customer segment pivot

is a pivot whereby the company realizes that the product it's building solves a real problem for real customers but that they are not the customers it originally planned to serve.

The kind of pivot we needed is called a customer segment pivot. In this pivot, the company realizes that the product it's building solves a real problem for real customers but that they are not the customers it originally planned to serve. In other words, the product hypothesis is confirmed only partially. (This chapter described such a pivot in the Votizen story, above.) A customer segment pivot is an especially tricky pivot to execute because, as we learned the hard way at IMVU, the very actions that made us successful with early adopters were diametrically opposed to the actions we'd have to master to be successful with mainstream customers.

customer segment pivot, n.Definitions

customer segment pivot