Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Website translation. Wow! That’s completely different.

Will Fleming: It sounds completely different. Our target market for the brochures were the largest retailers in North America. We met with nearly every one of the top 20 or 25 retailers. We had great visibility into this common problem. It was interesting to us that all of those retailers wanted to meet with us but none wanted to buy. As we tried to figure out what was so interesting about us that they wanted to meet with us and also what was so unattractive that they never wanted to buy, they revealed a lot about their own businesses.

They told us, “These brochures are nice-to-have but not a need-to-have. The reason we have you here is because you combine website technology and language in ways that nobody else has ever thought of, and might be very valuable to us down the road.” We said, “Tell us more about that.” This was 2001 or so. They said, “It’s called the World Wide Web, but I operate my website in one language for one market. I don’t think that’s going to be my future state.” We asked, “What do you want to accomplish over time?”

They said, “For starters, I want my website in another language so I can serve my customers who speak another language.” We said, “Why don’t you have your website in another language right now. There are thousands of translation companies in the United States.” They said, “Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how much IT infrastructure work would get dumped on me if we treated this as a translation project.” We said, “Not really. Could you tell us about it?” They proceeded to tell us about the IT infrastructure work, which was considerable. That gave us great clarity and understanding of a technical problem they were having.

Sramana Mitra: That was the customer need that they told you about.

Will Fleming: Exactly. We took that clarity of understanding of what they were trying to solve for and wrestled with the riddle of, “How do we craft a technology-driven solution to their website translation needs so that they can get the benefit of a website in another language without having to go through this IT infrastructure work?” That was our first pivot in getting from the wrong business into the right business. We’ve had a couple of pivots since then.

Sramana Mitra: How did that pivot go? It seemed like it was driven by a customer who was willing to pay. How many other customers were you able to validate that way or get to in a short term after that?

Will Fleming: We were able to validate the need through conversations with well north of a dozen very quickly. Then it took a year to build the technology so that we could deliver translated websites. Once we built the technology, we then needed to go to market with it. Just like most startups, that was rough going. The first year, we got three customers. The next year it was 12. The next year, it was 40. Then it spiked up to well north of a hundred and continued to grow from there.

Sramana Mitra: This became your core business essentially.

Will Fleming: Yes, that became our business.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Managing Multiple Pivots While Scaling to $50 Million: MotionPoint CEO Will Fleming
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