20 ms·
Companies that had successful pivots
- aphroz 5y agoSamsung was exporting dried Korean fish
- Someone 5y agoIt wouldn’t surprise me much if they still do that. It is a highly diversified company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung: Notable Samsung industrial affiliates include Samsung Electronics (the world's largest information technology company, consumer electronics maker and chipmaker measured by 2017 revenues), Samsung Heavy Industries (the world's 2nd largest shipbuilder measured by 2010 revenues), and Samsung Engineering and Samsung C&T Corporation (respectively the world's 13th and 36th largest construction companies). Other notable subsidiaries include Samsung Life Insurance (the world's 14th largest life insurance company), Samsung Everland (operator of Everland Resort, the oldest theme park in South Korea) and Cheil Worldwide (the world's 15th largest advertising agency, as measured by 2012 revenues) Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_C%26T_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_C%26T_Corporation it doesn’t seem they still trade in dried fish, but who knows?
- JJMcJ 5y agoInteresting fact, Nintendo still makes playing cards, including the standard 52 card decks. Ran into one once, very high quality plastic cards.
- lowdose 5y agoI didn’t see TomTom in the list. After Google stole Maps TomTom successfully pivoted to health.
- 0dayz 5y agoThat list I think is a good lesson/motivator that the "golden" product youre developing may not become the product defining your company but instead a side project.
- ehnto 5y agoMakes you wonder what you are actually building then, if it wasn't the product that ended up making you succesful. I notice a few of these stories involve stumbling on an itch that badly needed scratching while doing something else with as much purpose. One of the big challenges of entrepreneurship in software is finding a problem worth working on when you're not actually experiencing any problems that aren't software related. In that sense, perhaps you're building up experience in a new industry when building an idea, which introduces you to new problems, sometimes better problems.
- Ozzie_osman 5y agoThe one I never really quite understood was Slack. Who builds an internal chat client, while building an online game, and then decides to build a b2b business around that chat client? The rest at least have some logic to them. You build something, people use it for something else, so you generalize. Or you pursue a neighboring market or use-case. But the Slack one just seems so random.
- rhtgrg 5y agoYou have a lot of responses, but none actually address your question... > Who builds an internal chat client, while building an online game, and then decides to build a b2b business around that chat client? Someone who's done something similar — successfully — once before, that's who. The experience gained from Flickr certainly helped with Slack.
- ycombinete 5y agoI've heard similar stories many times, where someone discovers a gap in the market through an actual need that they have while trying to do something else. Like the Kitopi Cloud Kitchen. The story I heard is that the guy already had a successful sweet business, and got the idea to have little mini distribution kitchens for it, instead of opening a new business everytime he wanted to extend his reach. Then decided to make that idea a whole business model.
- xcambar 5y ago[tangent] Wow, I didn't know Kitopi Cloud Kitchen. This is truly a disruptive idea (I never use this word), as it breaks with the traditional idea that restaurant food cannot be industrialized and has a connection with the chef but also the place. Even after reading this, it is hard for me to think "I could order food from this restaurant but the actual meal will come from a partner kitchen". Brilliant from a business perspective, yet somewhat questionable culturally.
- bobsmooth 5y agoLots of youtubers jumped on this to create their own virtual restaurants. MrBeast Burger being the most popular.
- the-dude 5y agoAcorn to ARM.
- ninechars 5y agoHoly crap I had no idea! We had an Acorn in my primary school back in the stone age.
- karimf 5y agoAdded ARM to the list. Thanks!
- mattbee 5y agoPivot is a bittersweet description, and ARM was a new spin-off founded in 1990 alongside Apple. Acorn renamed itself to Element 14 Ltd in 1998 and sold off the assets from their home computer business. They built DSL kit for a couple of years before ending up as part of Broadcom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Ltd. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_14_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Element_14_(company)
- the-dude 5y agoWhat is interesting too is that none of the other microcomputer manufacturers of the time tried to create their own CPU. We have IBM + the rest of the mainframe guys and Sun.
