

When the month ended, they had 50 engaged users – more than double their target.

But this wasn’t all they had to think of, they had customers on their original product and investors who had invested in them thinking they’d be building something else entirely. What do you do about that? 

But wait… what about us?!  

Navigating a pivot requires careful management of both customer and investor expectations. Graphite handled these relationships thoughtfully:

For existing customers:

• No customers had any long-term contracts (yet)

• They maintained transparent communication about the direction change

• Integrated existing customers into the new product

"A lot of the early customers that we had on the iOS tool are now Graphite customers," Merrill notes. "It's been kind of fun to see that come full circle."

For Investors:

Merrill credits their investors at Homebrew: "When we were making the decision to pivot, Hunter and Satya kind of smiled and told us, 'We kind of figured you guys would pivot from your original idea.'" This transparent approach helped align all stakeholders around the new direction.

"You find that wedge, and then usually there's a lot of adjacent value that you'll discover along the way," Merrill explains. "As long as you're listening to your users and getting their feedback, they'll lead you to the adjacent value."

What this means for you

If you're considering a pivot or finding yourself at a crossroads with your product, Graphite's experience offers a blueprint you can follow:

1. Design a good experiment – Set a specific timeframe (like Graphite's one month) with clear success metrics before committing

2. Create high commitment hurdles – Don't just measure interest; measure actual commitment through actions like joining feedback calls or community channels (in short, find PMF)

3. Communicate transparently – Keep both customers and investors informed throughout the process to maintain trust

"Most companies don't get their first product right. The difference between success and failure often lies not in avoiding pivots, but in how effectively you recognize, validate, and execute them.”

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See you next week!

Rahul & Aryaman