The Founder Pivot Playbook with Sam Eitzen

On this episode of the Predictable Revenue Podcast, Collin Stewart sat down once again with SnapBar founder Sam Eitzen, this time to talk about the kind of founder journey that rarely unfolds in a straight line.

SnapBar didn’t move from one clear business model to the next. It went from physical photo booths to a pandemic-era corporate-gifting business to virtual experiences, and then to the software platform the company is building today. Along the way, the conversation touched on survival, customer demand, timing, founder instinct, and the uncomfortable reality that most pivots only make sense once you’re already through them.

It’s a familiar story for a lot of founders: the market changes, the original plan starts to crack, and the next version of the business has to be figured out in motion.

When the Business Breaks, the Founder’s Job Changes

A pivot usually starts before the founder feels ready for it.

Not when the market offers a clean new opportunity. Not when the strategy is obvious. It starts when the current business stops behaving as it used to, and the founder has to make decisions before there’s enough information to feel confident about any of them.

That’s what makes pivots hard. They are rarely clean acts of reinvention. More often, they are a sequence of uncomfortable choices made under pressure, each one buying a little more clarity than the last.

Survival Comes Before Strategy

When SnapBar lost its events business, it didn’t lose it gradually, it lost it fast. That matters because it changes the founder’s priority. 

In a moment like that, the question is not, “What is our next big strategic chapter?” The question is, “How do we keep this company alive?”

That difference is everything.

It’s why survival decisions often look unglamorous from the outside. 

• You protect cash. 
• You preserve relationships. 

You make temporary calls that don’t feel visionary, but keep the business from collapsing while you figure out what comes next. That’s also why acting in good faith can end up mattering more than it seems in the moment. 

SnapBar gave people their money back if they wanted it. At the time, that probably looked like a painful concession, but later, it helped preserve trust with the same kinds of customers the company would serve again in a different format.

Founders tend to think of strategy as the highest-order work. In a crisis, survival is a strategy.

Fast Execution Under Pressure

When the pressure is high, speed becomes a form of problem-solving because waiting too long can become its own kind of mistake. 

Founders don’t always get to sit with uncertainty until a perfect answer appears. Sometimes they have to move simply to create the conditions for learning.

That’s exactly what happened here.

Faced with a collapsing revenue stream, Sam gave himself a forcing function: he wasn’t going back to bed until he had written down 50 ideas the company could pivot to. Most of them were bad, that wasn’t the point, the point was to get unstuck.

• Then the team started cutting the list down. 
• Then they picked a direction. 
• Then they launched.

And it didn’t take a quarter, it didn’t take a long planning cycle, it actually took about eight days. That kind of speed comes from accepting that the first version may be rough, incomplete, and temporary, but still necessary. 

Founders often imagine execution as the last stage of clarity. In a pivot, execution is how clarity gets built.

The First Pivot May Only Be a Bridge

One of the easiest mistakes to make during a pivot is assuming the first new thing must become the company’s future. Sometimes it won’t, most times it shouldn’t.

SnapBar’s first big move was Keep Your City Smiling, a corporate gifting business built around products from small local businesses, and it worked well enough to generate roughly $1 million in 10 months. 

• It solved a real problem. 
• It gave big companies something thoughtful to send to remote employees. 
• It helped small suppliers who were getting crushed.

But:

• The margins were tighter. 
• The operational model was heavier. 

It helped the company survive, but it wasn’t the same kind of business SnapBar had been built to run. And eventually, that became clear.

That’s an important founder lesson. 

A bridge business does not need to become a forever business to be a good decision. Its value is not that it perfectly defines the future. Its value lies in creating enough time, revenue, and breathing room for the next real opportunity to emerge.

Many pivots are misunderstood because founders judge them by permanence rather than function.

Customer Demand Can Point to the Real Pivot

While the gifting business was keeping the company moving, another thread was forming in parallel. 

A customer had asked a simple question: “Could a photo booth work online?” At first, the answer was no, then it became maybe, then it became a prototype, then it became sales, then it became traction.

That sequence matters because it shows how often the real pivot starts, not from a founder dreaming up a brand-new category in isolation, but from taking a customer’s problem seriously enough to build around it.

By the time virtual events became standard, SnapBar had something the market actually wanted. Old customers came back, and new ones found the company because it had moved early enough to define the category. The product emerged from customer demand, meeting fast execution.

A crisis can expose the More Scalable Version of the Business

The deepest shift was that the company eventually realized it hadn’t built something only for virtual events at all. It had built browser-based photo booth software that could work anywhere there was a camera and an internet connection.

That reframes the business.

• A phone works. 
• A laptop works. 
• A tablet works. 

A stadium activation works differently when people no longer have to walk across a venue to find a booth. A branded content experience changes when the device is already in the user’s pocket.

That’s when a workaround becomes something bigger.

The crisis forced SnapBar to adapt and stripped away an assumption that had been limiting the business: that the experience needed dedicated hardware. Once that assumption broke, the more scalable version of the company became visible.

Founders should pay attention to this during a pivot: Not just what keeps the business alive today, but what the emergency solution reveals about how the value could be delivered more broadly tomorrow.

Conclusion

Not every founder pivot happens in the business, sometimes it happens in the founder’s relationship to the business.

Over time, ambition can change shape, and what starts as a drive to grow faster, do more, and keep pushing can turn into something more grounded: a clearer sense of what kind of work is actually energizing, what kind of company is worth building, and what success is supposed to feel like once you get closer to it.

When a founder becomes more honest about what they want and how they want to build, the business usually gets clearer, too.

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