- mattbee 5y agoNot that it helped Acorn survive, of course! Right up until the end, RISC OS ran on interrupts, too much delicate kernel code, cooperative multitasking, and unprotected memory. They weren't the only CPU pioneers; Argonaut didn't think it unreasonable to create a custom CPU to push polygons on a Nintendo cartridge - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_FX
- the-dude 5y ago
- AussieWog93 5y agoI run a small business, and know others who do the same. Honestly, I think pivoting is the norm rather than the exception. Many of the people I know started in a similar place, but their businesses evolved into all kinds of weird and wacky enterprises.
- Enginerrrd 5y agoI also run a small business and I agree with this. I think it becomes more notable when you have to change the heading on a large company and all its bureaucracy.
- hellbannedguy 5y ago
- k__ 5y agoThis. I had a client who once sold anti-virus software and even ZetaOS. Somehow they pivoted to selling mobile speakers and toys.
- calmlynarczyk 5y agoIt really begs the question "what is a company?" if one can shift between such disparate markets. Surely mission doesn't define a company then. Perhaps ability to accumulate capital for a means?
- ip26 5y agoAn organized team of people used to working with each other?
- bodhiandpysics1 5y agoAnd of course the pivot to end all pivots: APPLE!!! Which started as a company that made computers, then became a company that made mobile music players, and now is a company that makes phones.
- allendoerfer 5y agoOr every car company that started as a company that made gasoline consuming cars and now is producing rolling electric computers. Or every other company, which now essentially makes computers.
- DonHopkins 5y agoI've heard electric cars aptly described as iPads with wheels. So conversely, you could say that when Apple rolled out the iPad, that was a pivot to electric cars without wheels. https://twitter.com/hartsman/status/555953649004716034 https://twitter.com/hartsman/status/555953649004716034 https://twitter.com/charlesvonbrown/status/1457824256801263616 https://twitter.com/charlesvonbrown/status/14578242568012636... https://network1consulting.com/tuesday-tip-tesla-motors-continues-to-disrupt-the-automobile-industry/ https://network1consulting.com/tuesday-tip-tesla-motors-cont... https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/8qvxwq/finally_after_2_yrs_and_3_months/ https://www.reddit.com/r/TeslaModel3/comments/8qvxwq/finally... https://www.macfilos.com/2021/03/17/first-impressions-of-the-tesla-model-3-falling-in-love-again/ https://www.macfilos.com/2021/03/17/first-impressions-of-the... https://www.itbusinessedge.com/business-intelligence/how-tesla-beats-jaguar-with-applied-analytics/ https://www.itbusinessedge.com/business-intelligence/how-tes...
- satyrnein 5y agoMy phone thinks of my car as one of its accessories.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoThen they made the commercial with the kid saying “What’s a computer?” in the backyard which still enrages everyone I know when it is mentioned.
- aardvark179 5y agoThere are a few of these that don’t really feel like pivots to me. For example Netflix changing from delivering things via DVD to doing it by streaming just feels like evolving to suit the market. Would we consider a publisher as pivoting because they now sell ebooks and run news websites instead of printing books and magazines?
- jrh206 5y agoI certainly view Netflix as a pivot. The things the company has to do, day to day, are just drastically different.
- davnicwil 5y agoWasn't the streaming delivery piece intended from the start though, but they just had to wait for the infrastructure to support it so did DVD delivery as a stopgap? I had always assumed this was the case.
- ng55QPSK 5y agothe "Net" in netflix was: you could order on the net, only the delivering changed.
- Beldin 5y agoYes, it hinges on the definition of pivot. From a customer point of view, this is a mere evolution. That this imposes vastly different requirements on the underlying business is not really the problem of the customer. In a similar vein, how would you describe the move of just about every primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions to online teaching? I don't consider that a pivot. It was necessary to continue to deliver the basic added value of these institutions. However, that did require a whole slew of new skills from teachers. So sure, YMMV.
- deltree7 5y agoSo does Amazon, Apple, IBM and hundreds of other companies
- agomez314 5y agoWonder how long the list is for companies with unsuccessful pivots
- pjerem 5y agoAn amazing discovery, thank you. Some companies names like BioWare, WhatsApp or YouTube totally makes sense now.
- ur-whale 5y agoTo be fair, Netflix's DVD via email business model was very successful before they pivoted to streaming while many of the others initial idea was ... <hrm> In the case of Netflix, here goes a company that smartly and efficiently adapted to changing market conditions rather than "pivoting".
