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

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.