Interesting that no one mentioned Netflix, which originally started off as nothing more than a rentals company.
Netflix is a cool one but the transition from rentals to streaming feels more like a natural progression than a pivot.
Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
71–80 of 204 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#72Didn't youtube start off as a dating website?
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#73No post body was provided.
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#74Air 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
Hardly a pivot. Paul Graham’s write-up on their very early days: https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/the-airbnbs and a pretty gushing wired article about how AirBnB got into ycombinator: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/airbnbs-surprising-path-to-y-c...
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#75Quoted post unavailable.
Nice burn
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#76Apparently Nextdoor was previously a "crowdsourced almanac of professional and college athletes" called Fanbase https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fanbase
Pivot story: https://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-VCDB-16558
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Nope, YouTube really did start out as a dating site where you could record videos. Quite simply it didn't work very well. They pivoted and history was made. Others had tried earlier with the same idea but the pieces weren't in place. Plus being members of the PayPal mafia they knew how to execute.
I was wrong indeed. Screenshot of the dating-site youtube.com https://web.archive.org/web/20050428014715/https://www.youtu...
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#78Nokia used to make toilet paper and rubber boots.
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
#79Brex went from virtual reality goggles -> corporate finance saas They basically started on the billing system for their VR and decided to pivot to that.
Was it googles? I thought they were building a development environment in VR. But I can't find any reference.
Re: Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?
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