- k__ 5y agoIn 2006, I even knew people here in Germany who were "renting mailorder DVDs from the US". It dawned to me a few years ago that this service was Netflix, before they went streaming.
- perlpimp 5y agoThis promotes thinking in terms of survivorship bias IMO.
- ng55QPSK 5y agoNokia is incorrect (afiu the tire/rubber business was span-off some years ago Nokian), even the source cites it better "The company has operated in various industries over the past 150 years. It was founded as a pulp mill and had long been associated with rubber and cables, but since the 1990s has focused on large-scale telecommunications infrastructure, technology development, and licensing."
- silisili 5y agoYeah the source sentence is awfully vague to the point of confusing. Nokia was a paper mill, and their own website says as much in less ambiguous terms - https://www.nokia.com/about-us/company/our-history/ https://www.nokia.com/about-us/company/our-history/
- iLoveOncall 5y agoIsn't Twitter also wrong? I thought it didn't pivot and was created to communicate effectively during riots and stuff like that?
- taspeotis 5y ago> The company then decided that the market for cameras was not large enough for its goals Such a Cave Johnson move.
- pembrook 5y agoAnother example is Unsplash. Unsplash was originally a marketing attempt by a company named Crew, a marketplace startup trying to connect businesses with freelance designers. After Unsplash took off and the talent marketplace didn’t, the company became Unsplash.
- mhh__ 5y agoValve: They used to make games, now they make money.
- huffmsa 5y agoWith a brief foray into the hat making business in-between
- wombatmobile 5y agoGoogle: Don’t be evil
- philmcp 5y agoVery nice, never too late to pivot p.s. you could also add FanDuel to the list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanDuel#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FanDuel#History
- ninjaturtlez 5y agoDidn't Figma start out as a drone company? Compared to that a lot of these seem like reaches
- the-dude 5y agoMt. Gox
- xwdv 5y agoWhat was originally a Magic The Gathering Online Exchange became a massive crypto empire eventually toppled by greed and mismanagement.
- zhoujianfu 5y agoAlthough apparently it never actually operated as a trading card exchange… that’s just what the domain was originally “intended” for.
- k__ 5y ago"2007, the service went live for approximately three months before McCaleb moved on to other projects, having decided it was not worth his time" lol, interesting.
- cm2187 5y agoNot sure if the original business needs to be dead for it to be considered a successful pivot. You could include amazon with aws. Or Dassault (planes) with Dassault system (CAD). And all the big asian conglomerates. You could even include the east india company which started as a trading company before becoming a colonial administration! My point is that these pivots are quite common.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- user-the-name 5y agoNintendo existed for nearly one hundred years before they started making video games. Saying that all they did up until then was not successful is ridiculous - you do not run a company for an entire century by not being successful.
- Kranar 5y agoThat's not what the article says. It says that Nintendo tried to pivot away from the playing card business into several other businesses, each of which ended up failing except for electronic toys/video games. Given that Nintendo no longer operates a taxi service, love hotels, or sell instant rice, I would say the article is correct about that statement.
- bbanyc 5y agoThey still make playing cards, though. https://www.nintendo.co.jp/others/playing_cards/index.html https://www.nintendo.co.jp/others/playing_cards/index.html
- Kranar 5y agoPlaying cards is not among the things listed as having failed; it's as if some of you guys go out of your way to fail to understand basic English.
- andi999 5y agoWhat about unsuccessful pivots? Like Borland pivoted from compiler to services.
- Softcadbury 5y agoI'm thinking of Epic Games and their game Fortnite. The game was some kind of tower defence at the begining. They swithed to battle royal and made one of the most played video game of all time. Ok, it's a small pivot, but it changed the company and gave them so much money that they were able to create their own game store (and fight Apple in court).
- sombremesa 5y ago> They swithed to battle royal and made one of the most played video game of all time. More specifically, they saw the success of PUBG and decided to copy it immediately. I suppose that still counts as a successful pivot!
- srcreigh 5y agoYou'll have to follow the popularity trail further back to early 2010's Minecraft hunger games servers. (Rather I suppose the popular 2008 book The Hunger Games.)
- Handytinge 5y agoI mean if we're doing this, you can probably go back to the 1999 Japanese book "Battle Royale", which lent its style to the popular UHC Minecraft mod well before "The Hunger Games" mods came out.
