Didn't youtube start off as a dating website?
Maybe you're mixing that up with Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg started FaceMash to compare students in a 'hot or not' type website. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook#FaceMash
Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
41–50 of 204 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#42Brian Armstrong pivoted from "payments enabler for Bitcoin" (Bitbank) -- to -- "cryptocurrencies exchange" (Coinbase) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26815403
In other words, he pivoted from an idea analogous to Visa/PayPal/Stripe/etc -- to -- a forex exchange market and financial broker/custodian.
[To downvoters, if my information is incorrect, please add the correction. I linked Brian's 2012 text where he described what he was initially trying to create.]
EDIT ADD reply to: >because you pretty clearly need to build the exchange to make the payment thing work.
Thank you for your comment. I'm using the term "exchange market" in the sense of a full blown currency trading platform that has a "order book" to constantly match buy/bid and sell/ask orders. His initial description of "disrupting credit-card fees" did not require building that type of exchange platform. Instead, he just needs to be a "bank" that acts on behalf of users via the "custodian" ownership model. This would let users convert USD$ into BTC and they can then pay each other. The first business name for the website on his prototype screenshot was "Bitbank" which makes sense for the idea that emphasizes ecommerce payments rather than the trading of cryptocurrencies itself. E.g. Stripe enables payments and deals with 135+ currencies but does not have a "currencies trading platform with a buy/sell order book".
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#43It could depend on what is considered 'a pivot'. Some companies start out with grandiose plans only to find out that they don't have enough money or other resources to develop, market, and support 'Plan A'. So they take a piece of what they already have working and build a product around that to 'prime the pump'. Before they know it, the pump primer turns into 'Plan B' and they never get back to the original plan.
I have experienced some of that with my current project. It is designed to be a global distributed data management system, but I am currently marketing it as a simple data analytics tool because that is the part that is working the best right now. https://www.Didgets.com
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#44Air BNB Started as a tool for renting rooms in cities during conferences, where hosts were expected to provide no more than an air mattress. Pivoted to full on house renting. Chesky talks about it all here in the blitzscaling series, an interview series conducted by Reid Hoffman: https://youtu.be/W608u6sBFpo
that doesn't really seem like a pivot, moreso a big expansion of their original niche
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#45I believe both Slack and Discord started developing video games, then realized the communication tools for large video game-scale teams aren't good enough.
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#46Cisco is a famous example. They were founded to build a clone of the beloved PDP-10 mainframe. To bring in some cash they made copies of the stanford LAN routers the team had designed and built at Stanford. Turns out a lot of people wanted networking gear. Years later some of the founders founded XKL to make a PDP-10 clone.
Which in turn pivoted to optical networking equipment. ;)
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#47Brex went from virtual reality goggles -> corporate finance saas They basically started on the billing system for their VR and decided to pivot to that.
wow i totally didn't know about this -- that's hilarious.
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#48Slack is a great story.
Basically a tool they built in-house, the company were going bust and they realised that the "tool" had some value and out popped Slack
https://review.firstround.com/From-0-to-1B-Slacks-Founder-Sh...
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure Microsoft had such a grand vision early on; they were late to the Internet after all. And their public cloud play came along later as well. Neither did Apple. And I'd say that Google went from organizing the world's information to mostly selling ads.
I would say that Google monetized organizing the world's information by selling ads. That is pretty exactly what they did with search and search ads.
Except that they largely deprioritized things besides search because they couldn't monetize to the same degree. Google Reader, Scholar, Books (and yes I know there were legal issues), Deja News/Groups, etc. They continue to sort of support things like Blogger but they're clearly not a priority. To Google, the "world's information" is mostly restricted to information they can serve search ads against.
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#50This is a pretty decent list if you are interested in the concept and looking for examples. https://github.com/fikrikarim/companies-with-successful-pivo...
hah curious about soylent