Pivoting vs. Creating Something New

After the success of WhereMyFriends.Be which is both awesome and surprising we are faced with an interesting question. Being on Mashable and CNN has both upped our visibility and our credibility to a certain extent. Additionally we now have a pretty large database of users with 12 thousand signups and over 1,000,000 friends mapped.

The problem with WhereMyFriends.Be is that it is very much a single serving app. You go to the landing page, you sign up, see your map, post to your Twitter and then your friends use it. You will most likely never come back. This means that in its existing form it’s not really an option for a long-term project. The question then becomes: what should we do with our new visibility and userbase?

Should we A. pivot our existing product to somehow make it into a viable startup/business?

Or B. pursue some of our other ideas which have more long-term potential?

The problem with option A is that we don’t really have an idea to pivot our product which could make it into a business. We have a few ways that we think we can make people come back, but they really aren’t all that groundbreaking.

The problem with option B is that we might not be using our existing user base in the best way possible and because we would be leveraging our credibility on a project that won’t necessarily succeed.

I personally prefer option B but I wonder if it’s really the best course of action. What do you guys think?