- xenihn 5y agoThere's pre-cliff bleszinski Fortnite, and post-cliff bleszinski fortnite. It would have not become as huge as it is now if he had not been ousted.
- astura 5y agoMentions Western Union but no mention of American Express (express mail -> financial services)? Western Union hardly even counts as a pivot because their original money wiring service operated entirely through their telegraph network, which is where the term "wiring" came from.
- lebuffon 5y agoHere is more background about the nature of the pivots at WU. WU had already pivoted once in the 1970s to become a satellite communication company being one of the first companies to have five birds in orbit. (Westar series) Sometime around 1980(?) things were so bad they went into chapter 11, bankruptcy protection. At a senior executive meeting the reports were all bad. A guy named Art Tarini spoke up and said "What about money transfer? Can't we do something with that?" The reply was something like "Art if you think you can help give it a try" Art setup a call centre and had a small sales force to sign up agents in small stores in the north east side of the USA as money transfer locations and created paper forms to record the transaction details. All agent transactions were sent over the telephone. They were scheduled to be in bankruptcy court at the end of the year, but the new money transfer business was making so much money they cancelled it. Told to me by Art Tarini in 2001. (Paraphrased from memory) Later on (1990?) a computer terminal was created with Turbo C, communicating over modems to a back office system. In 1989 when US law changed to allowed transfers to other countries somebody asked "I wonder if Mexicans in the USA would want to send money home?" A new platform was created to handle foreign exchange and the rest is history. Telegraph service was shutdown in 2006. It was still doing ~$10M per year in revenue then. Money transfers were about $4B.
- lqet 5y ago> Netflix had considered offering movies online, but there were speeds and bandwidth problem in mid-2000. One of the more interesting things I learned from the (outstanding) documentary "Enron - The Smartest Guys in The Room" [0] was that Enron planned an online movie streaming service together with Blockbuster in the late 90ies (to start in 2000), but failed for the same reasons. > Enron would store the entertainment and encode and stream the entertainment over its global broadband network. Pilot projects in Portland, Seattle and Salt Lake City were created to stream movies to a few dozen apartments from servers set up in the basement. Based on these pilot projects, Enron went ahead and recognized estimated profits of more than $110 million from the Blockbuster deal, even though there were serious questions about technical viability and market demand [1] But of course Enron "pivoted" to outright fraud some years before that. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDyMz1V-GSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDyMz1V-GSg [1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/089533003765888403 https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/0895330037658884...
- reaperducer 5y agoEnron planned an online movie streaming service together with Blockbuster in the late 90ies (to start in 2000), but failed for the same reasons. I lived in Houston during that era, and for some reason a bunch of the local energy companies dabbled in internet video and infrastructure at the time. As you mentioned, Enron. But there's also Williams (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_Companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_Companies). It built one of the first live business news channels. I knew a few people who worked there, but I can't remember the name of it. Naturally, it was focused on energy. The idea was that people in the energy industry would have it on a screen next to their computers in their offices. It worked, a bit. I saw the channel in the break rooms and lobbies of several oil and gas companies I visited at the time. But, like the Enron/Blockbuster thing, I think it was a little ahead of its time. While today a big oil company would think nothing of deploying thousands of screens to its cubicles around the world, back in those days, it was considered a crazy extravagance. Plus, everyone was still using tubes, not flat screens, so a big chunk of desk real estate would be lost at a time when offices were far more paper-reliant than they are now. Some of the big oil and gas companies saw how the railroads were getting into telecom, and follow that, as well. (The "SP" in "Sprint" is Southern Pacific Railroad.) They figured if the railroads can run phone calls over microwave relays along their rights-of-way, the oil companies could run fiber through their pipelines. And they did. Again, I'm most familiar with Williams. It built a huge fiber-optic network across the country by running cables through its pipelines. One of its services was called VYVX (pronounced "viv-ex"). For years and years, it was the primary way to move video between television stations at a time when satellite hookups were a lot more expensive than they are today. I know at least part of the Williams network became what we know today as Level3. I wonder if the original network is still in use. Kind of ironic to think about all those environmentalist web sites flowing through fiber running through oil pipelines.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoCentury old example showing pivoting is as old as business: “ When 3M began in 1902, the five founders had a simple goal: to mine for corundum, a mineral ideal for making sandpaper and grinding wheels. Turns out, what they thought was corundum was really another low-grade mineral called anorthosite.” 3M pivoted to selling sand paper without the sand, I.e tape, and that helped them survive long enough to try again at sand paper. (Transparent tape, invented by 3M, helped them grow during the Great Depression because people fixed stuff instead of buying anew.) Funny to see sandpaper still being improved upon after 100 years: https://youtu.be/NZDCRFi8dKY https://youtu.be/NZDCRFi8dKY
- reaperducer 5y agoFor those who don't know, 3M means "Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing."
