I think you make a good point. We need to make sure the whole company is on board. PG's comment on using consulting to find the product you want to build long term feels applicable here. Of course, the slippery slope remains. But if we can make money while finding those "narrow openings that have wide vistas beyond"
We are also competing with extra-ingrained incumbents like Blackboard (publicly traded) that own the sales channels despite being bloated, hard to use software. The higher ed market values reputation and a laundry list of features that promise to fix all their issues over a solution that actually resonates with students.
First time founder. My company is in a "fatal pinch."
Similar to a previous comment by @LukeFitzpatrick, we built something for our alma mater that we thought we could sell to colleges for 50k/year. We got investment, we built it, we sold it to a few more schools but the software is not feature-packed and mature enough to attract sales fast enough. Higher ed also moves super slow even when you're doing well.
We're starting to see some traction with parties that want the software custom-tailored for their need (the consulting PG speaks of). But we're stuck in spot where we haven't gotten a check from any of these parties yet and are reluctant to pull the trigger and focus on only on the consultative sale.
The team, product roadmap, and marketing strategy is all geared towards higher ed. But it's clear now we can't become profitable in 6 months in that industry. How do we operationally perform the "pivot" into consulting? Do you agree it's time to do so?
Unfortunately from our view, it changes the vision a lot.
Our networks are built for universities and a big way we differentiate from other solutions (in which only chartered organizations can make a group) is we allow informal groups (study groups, interest groups, topic discussions, etc) on the system.
Based on our beta, a large percentage of groups are informal and would not be chartered by the university. Yammer does not limit who can create a group, for that reason we are more wary of them as competition.
Nothing wrong with that.