The focused pivot that unlocked Constructor's earliest growth

In startup lore, pivots are mythic moments: A struggling company abandons one path, commits to another and everything changes.

In my experience building Constructor from 0 to 1, this understanding is incomplete.

Some companies execute daring and high-risk shifts from one market to another, but most do not.

More often on the road to product-market fit, successful startups make a series of clear, intentional and committed shifts in strategy. This is the more common sort of pivot.

Moving Constructor from fragile early traction to breakout success required we execute numerous pivots like this. In this article and the ones to follow, I’ll discuss 7.

The setting

Constructor had a bold thesis back in 2016: Search should be solved as a machine learning problem, not as a series of hand-tuned rules layered on top of keyword search.

But these bold ambitions belie our humble beginnings.

We started as a simple autocomplete solution that integrated some behavioral signals in ranking. We hadn't yet fully realized our AI and ML vision. We had barely 4 figures of MRR, and 90% of it came from one customer where our champion had departed. We were so afraid of losing the revenue that we avoided asking them to upgrade our library, lest they cancel the service!

We had yet to fully define our product, let alone achieve product-market fit.

What was our first pivot?

My initial survey of our customer base uncovered a lack of focus: a medical billing tool, a daily deal app, an expense reporting tool, and a retailer of pool supplies.

Our goal was to deliver autocomplete optimized with ML trained on behavior, but of our customers, only the lone retailer cared about great search or conversions.

That was the insight. We were making autocomplete for everyone, but we needed to be make autocomplete for eCommerce.

When we pivoted our focus to eCommerce and pushed hard on GTM, the results were clear: a major grocery retailer, a massive multi-brand retailer, an education publisher and even the largest eCommerce brand in Africa.

This pivot catapulted us to our earliest growth.

The returns compounded even years later when we were able to outcompete unfocused rivals like Algolia and Bloomreach by delivering features that spoke uniquely to our customers' challenges, tailoring messaging, sales motion and customer expertise to this one space.

Eventually our pivot transformed everything, but at first it changed very little.

We didn't change what we built. We didn't even really change how we sold it. The changes to marketing were minimal.

We just changed who we talked to. The key was that we made a clear decision, committed and pushed hard in the new direction.

People say startups don't die of starvation, they die of indigestion. That's not always true (as you'll see in a future story), but in this case, it was greater focus that unlocked success.

Stay tuned for the next 6 lessons!