- lh7777 5y agoAlso interesting: employee email addresses are @mmm.com rather than @3m.com.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThey both work though, e.g. everyone has @3m.com as well (unannounced), but culturally, everyone publicizes @mmm.
- creeble 5y agoMy favorite "internal slogan" of 3M is (or was): Make it by the mile, sell it by the inch.
- jbay808 5y agoI wish every company had this motto! It's so often that when I need some material, nobody will sell me less than a mile of it.
- wlonkly 5y ago
- sgslo 5y ago> Segment - Classroom lecture tool - When the product was deployed in the classroom, all the students opened their laptop and went straight to Facebook instead of using the program. There is an excellent YC podcast featuring Segment's founder that walked through this pivot. Excellent listen: https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6B-on-finding-product-market-fit-at-segment-yc-s11 https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6B-on-finding-product-ma...
- pezzana 5y agoIt might be interesting to classify the various kinds of pivots. For example, one that gets covered from time-to-time is the one where customers start using the product differently than the founders intended. The examples here are WhatsApp, Yelp, Flickr, Groupon, Play-Doh, Segment. But there are a lot more like that. If you had a language for talking about pivots and why they happen, it might be possible to avoid (or induce them) more deliberately.
- mentos 5y agoPixar - ‘How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio’
- karimf 5y agoAdded Pixar to the list. Thanks!
- raldi 5y agoTwitch started out as Justin.TV, where Justin Kan wore a camera on his head 24/7 and livestreamed the results. Then they expanded to a small handful of streamers, then anybody could stream, but it never really took off and they were running out of runway. Then they noticed that the one area growing faster than any other was videogame streaming, and rebuilt the whole company around that.
- AQuantized 5y agoYears later a guy named Ice Poseidon took advantage of the fact that Pokemon Go required you to walk around outside to play to do irl streaming, and the deluge of streamers trying to get around the videogame requirement caused them to pivot back to allowing non-videogame streams.
- karimf 5y agoHow could I miss that? Added Twitch to the list. Thanks!
- delgaudm 5y agoFoursquare comes to mind. They were the "location check-in app" hotness for a while. They abandoned the app and now are a significant player in the surveillance ^H^H^H "location-based experiences" space.
- raldi 5y agoMP3.com was initially a search engine. The nice thing about running a search engine, even if it only ever gets a trickle of traffic and could never compete with the big players, is that you can look at the logs and spot trends early. The founder noticed people were searching for something called “mp3”, saw the domain was available, bought it, and then looked up what it was and eventually rebuilt the company around it.
- raldi 5y agoMy favorite part of the Nintendo story is that back when it was a playing card company, the heir to the family business took a trip to America that included a meeting at the largest card company in the world. He had expected it to have a luxurious, palatial campus… but its entire headquarters turned out to be like the fourth floor of a single building in a generic office park. He was like, “This is the absolute pinnacle I can ever hope for if I succeed beyond my wildest dreams running the playing-card company. I need a new idea.” You can read all about it in an outstanding book called I Am Error that, beyond extensive interviews with the historic key players, also takes an incredibly deep dive into the technical details.
- k__ 5y agoThe Wizards of the Coast are quite a big company too.
- Belphemur 5y agoWizard of the coast is mostly a publishing company. I think the playing cards came later.
- Illniyar 5y agoActually they originally hit it big with Magic the Gathering. They bought D&D and the rest much later. I'm pretty sure Magic the Gathering is still the largest moneymaker for them even now.
- cortesoft 5y agoThey bought TSR, who made D&D
- daniel-cussen 5y agoYeah Magic the Gathering is precisely the playing card moneymaker that would have fit Nintendo's aspirations.
