The art of the pivot
Frank Greer, CEO of Zipit Wireless Inc., appreciates the importance of both thinking long-term and having the ability to pivot, defined as a significant course change when business isn’t working out.
Seven years ago, he and cofounder Ralph Heredia created Zipit Wireless, a company using cloud-based technology before most people had heard the term. The company’s product was hand-held devices marketed to teenagers who chatted with AOL Instant Messenger, but lacked unlimited access to personal computers. Zipit devices received positive reviews from The New York Times and other news organizations. Then came cellphones.
Zipit Wireless has continued to grow long after AOL Instant Messenger was eclipsed in the teen market by text messages, Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook.
Success has come from patented technology, but also from mastery of the pivot – an important challenge many startup companies never achieve.
When you think about the course that you’ve taken with Zipit Wireless, which pivots stand out to you?
The biggest one that affected us at Zipit was when we spun the company out. We were shipping a kids’ messaging product, a consumer product geared toward teens and tweens. At that time AOL Instant Messenger was their form of communication. Today, it’s Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We started out when there wasn’t a lot of options for kids to communication through instant messenger. And then we saw the market change dramatically in a short amount of time. Then we started seeing 12-year-olds and 10-year-olds carrying cellphones, and text messaging gained speed.
We were in a market where we had really good technology but clearly in a declining state. We basically looked at where we were as a company and said, “We can continue to do this and die with it, or we can change and take this expertise and knowledge we’ve got and redirect it.”
How do you decide what do when your market is going away? It’s got to be a scary situation.
It was very gut wrenching. I can remember a board meeting where we talked about how can we change, how can we improve. One of the board members said, “We need to stop spending a dime. We need to spend no more money on this instant messaging product for kids. We need to stop right now.” We all sat back in our chairs and thought, “Really?”
We turned on a dime, and had to. If we hadn’t, we wouldn’t still be here. It really hit me like a sledgehammer that he was right. We needed to take the dollars we had to spend to make a successful product and profitable company.
That’s a real aha kind of moment. How do you know when you’re there?
It’s hard as an entrepreneur. You get emotionally attached to something. We’d been working on that for five years at that point. You get heavily invested and believe in your product. It took somebody making that comment in a strong way.
How do you go from a kid’s messenger to a serious medical communication device? It’s quite a transition.
When we started this concept … the first thing we realized is we needed to have some way of having a remote way of managing these devices. Let’s say we needed to update software … or put parental controls on the device, we needed to have the ability to control the device. We actually patented technology around that. That basically put us in a spot where we developed cloud technology before that term was even popular.
Our cofounder did a good job of seeking opportunities where we could fit. And we had some very fortunate relationships develop with companies like Verizon Wireless and then with AT&T Wireless. We got connected with both of them. Verizon saw an opportunity at the time with simply replacing pagers. It’s generally a declining business, but they’re still almost 5 million pagers in use.
And we also provide the ability to monitor, track and then manage all of the devices in the field. When we send a message to these end users, we know when the message got sent, when it was delivered, when the user responded. That lets a business understand what’s working and what’s not, so they can improve their processes. That’s really what we do – the ability to monitor, track and improve in real-time.
We have three key things we do. We have a device we offer for messaging. Then we have a smartphone application. And then we have this Web-based control center that is all client-based.
We also allow basically secure texting as well. In health care, finance and other fields, having secure communication that can be encrypted, wiped, removed and automatically destroyed is very important.
Looking toward the future, do you see the next pivot?
One of our key businesses is what we call critical communications. That really has been our core business over the past four years. I’m not sure this is a pivot, but we’ve also grown another portion of our business, another very hot space right now – the Internet of Things. It’s really evolving to be a significant part of our business. In the tech world … it basically means the idea of connecting all of these different devices that in years past may not have needed or wanted or had value from an Internet connection. But as you start to look at how the world is evolving, connecting machines in so many different kinds of ways adds so much value. Everything from cars to trail cameras for Bushnell, a company we work with. We’re also doing a prescription medical dispensing device.
