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Q: What were the biggest learnings from the failures that you took into Kami?

10/5/2016

Alliv Samson
COO & CoFounder
Kami

A: Assess the failures earlier, I must say. Looking back at our pivot from Notable [the first version of Kami] I think we should have pivoted earlier. We were too afraid to let go and move on, to accept the fact that we were growing as fast as we possibly could. We’re trying to push it hard, and didn’t stop to think that maybe something else was wrong; we didn’t look at the bigger picture. I wish we pivoted earlier, I wish we were more courageous and open to assessing what needs to be changed. At the time of our second pivot to focusing on education we were growing really well with Kami, but we were doing too much. We were trying to focus on too many markets. We thought that we could do it. We thought, ‘they love our product, it’s got to work’. But the truth was there is only four of us, and we can’t do all of those things. We should have focused on education probably mid last year, when we started going to conferences. We were getting all that feedback and receiving these suggestions from our education users, so we should have had a lightbulb moment where we thought let’s focus on education. But we didn’t and kept trying to do as much as we could for too long. It didn’t end up well on our end, because we were so resource constrained. That’s one of the biggest lessons I took, that we should have pivoted as fast as possible, and actually assessed our difficulties earlier.

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Q: What were some of the things that led to your pivot? And where have you ended up to now?

10/5/2016

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Alliv Samson
COO & CoFounder
Kami

A: So we’ve actually pivoted a couple of times. The first pivot was from a focus on NZ’s higher-education market to being more US focused, and less specific on verticals. What led to that pivot was mostly the growth that we wanted. When we closed Notable [the first version of Kami] we had around 5000 users, and that’s within a years growth. And that’s not good enough. Now we get 5000 in a day or so. That’s the difference with the same amount of effort. So that was the first pivot.

The second pivot happened a couple of months ago. With Kami we were lucky because because everybody with a PDF or an online document could easily use our product. But unfortunately for us, with only four full-time employees we’re very constrained resources wise. We just couldn’t cover every industry and every type of user that we have. So we decided to narrow our focus. We’ll still support other types of users - but we will focus the business - marketing, sales, engineering and development - on the education market. So we’ve just basically refocused the entire business to the North American - mostly US - K12 market. We were growing before we made that decision, and now we’re growing even faster. It’s definitely been a big learning curve for us, but we’ve been happy with how it’s gone so far.

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Q: What were the biggest learnings from the failures that you took into Kami?

Q: What were some of the things that led to your pivot? And where have you ended up to now?

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