Alan & Jordi (SayPeter)
Why pivoting away from a working business can be harder than escaping a failing one — and what happened next. That is harder than most pivot stories admit.
A failing business eventually forces a decision.
A working one gives you reasons to stay.
That was the position Alan and Jordi found themselves in.
Their journey in Luxembourg began with events. The business had customers, generated revenue and gave them something real to build from.
But Jordi, the technical co-founder, already knew he did not want to spend the next decade producing events every weekend. He wanted to move towards software, digital products and a business that could scale.
Alan, now SayPeter’s CEO and commercial co-founder, had less certainty about what should come next. Events was the business he knew, but he could see the market changing and understood that the company would eventually need to move further into technology.
Today, SayPeter is building an AI employee for startups and small businesses, designed to help teams plan and execute work through WhatsApp.
The path from events to that product was not obvious at the beginning.
They were not equally certain about the destination.
But they agreed on something more important: the business that was working was not the business they wanted to keep building.
That was enough to move.
Jordi did not join because he believed events were the final opportunity.
He joined because he saw room to build something beyond them.
“What attracted me was that we were not closing ourselves into one vertical. We were joining a project where we could explore, with an emphasis on digital products and software.”
The exact product was undefined. What mattered was that there would be space for technology, automation and scalable digital work.
Alan’s conviction developed while building the business and watching the market move.
That gap in certainty did not make the partnership unworkable. One founder understood the current business better. The other saw more clearly what the company needed to become.
The danger would have been if those views pointed towards different futures.
It would be easy to rewrite the events company as a temporary experiment that was always meant to lead to SayPeter.
That would make the story cleaner.
It would also be wrong.
“It was not a test. It was to generate revenue—but with the mindset that, at some point, we would pivot away from events.”
The company was intended to work. It was not a fake first chapter created only to test the founders’ relationship.
That is what made the decision difficult.
When a business works, changing direction is often harder than when it fails. The real question is whether the current model is the company both founders want to keep building—or only a bridge to the next one.
Staying meant customers, stability and a known model.
Leaving meant uncertainty and the possibility that the next idea would not work.
Sometimes the old company is not broken. It is simply no longer where the founders believe the larger opportunity sits.
The move towards SayPeter did not begin with a blank-page search for an artificial intelligence idea.
It came from the work the team was already doing.
After events, Alan and Jordi developed a platform that allowed corporate clients to organise their own events. While building and operating it, they automated more of the repetitive processes behind the business.
The automation became more interesting than the original context.
It showed them that the deeper problem was not specific to events.
Small companies often know what they need to do. They simply lack the time, people and operational capacity to execute everything.
That problem appears everywhere: building websites, following up with leads, managing bookings, sending invoices, launching campaigns and handling the work that accumulates around a small team.
SayPeter grew from that observation.
The opportunity was not discovered by abandoning everything they had learned.
It was discovered by looking more carefully at what they had already built.
Sometimes the strongest product signal is not the service a company sells.
It is the internal capability the team keeps improving because the original business cannot run without it.
Alan and Jordi both describe themselves as entrepreneurs who naturally want to create and move towards new opportunities.
That instinct helped them leave events, build software and recognise a wider use for automation.
But it can also become a weakness.
A founder who is always ready to pivot can become a founder who never commits long enough for anything to become strong.
Alan’s decision to commit full-time depended on more than confidence in Jordi’s technical ability.
“I trusted that this time Jordi would focus on one idea and not let it go until unicorn.”
That was the real bet: not whether they could find another idea, but whether they could stop searching once they found one worth building.
A startup needs founders who are willing to pivot.
It also needs founders who know when to stop pivoting.
Too little flexibility keeps a team trapped in a weak model.
Too much flexibility prevents any model from compounding.
Complementary skills help founders build. Shared judgment helps them decide when to stay and when to change.
SayPeter was not the idea that originally brought Alan and Jordi together.
It was the opportunity they reached after events, software and automation moved them towards a larger problem.
Their partnership did not depend on having every answer at the beginning.
It depended on continuing to make the same major decisions:
When to move.
What to leave behind.
Which opportunity deserved commitment.
And when exploration had gone far enough.
The first idea does not need to be perfect.
The next one does not need to be obvious.
But co-founders must be able to change direction without quietly building towards different companies.
So the useful question is not only:
Do you trust your co-founder with the idea you have today?
It is also:
Do you trust them to leave it when something better becomes clear—and to stop searching when the right opportunity finally appears?