Start-ups fear hearing the word Pivot. Pivot to someone who has risked everything on their vision of a new product is failure. Even I say the word to clients and duck in fear of flying objects because the term is so misunderstood.
A Pivot is a point of turn not a call to change everything and run the other way. A pivot that is 180 degrees in the opposite direction is almost certainly as big a mistake as persevering on a broken path. Pivot in the dictionary is a point of turn often on a bearing point. Your bearing point is the work up to now, your core skills and competences as well as any market perceptions that are out there.
Great pivots leverage what has been accomplished and are honest about where poor choices were made. Often the product is not wrong just how it adds value and to whom that value is directed is off the mark. Markets are like launch windows for NASA, they move and change but seem to come around again. However if you just wait and do not recalculate for the new window your launch will fail so the Pivot becomes a process of recalculating the new window.
How can you hit the market? Is this new window similar and in what ways has the atmosphere changed? Warning is you think that this new window is finally the market catching up to you and you do nothing new, you are most likely WRONG. More often than not the market now has new obstacles, customer behavior has changed and your earlier attempts have yielded data that is critical to success.
The Russian/US rocket programs were different in that in the US we modeled for ever before building and in Russia they built and blew stuff up to learn. Russia built the strongest launch vehicle ever that is still in use today. The US built a highly efficient vehicle that severed one function very well. Both succeeded in their goals but the Russian vehicle had accumulated domain knowledge that is still serving them today. Your efforts prior to a successful Pivot are never in vein if you do not throw away the learning or code for that matter. We experiment and fail in order to learn.