A Pivot lesson with Recivu

Every startup that goes through a pivot has a story to tell.
Recivu’s, a startup from the Hubble acceleration program, is a particularly interesting one: in just a few months, it shifted from targeting the retail market to tackling a €3-billion problem for Italian companies.

Their solution automatically converts expense-receipt data into invoices, enabling companies to recover VAT that would otherwise be lost.
But this wasn’t always their mission.

For those who don’t know you yet: what is Recivu today, and what problem does it solve?

Today, Recivu helps companies recover the VAT lost on employee expense reports.

In Italy alone, companies lose around €3 billion in VAT each year. This happens because business expenses are often reported with receipts rather than invoices — and requesting invoices at the point of sale is a cumbersome process.
Our technology solves this by automatically transforming all the receipts uploaded through expense-management apps into invoices, allowing companies to reclaim their VAT.

What were you doing before the pivot, and what led you to change direction? What’s the most efficient way to relaunch after such a shift?

For about a year and a half, we focused on the retail market, trying to solve the problem of paper receipts.
We had built a solution based on a QR code that allowed customers to receive digital receipts instantly and enabled retailers to collect fiscal data directly at the point of sale.

Last November, after deploying our solution in several stores, we were boycotted by large competitors. We had to change course, refunding the merchants who had subscribed to our service. In short, we were forced to build a new product from scratch.

Today, launching a startup no longer requires coding skills. The smartest way to start is by using no-code tools (many of which are free up to a certain limit), allowing you to build infrastructure in just 10% of the time it would normally take.
Sure, it’s less scalable, but it’s crucial for testing a solution quickly. We managed to complete our pivot in just two months and were back on the market — “ugly” but effective.

What was the biggest challenge during the pivot?

Without a doubt, downsizing the team — losing people who were actively contributing to the project. That was the toughest part, along with managing our dwindling cash reserves.

Another challenge was finding a new product that could reignite the same excitement as before, because in the end, it’s rarely just about business.

It was essential to learn from our previous experience. Our first product relied on integrations, so this time we decided to develop a stand-alone solution, to avoid depending on third parties.

And what was the most unexpected opportunity that came from this change in direction?

We started testing our new product by going straight to market, validating the idea through surveys — without any clear expectations at first.
The real opportunities emerged from listening to our users, who told us directly what they needed. Thanks to word of mouth, we even managed to onboard several corporate clients.

What advice would you give to a startup that realizes it needs to change its model or product?

Talk to users, ask for feedback, and let them challenge you. It’s the only real way to validate — even with something as simple as a form or a notebook full of questions.

If you don’t talk to people, you risk launching blindly — and 99% of the time, you’ll either be solving the wrong pain point or solving it in the wrong way.

That’s why 90% of your time should go into market validation, and only 10% into building the solution using efficient tools.

Another key lesson: sell the product before you build it.
If someone is willing to put in their credit card number or wire you money before even seeing the product, then you know you’ve truly hit a real pain point.

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