Footprint’s Pivot Playbook: What to Do When You Have Six Months of Runway Left

Footprint’s Pivot Playbook: What to Do When You Have Six Months of Runway Left

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Eli Wachs, CEO of Footprint, shared the story of the pivot that saved his company—a decision made in a pub in Birmingham, UK, with the clock running out. Most pivot stories get sanitized in retrospect, stripped of the desperation and uncertainty that defined them. Eli’s doesn’t.

Footprint had built merchandising analytics software that worked perfectly. The forecasts were accurate. The technology was solid. And nobody would buy it. After months of failed sales cycles and brutal feedback from buyers, the team had maybe six months of runway left. They needed to change everything or die trying.

“We were like, oh shit, we need to change what we’re doing,” Eli recalls. That conversation in Birmingham became the framework for how Footprint evaluated what to kill, what to keep, and where to pivot. Here’s what that actually looked like.

Start With Brutal Honesty About Why You’re Failing

The hardest part of pivoting isn’t changing direction—it’s admitting why your current direction is failing. Footprint’s problem wasn’t that they needed better marketing or more aggressive sales. The problem was fundamental: they’d built something nobody wanted to champion internally.

“We were building a product that could tell merchandisers which products were going to sell well and which products weren’t,” Eli explains. The wake-up call came from a retail VP who laid out the impossible position: “I have a team of 50 people whose job it is to forecast what’s going to sell. If I use your product and it works, I have to fire 30 of them. And if I use your product and it doesn’t work, I still have to fire 30 of them because I just spent a bunch of money on software that doesn’t work.”

Most founders would hear that feedback and try to solve it through positioning or better sales enablement. Eli’s team did something harder—they accepted that the fundamental value proposition was broken. No amount of iteration would fix a product that forced buyers to bet their careers on being wrong about their own teams.

This is the first principle of pivoting with limited runway: be honest about whether you have a sales problem or a product-market fit problem. Sales problems can be fixed with better process, different messaging, or new channels. Product-market fit problems require changing what you’re building or who you’re selling to.

Find the Asset Worth Keeping

When you’re pivoting with limited runway, you can’t rebuild from scratch. You need to identify what’s actually valuable in your existing business and preserve it. For Footprint, that was their underlying technology—the data models, forecasting algorithms, and analytics engine.

The insight was recognizing that the technology worked but the application was wrong. The same forecasting models that merchandisers wouldn’t buy could power marketing automation. The same analytics that threatened operations teams could help marketing teams execute better campaigns.

This is critical when time is short: find the technical or business assets that don’t need to be rebuilt. Maybe it’s your core technology, your data infrastructure, your customer relationships, or your domain expertise. Whatever survived the first business model needs to be the foundation of the second.

Map Buyer Psychology, Not Just Market Size

Footprint’s pivot wasn’t about finding a bigger market—retail marketing wasn’t larger than retail merchandising. It was about finding buyers with different incentive structures.

“Marketers were where the budget was. They had budget, they had urgency, and they actually wanted to try new things,” Eli says. This wasn’t just about budget availability. It was about understanding that marketing managers face different career incentives than operations managers.

Marketers are expected to experiment with new tools. Adopting marketing automation doesn’t threaten their teams or question their judgment—it shows they’re staying current with industry trends. The same product that was politically toxic to merchandisers was politically safe for marketers.

When evaluating pivot directions with limited time, don’t just assess market size or competitive dynamics. Map out the buyer’s career incentives. Ask yourself: Does buying our product make them look smart or make them look questionable? Do they have budget authority or do they need to build consensus? Are they measured on innovation or efficiency?

These questions matter more than TAM calculations when you need to start closing deals immediately.

Optimize for Speed to Revenue, Not Long-Term Potential

With six months of runway, Footprint couldn’t afford to build toward a five-year vision. They needed a business model that could generate revenue immediately. The marketing automation pivot worked because retail marketers had budget, made decisions quickly, and could buy without extensive procurement processes.

This created a philosophical tension many pivoting founders face: the best immediate opportunity isn’t always the best long-term market. Footprint could have pivoted to something with more strategic potential but longer sales cycles. Instead, they optimized purely for survival—finding the fastest path to revenue with their existing assets.

This is the right call when you’re running out of money. You can’t build the optimal long-term business if you’re dead in six months. Get to revenue first, then expand your strategic options once you’ve survived.

Test the New Direction Before Fully Committing

Even in crisis mode, Footprint didn’t blindly commit to the marketing automation pivot. They tested whether the new positioning resonated before rebuilding everything. Early customer conversations validated that retail marketers had budget, faced problems Footprint could solve, and would actually champion the product internally.

This validation process doesn’t need to be elaborate when time is short. You’re not looking for perfect product-market fit—you’re looking for evidence that the new direction is better than the current one. Can you get initial meetings? Do prospects understand the value proposition? Do they have budget and authority?

If the answer to these basic questions is yes, you have enough signal to commit. Perfect validation is a luxury you can’t afford with six months of runway.

Build the Minimum Viable GTM Motion

After deciding to pivot, Footprint needed pipeline immediately. They couldn’t spend months building an enterprise sales team or waiting for content marketing to generate organic traffic. They needed a GTM motion that could scale fast with limited resources.

The answer was Facebook ads arbitrage. “We basically said, we’re going to create a demand gen engine that is all about Facebook,” Eli explains. “Back in 2013-2014, Facebook ads were incredibly cheap and incredibly effective.”

The math was simple: “We could put a dollar in and get $3 out consistently. That was the engine that helped us grow from zero to about 10 million in ARR.”

This worked because it was capital-efficient and fast to deploy. No hiring ramp. No training period. Just create content, buy distribution, capture leads, close deals. The entire motion could be executed in weeks, not quarters.

When pivoting with limited runway, your initial GTM strategy should optimize for speed and capital efficiency over sophistication or scalability. You need revenue before you run out of money. Everything else is secondary.

Know What Success Looks Like

The Birmingham pub conversation wasn’t just about deciding to pivot—it was about defining what success meant for the new direction. For Footprint, success was getting to ten million in ARR, proving retention, and raising a growth round. That became the goalpost that determined every subsequent decision.

This clarity matters because pivots are messy. You’ll face dozens of decisions about where to invest limited resources. Having a clear definition of success helps you evaluate tradeoffs. Does this help us get to ten million faster? Does it improve our chances of raising the next round? If not, deprioritize it.

What Came After the Pivot

Footprint’s pivot worked. The marketing automation positioning resonated. The Facebook arbitrage strategy generated pipeline. They got to ten million in ARR, then scaled past one hundred million. “That was really the point at which we said, okay, we’ve figured out product market fit, we’ve figured out our initial go-to-market motion, now we need to scale everything,” Eli reflects on their Series B.

But the real lesson isn’t that pivots work—it’s that successful pivots follow a framework. Be brutally honest about why you’re failing. Identify assets worth preserving. Map buyer psychology, not just markets. Optimize for immediate revenue over long-term potential. Test before fully committing. Build the fastest viable GTM motion. And define what success looks like.

That conversation in a Birmingham pub saved Footprint because the team was willing to abandon everything that wasn’t working and rebuild around what could.