- deleted 5y ago
- jeffrwells 5y agoI founded a company called Milo (https://www.getmilo.com/ https://www.getmilo.com/) - we started as a “One Medical For Pets” modern veterinary clinic and actually had 3 hospitals before realizing that the real value was in the software we had built to make our teams more efficient. Now we’re pure SaaS It is definitely challenging to pivot and fighting sunk cost bias is massively hard
- hycaria 5y agoHello I am not sure you will see my message as I’m late to the party but I would like to reach out to you.
- iqanq 5y agoInvestigating around the whatsapp pivot, I found their old blog. https://web.archive.org/web/20110927080704/http://whatsapp.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/a-few-things/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110927080704/http://whatsapp.w... >So first of all, let’s set the record straight. We have not, we do not and we will not ever sell your personal information to anyone. Period. End of story. Hopefully this clears things up. Heh... :-)
- Belphemur 5y agoTechnically they didn't ... Facebook/Meta did. I remember when I had to pay 1€ per year for What's App that was only 8 years ago...
- axiosgunnar 5y agoWell since they sold Whatsapp, the company, that was holding all of the data, to Facebook, they literally sold all of the data at once.
- chii 5y agoThey often waived that charge anyway.
- raldi 5y agoA classic non-pivot is the Prodigy service, created as an IBM spinoff in the 1980s as a sort of proto-Amazon. To their great annoyance, instead of shopping, users insisted on chatting with each other all day. They could have embraced this and beaten AOL to the punch, but instead they issued an edict that from then on, users would only be allowed to send 30 messages a month, and after that, they would cost 25 cents each. This was the start of the company’s death spiral.
- Semaphor 5y agoFor anyone else who has never heard of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
- willhinsa 5y agoWow, I had no idea. This is such an interesting story! > The price increases prompted an increase of "underground IDs" (known as 'UG's for shorthand)—where multiple users shared a single account that they turned into private bulletin boards by using emails that were returned (and therefore not billed) due to invalid email addresses. Those invalid addresses were the simple names of the person or people for whom the messages were intended. When those people signed in and checked the email, they would find "returned" messages with their names. They would then "send" a reply by typing the name of the first sender, which would also be returned. When that person logged on next, they would see their message, and the cycle would repeat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)#Price_increases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)#Price...
- delecti 5y agoThis is a perfect use case for the original meaning of "the customer is always right". If customers want to send messages then you change your business to a message system.
- robotkad 5y agoFun to think that games spun out fickr and slack. I wish we saw more kids looking up to Fake and Butterfield rather than say, Musk.
- zackmorris 5y agoOh man, I didn't know that Groupon started as The Point, a tool to help people organize to work towards a goal. The biggest goal ended up being to save money.. Does anyone know of a service today for helping people organize around a cause?
- hn_throwaway_99 5y agoThis was really interesting, a lot of these I never knew about, like Segment was originally pitched to YC as a classroom tool. Related, though, perhaps it's just a bit of semantics, but in general, I consider a "pivot" to be where a company hasn't found traction with their current product, so unless they switch they're going to die. Like another commenter who mentioned Netflix, that feels very different than some of these companies that were just evolving or growing with the market. I mean, in one sense, since technology is always changing you better evolve at some point or you're guaranteed to die. Moving from DVDs by mail to streaming was a pretty obvious switch, and not something that really took Netflix by surprise (though they famously had some major hiccups as they tried to make that switch). In general, though, lots of interesting and cool stories here!
- after_care 5y agoWhat’s the difference between a pivot and an expansion? Did Netflix pivot to online streaming, or did they expand into online streaming?
- rkk3 5y agoApple Computer and Microsoft seem notably absent.
- ferdowsi 5y agoApollo GraphQL (which just raised a $130M Series D) pivoted from Meteor, a company built around supporting the frontend framework MeteorJS. https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/01/17/apollo-graphql-with-geoff-schmidt/ https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2020/01/17/apollo-graph...
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoApple. Went from being an unprofitable 1990s personal computer manufacturer like IBM, Dell, Compaq, etc. to being a high end AV consumer electronics company like Sony.
