
I recently met with a startup company that has built a good product but, as I discovered, the company is burning cash fast and is looking to raise more money to find a sustainable business model. The challenge this company is facing is that they still have not found a problem that their product can solve cheaper, better, faster and smarter than their competition. To put it bluntly, as a startup, they have not come up with a disruptive business model to pose a threat to their competitors. Will they pivot and experiment with a different business model or just crash and burn? It remains to be seen, but they are certainly running out of time and, unless they figure it out soon, they will go into a zombie state.
This company is a typical example of a company that has a good product but is desperately looking for a problem to solve. Unfortunately, this is faced by many startups early on.

Mahatma Gandhi faced this exact situation with his "lean startup" non-violent movement in South Africa in 1912. He was like an early startup who had tactics but needed a big cause.
As Eric Reis states in his book "Lean Startup," that every entrepreneur inevitably reaches a point at some time where he has to make a choice between stay the course or change direction. Changing direction is called pivot, which is "a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis about the product, strategy, and engine of growth [1]."
Steve Blank in this video about pivot asks a fundamental question, "What do you do when your hypotheses don't match the reality?" You have to say that pur hypotheses are wrong and try something else. Often this happens by accident where you discover that the product can solve a problem in a way that you had not thought about. This is not that different from many inchoate political movement. This is what Gandhi discovered in 1913 in South Africa that made him change his hypothesis and learned who he needed to make his passive resistance movement work.

Gandhi, when he was in South Africa, was experimenting with passive resistance to seek justice, but did not have a big cause or army of followers to turn it into a powerful political mass movement. In fact,he had very few followers---besides his family---who took part in passive resistance since they were being jailed and losing business. Protesting was costly and his movement was losing steam since he could not make it grow from a bootstrap phase.
Gandhi was deemed a failure, according to his critic P.S. Aiyar, editor of a weekly paper called African Chronicle aimed at Tamil readers, in which he writes that Gandhi's non-violent struggle had “resulted in no tangible good to anyone [2]," and that he and his associates were looked upon as “an object of ridicule and hatred among all sections of the community in South Africa [3].”
The difference between Gandhi being known for say one or two generation (at most) and immortality came down to one event that pretty much fell into his lap in 1913. He did not start it, but seized the moment and led it. It gave him an insight, confidence and credibility that no other Indian leaders had to start a political movement of scale to end the British rule in India.

Gandhi's luck as a political leader changed when poor Indian indentured laborers went on strike in 1913 in a coal-mining town of Newcastle in Northern Natal in South Africa.. Gandhi had not paid much attention to the plight of these oppressed workers who were derogatorily referred to as "coolies." They were supposed to be protected by a colonial officer with a feel-good title of "Protector of the Immigrants," but was really looking after the interests of the plantation, mine and railroad owners. The workers had enough and finally walked off their jobs in thousands to follow Gandhi's non-violent resistance,
The reason I say that this event fell into Gandhi's lap is because Gandhi had not figured out how to integrate people of low caste Indians into his non-violent movement of which many of these indentured laborers belonged to. Many had come to South Africa not only to earn money but hoping to launder their low caste when they returned to India. Gandhi was liberated from the shackles of the caste system, thus, when urged by his followers to lead the labor strike, he did not waver and changed the game for himself and India.
How?

Gandhi had to pivot in order to turn his "lean startup" into a non-violent mass movement.
What Gandhi learned from his experience with indentured laborers is how to connect with the poor. Any mass movement needs foot soldiers and the numbers in his mass movement would have to come from the 700,000 villages in India (prior to partition). The Anglicized elites (mostly lawyers) in India had passion and ideas but lacked wide support from people that really mattered---the poor.
Joseph Lelyved writes in his book that Gandhi might have "faded into semi-oblivion if he’d returned to India in 1912. His final ten months in South Africa, though, transformed his sense of what was possible for him and those he led [4]." The two important things Gandhi gained from the labor strike in Natal and his stay in South Africa was that satyagraha (passive resistance) "as a means of active struggle to achieve a national goal belonged to the first category; satyagraha involving the poorest of the poor fit the second. These were what he carried in his otherwise meager baggage when, finally, he came out of Africa [5]."
Gandhi arrived in India with a valuable insight that helped him frame a simple question when he became the leader of the independence movement that resonated with the masses: How can a country of 300 million people be ruled by 100,000 Britishers if the people refuse to cooperate? British rulers realized that you can't and eventually quit India in 1947.
Startups of all kinds at some point are faced with a hard decision to either perservere or pivot, and sometimes a small pivot is all that's needed that can make a difference between failure and success.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sources
[1] Reis, Eric, "Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses," Crown Business, September 13, 2011
[2] Lelyveld, Joseph, "Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India," Vintage, March 29, 2011
[3] Ibid
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Will You Please Share This Post? Thanks.
