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Ask HN: Is it a pivot if the FDA makes you?
433 points by formerly_ingestible 7 hours ago | 96 comments

We got a warning letter in March and had to stop selling the thing we were selling. We now sell a different thing to the same people. My cofounder is telling investors we "pivoted based on market feedback." I think the market in this sentence is the federal government. Is this a pivot? Does it matter? Our next board meeting is Thursday.


second_time_defendant 7 hours ago

A pivot is when you change direction because you learned something. You learned something. The letterhead it arrived on is an implementation detail.

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formerly_ingestible 6 hours ago

That's more or less what my cofounder said, but he was smiling in a way I didn't like.

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vc_anon_44 6 hours ago

Investor here (not yours, I hope). We see this more than you'd think. In a deck I'd want it framed as "regulatory-led product discovery." The best founders treat a warning letter as the most expensive user interview they'll ever get, and the only one where the user writes everything down.

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grumpy_bsd 6 hours ago

I can't tell anymore if this site is satire.

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vc_anon_44 5 hours ago

Neither can my LPs. It's going great.

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actual_lawyer_not_yours 6 hours ago

Not legal advice. Whatever you call it, make sure the word "pivot" does not appear in any email dated before the letter. Discovery is a search engine, and it has very good recall.

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formerly_ingestible 5 hours ago

What about Slack?

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actual_lawyer_not_yours 5 hours ago

Oh no.

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pedant_prime 4 hours ago

Pedantically, the basketball definition of a pivot requires you to keep one foot planted. Which foot did you keep planted?

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formerly_ingestible 4 hours ago

The customers. We kept the customers. I'm realizing as I type this that that's the part the FDA was upset about.

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