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago(1) I don't think "we've added other business lines while making our existing business lines more successful" can truly be described as a "pivot". Apple is still a personal computer manufacturer, and is selling more Macs than ever. (2) I really don't think you can call Apple "a high-end AV consumer electronics company". Sony makes televisions, receivers, speakers, soundbars, Blu-Ray players, turntables, and $3000+ digital music players. You can argue that the iPod brought Apple back from the brink, but I don't think you can argue that any iPod was a high-end music player; the only video player they make is the Apple TV, and their audio equipment is limited to Beats headphones, AirPods, and one smart speaker of middling quality (and dubious smarts).
- gxespino 5y agoAnyone else annoyed that the way this table is laid out the pivot comes first before original idea. My brain doesn't work this way...
- rozab 5y agoI recently learned from a loading screen message that Discord has almost the same origin story as Slack. They were making a mobile MOBA called Fates Forever but pivoted when they realised how poor the current systems for communicating in games like MOBAs are. Unlike Slack though, I don't think code was shared between the projects. https://toucharcade.com/2015/09/14/ex-fates-forever-developers-making-discord-a-voice-comm-app-for-multiplayer-mobile-games/ https://toucharcade.com/2015/09/14/ex-fates-forever-develope...
- dsiroker 5y agoWhile this is helpful, just looking at successful pivots suffers from survivorship bias. Anyone have examples of failed pivots?
- sroussey 5y agoAll failed companies. ;)
- deepnotderp 5y agoIntel- memory to microprocessors?
- wenbin 5y agoEducation tech startup -> musical.ly -> acquired by Bytedance -> TikTok
- wlonkly 5y agoDid musical.ly pivot to become TikTok, or did Bytedance already have TikTok when they acquired musical.ly? I thought it was the latter, and that's more growth hacking than pivoting.
- productceo 5y agoLove the list. Thanks for putting it together.
- rubayeet 5y agoI am not sure Shopify belongs to the list. It didn’t exactly pivot, Tobi Lutke made a website with Rails to sell snowboards, and realized there is an untapped market for SaaS e-commerce product, so he generalized the framework powering the website.
- puyoxyz 5y agoSame applies to Slack then
- reed1234 5y agoHow’s that not a pivot?
- jazzyjackson 5y agoWell, does Toni still sell snowboards?
- magneticnorth 5y agoI find this to be one of the most interesting kinds of pivots - the original business idea wasn't good enough, but along the way they encountered problems with no good solution, and were savvy enough to go to market with that solution once they came up with it.
- davidhariri 5y agoThis is great. I’m curious to know what the line is between pivot and new company. Is it same successive founders? Same domain? Same cap table?
- calmoo 5y agoAn example that is missing is MongoDB.
- Havoc 5y agoSome of those are so unrelated I'd hardly call them pivots. More like currently successful companies that used to do something completely different under same brand name
- transcriptase 5y agoValve: We used to make games; Now we make money.
- ARothfusz 5y agoThere's always Wrigley's that went from offering gum as an incentive to buy soap to just selling the gum... "Make something people want" > In 1891, 29-year-old William Wrigley Jr. (1861–1932) came to Chicago from Philadelphia with $32 and the idea to start a business selling Wrigley's Scouring Soap.[14] Wrigley offered premiums as an incentive to buy his soap, such as baking powder. Later in his career, he switched to the baking powder business, in which he began offering two packages of chewing gum for each purchase of a can of baking powder. The popular premium, chewing gum, began to seem more promising, prompting another switch in product focus. Wrigley also became the majority owner of the Chicago Cubs in 1921. -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrigley_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrigley_Company
- alangibson 5y agoWhile reading that list, I had a realization that many good 'pivots' arent so much pivots as upgrades of a successful feature into a product. I wonder if anyone had tried to formalize that into a product development methodology.
- jbverschoor 5y agoFacebook is not in the list... They pivoted from friendlist -> wall -> timeline(twitter)
- mrslave 5y agoPretty sure there was some sort of "hot-or-not" in there as well near the start.
- jbverschoor 5y agoomg forgot haha hot or not was cool though.
- peter303 5y agoMicroSoft's first products were programming languages for PCs. BASIC for the Altair in 1975.
- justicezyx 5y agoI think at least for me, before working at an early start-up, the wrong idea is that pivots are exceptional. No, pivots are what startup do. They are born out of pivots, since the founder(s) could not find a way to implement their ideas in other venues. So all startups pivots, and all successful had pivoted successfully.