The Week I Pivoted My Software Business

This Week:

Why I’m pivoting my software.
Finding a hidden gem that I never knew existed!
Snaps from a week working in Kuala Lumpur.

March 2025

Su	M	T	W	Th	F	S
23	24	25	26	27	28	3/1
2	3	4	5	6	7	8
9	10	11	12	13	14	15
16	17	18	19	20	21	22
23	24	25	26	27	28	29
30	31	4/1	2	3	4	5

Where In The World Was I?

🇲🇾 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Metrics From The Week

The first time I’ve hit 5 weight training workouts in a week in… I have no idea how long. Over a year? Regardless, it hasn’t happened very often 💪

Business Update

The Setup – What’s Wrong?

Oh boy okay where do we start?

If you’ve been following along, you’ll probably remember me mentioning a couple times about changing my pricing model for VideoHawk.co and differentiating from all the other tools out there.

A couple of things culminated this week as I tried to figure out what exactly my strategy is going forward.

Building new features doesn’t seem like a good use of my time. And going heavy into hard-selling my software on my YouTube/socials is something that I don’t feel comfortable doing.

This whole process has been drawn out a lot longer than I had originally intended… (see uh, August 2024 life update posts 😂). My most recent rough plan was:

Use my software to help me with content
Use the content to attract new creators/users
Get high-intent users who are willing to pay (not just use it for free)
Jump on calls with those users and figure out pain points and opportunities to double down on

So kind of like a better “foot-in-the-door” and way to provide value to people and find the best opportunities to double down on.

But as I’ve been making more YouTube videos, I’ve realized something…

The fastest way to attract more of my target users is going to be making content solely focused on YouTube, video titles, YouTube growth, strategy, etc. But the thought of doing that doesn’t feel sustainable to me.

I didn’t get into all of this to optimize YouTube and build a 100k+ subscriber channel.

I started this just to help me systematize finding topics that resonate.

I’m just a guy who builds stuff, systematizes his life, and is looking to use that as an opportunity to help others in exchange for money.

I see my “personal brand” as more of an umbrella of systems & personal growth. My software does fit under it, but it’s not the whole thing. That umbrella feels more sustainable to me, because well, it’s me, and not my software.

But doing this sort of by definition broadens my niche because systematization is a lot more broad then systematizing YouTube growth.

… and being more broad means I’ll attract a fewer % of my target users interested in my software.

… which means getting high-intent users and validation for what I’ve built is going to take a LOT longer.

To some extent I’m okay with this, because I’m building my brand for the long term.

But also the opportunity cost in terms of actually sustaining a business, is VERY high.

Maybe this would work if I had a killer product that I already knew smashed at the pain points. But I haven’t gotten validation like that yet.

So this all presents the question… What’s the strategy here?

Do I just accept this will take longer and continue forward?
Do I double down on content and put my software on back burner?
Do I double down on my software and put content on the back burner?
Do I step back even further and change my business model?

Getting Advice

I decided to write everything out in a file. Like uh, everything (10,391 words). Back to quitting my job, what I’m interested in, how and why I started VideoHawk, the marketing efforts I’ve done so far, the quotes of user feedback and conversations I’ve had, the API constraints I have, my strengths and weaknesses, all of it.

And I passed it all to ChatGPT (Gosh this feels so stupid to write 😂)

But instead of just “what advice do you have,” I asked it very specific and targeted questions. Some of the best were:

Before answering what I should do, what are all the directions you could take this conversation?
Rank the most pressing and impactful issues here
Read between the lines, what can you tell me deeper in here that I may not recognize?
What would you say if you didn’t care about my feelings and only optimized for objectivity?
Play devils advocate. What would you say if you were skeptical or contrarian?
What would you do if you optimized for money? What would you do if you optimized for fulfillment? (be specific)
What would you do if you were risk averse? What would you do if you were highest risk? (be specific)

And all the while I took note of what continued to resurface and updated the context to fix gaps. I eventually had a list of all the exact issues, questions, and requests I had.

Then asked:

Dive deep into one specific topic or question (be specific)

This was the best by far, and GPT-4o worked WAY better than the new o3-mini.

The Takeaways

I had a LOT of takeaways, but at a surface level, this is what I took away:

Validation is severely lacking. Positive testimonials aren’t enough. I need concrete proof of outcome (views, subs, conversions, engagement, etc.) transformation.
I’ve provided some amount of value, but either the pain point isn’t strong enough or the solution doesn’t work well enough.
Pivoting my pricing to something more “premium” would be premature without this proof of transformation.
User acquisition from solely organic content will take too long to validate. Low ticket thrives with volume and I don’t have volume.
API constraints are a significant growth bottleneck.
I’ve waded and waded into this position where I’ve gone Scale -> Prove Demand. The better order is Prove Demand -> Scale

So, What’s The Solution?

At a high level:

Reposition myself away from low-ticket SaaS.
Find and prove demand.
Deliver concrete results.
Use the insights to create a process.
Transition to scaled SaaS.

I did an embarrassingly large amount of GPT’ing this week, but I settled on a very hyper-specific and concrete plan for how to pivot my offer, my positioning, and execute on this.

It’s still fresh, which is why I’m not gonna share the specifics publicly yet. Frankly, I don’t need more ideas, validations, or comments. I just need to execute on it.