Entrepreneurship in an unstable economy is a particular kind of work. It is not what the textbooks describe. It is not what the Western business literature, with its tidy assumptions about regulatory continuity and currency stability, prepares you for. It is a relentless game of adaptation, where economic instability, shifting consumer behaviours, and regulatory uncertainties make business strategy more art than science. For the founders working in Zimbabwe, where I have built most of my ventures, this is the operating environment, not an exception to it. For founders elsewhere on the continent, the specifics differ but the discipline is the same.
The discipline I want to write about today is pivoting, because it is the most misunderstood concept in African founder language and the most consequential one to get right.
The pivot is not a sign of failure
Most founders are taught, implicitly, that pivoting is what you do when the original idea did not work. The pivot is the embarrassed announcement, the awkward investor update, the admission that the plan needed to change. This framing is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that costs ventures their lives.
In a stable economy with predictable consumer behaviour and reliable infrastructure, the founder’s first plan can sometimes survive contact with reality. The pivot is the exception. In an economy where the currency can lose half its value in a quarter, where electricity supply is variable, where consumer purchasing power moves with rains and elections, the founder’s first plan cannot survive contact with reality. The pivot is the rule. A founder who is not pivoting is not paying attention.
I want to be specific about what I mean by “pivot,” because the word is overused and increasingly meaningless. A pivot is not a tweak to the marketing copy. A pivot is a deliberate revision of one or more core assumptions about who the customer is, what they will pay for, why they will pay for it, or how they will receive it. It is the act of replacing one operating hypothesis with another based on accumulated evidence. In a stable economy, the evidence accumulates slowly. In an unstable one, it accumulates fast, and the founders who survive are the ones who read it fast enough to keep replacing their hypotheses with better ones.
The challenge of being too far ahead
Founders with vision often face an ironic challenge: seeing the future so clearly that the present is not ready for them. Being ahead of the curve sounds like an advantage, and in a mature market it sometimes is. In a market where purchasing power is inconsistent, infrastructure is lacking, and consumer trust in new categories is low, pioneering too soon can be a costly mistake.
This is one of the most painful patterns I have watched in African founder communities. A founder identifies a real future trend, builds against it with conviction, and discovers that the market is two or three years behind where the product needs it to be. The product is not wrong. The timing is wrong. The temptation in this situation is to wait for the market to catch up, financed by personal savings or patient capital, and the founder ages out of the venture before the market arrives.
The alternative is to pivot, but in a way most founders find counterintuitive. The vision does not change. The expression of the vision changes. You take the long-horizon insight that motivated the venture and you reframe it as something the market is ready to buy now, while quietly continuing to build toward the version that does not yet have a market. The founders who do this well end up owning both: the immediate product that pays the bills today and the longer-term product that becomes the moat when the market finally moves. The founders who refuse this discipline end up owning neither.
Two kinds of pivot, both required
Most founder writing on pivoting treats it as one thing. It is two, and the failure to distinguish them costs ventures dearly.
There is the internal pivot: the strengthening of the venture’s spine. This is what most founders ignore because it produces no visible external evidence. The internal pivot is the work of revising assumptions about how the venture itself operates. It is the mindset shift from defending a fixed vision to iterating against reality. It is the operational tightening: streamlining processes, enhancing efficiency, staying financially lean enough to survive what comes next. It is the talent and leadership rebuild: making sure the team is adaptable, multidisciplinary, and aligned with a venture that may need to change direction more than once. The internal pivot is a private discipline. Nobody outside the company sees it happening. It determines whether the venture has the chassis to survive any external pivot at all.
Then there is the external pivot: the visible shift that customers and the market notice. This is repositioning offerings, shifting target audiences, changing distribution, leveraging new partnerships. The external pivot is what investors discuss in updates and what journalists write about. It is also, on its own, almost useless. A venture with a weak internal chassis cannot execute an external pivot, because every external pivot requires the operational, financial, and team capacity to absorb the change. Founders who attempt external pivots without the internal foundation tend to compound their problems: the new direction inherits all the weaknesses of the old direction, plus the disruption of the change itself.
The discipline is to run both at once. When external conditions force an external pivot, the internal pivot has to be running in parallel, not deferred until later. In an unstable African economy this is the operating posture, not an emergency response. You are always strengthening the chassis. You are always re-evaluating the direction. The two work together, and the venture stays alive.
Creating both the product and the market
There is a particular African founder challenge that does not appear in most Silicon Valley playbooks: sometimes you are not pivoting your product to fit the market, you are creating both at once. The market for your category does not yet exist. The customer does not yet know they need what you are selling. The infrastructure to deliver it is partial. The regulatory framework is unsettled.
In this situation, the pivot becomes a longer game. You are not just adjusting the offering. You are participating in the slow work of educating customers, building partnerships, and shaping policy in ways that allow the market to come into existence around your venture. This is exhausting. It is also one of the highest-leverage moves an African founder can make, because the founder who succeeds in creating a market is the founder who owns it.
The Sprouting Curve framework I have written about elsewhere is directly relevant here. When you are creating a market, your early years will produce more learning than revenue, and the learning is the asset that allows you to build the venture before competitors recognise the category. If you measure these years by revenue alone, you will conclude the venture is failing. If you measure them by the depth of customer education achieved, the partnerships built, the regulatory ground prepared, you will see what is actually being constructed.
The Zimbabwe-specific dimension
I want to write a paragraph specifically for the Zimbabwean founders reading this, because the Zimbabwean context has features that deserve to be named.
The currency volatility is the most-discussed feature, but it is not the most important one. The most important feature is the unevenness of consumer purchasing power, which moves with seasonal rains, election cycles, civil service salaries, diaspora remittances, and exchange rate movements that are themselves unpredictable. The founder who plans against a stable monthly customer base will find their plan obsolete within a quarter. The founder who plans against a portfolio of customer behaviours, distributed across formal and informal economy, dollar-priced and ZiG-priced, urban and peri-urban, has a chance. Pivoting in this context is not about changing strategy when the original strategy fails. It is about building a strategy that already assumes change as its operating environment.
The compliance dimension matters too, and it is one most founder literature ignores. Zimbabwean founders carry a regulatory burden that includes ZIMRA fiscalisation, POTRAZ requirements for any electronic communications, RBZ exchange rate enforcement, and a half-dozen sectoral licences depending on the venture’s category. Building a venture without governance infrastructure equipped to handle these requirements is not optional. The pivot framework includes the question: when external conditions change, can your governance and compliance posture flex with them, or are you locked into structures that the next regulatory shift will break.
The closing discipline
I want to end with a discipline I have built into every venture I run.
Once a quarter, I sit down with the question: what would I have to believe about the world for the current strategy to keep working for another twelve months. I write the answer down. Then I check, in three to five sentences, whether each thing I would have to believe is still true. If even one of them is not, the strategy is already obsolete and I have not yet noticed. If all of them are still true, I run the experiment again three months later.
This is a small discipline and it has saved me from at least three pivots that would have come too late to be useful. The founders I admire most all run some version of it. The founders who burn out doing the same thing for two years past the point it stopped working all skip it, sometimes deliberately, sometimes by exhaustion.
If you are running a venture in an unstable African economy and you take nothing else from this piece, take the quarterly belief audit. The pivot is not an emergency response. The pivot is a planned revision, run on a schedule, applied to a venture whose chassis is already strong enough to absorb it. That is what mastering the pivot actually means.
This piece replaces the earlier 2025 essay at the same URL. The original is preserved in the archive; this is the elevated version. For the framework that underlies how I think about early-stage learning, see The Sprouting Curve.
