A great summary of pivot

The slides in this deck provide a great no-BS summary of what pivot is all about and what the major types of pivot approaches are. Definitely worth checking out.

Lean startup - what is pivot from Yuki Sekiguchi

As simple as possible, but not simpler

When we started working on the foundation and development of AFC Partners we had some really interesting discussions about our approach, our values and how we would express those things in very concrete terms.

One of our first decisions was to keep everything simple, including our tools and infrastructure. A concrete expression of that would have to be our website since we felt its purpose is to connect us to the market in an open and honest way; so speaking of simplicity, flexibility, focus on what matters felt a bit incompatible with a fancy site running on a more or less sophisticated CMS that would require more resources than necessary for the goals pursued. But to use 'simple' did not mean 'quick and dirty', nor did it mean that the choice of platform was not important. It was a case of keeping things "as simple as possible, but not simpler" (balanced simplicity).

So we applied one of our favorite methods to ourselves: experimentation and iterations. After some testing with other options we considered for our site and blog, we finally chose to deploy it on Blogger as you can see. It turns out this was the best solution to cover all of our needs:

1. a stable platform that would be simple to manage and
2. easy to use and
3. simple to integrate with other channels (social, emailing) and
4. efficiently processed by search engines and
5. straightforward to measure with Google Analytics.

The approach of balanced simplicity and continuous iterations is also one we applied to the development of content to present our services. So we tried several ways of presenting what we do and are still developing part of the content, since we wanted our visitors to get a couple of things really easily:

1. we strongly believe in combining thinking and doing because that makes both analysis and implementation far better than when thinking is dissociated from doing; after all, does anyone seriously believe that car engines would be built as they are if the people designing them were the ones changing oil every once in a while?
2. we like goals to be clear and properly formulated so that the means to reach them are chosen and used for that purpose exclusively; the means are not the goals and we don't particularly fancy using a tool "just because we can";
3. we seek to be as simple and as concrete as possible in tackling business challenges with our customers, which means that we apply Occam's razor, we speak in actionable terms and we iterate a lot to identify the simplest possible action plans and to focus on the best points of leverage. At the end of the day, our clients value the results we deliver, not the sophistication of our models or the beauty of our slides.

We'll be sharing more of what goes on in our backstage in future posts, but what you'll mainly find in this blog is ideas, thoughts, analyses and positions on balanced, meaningful and sustainable business, which we believe to be the very best path to successful venturing in turbulent times.

Hello world

Hello world!
This is a temporary blog. We'll be expressing opinions and sharing content of interest very soon.