Ask HN: Which startups have the most interesting pivot stories?

In 2019, my friend and I bootstrapped a white-labelled SaaS for Professional Sports Teams to have their own (personalized) mobile applications through which they can interact with their fans (i.e. exclusive behind-the-scenes content, tickets, merchandise, trivia, etc.) We landed a small client then a few big clients, and then COVID happened as soon as we were about to scale. In a matter of few months, we went from being on the verge to breakeven to existing clients defaulting on their payments and potential clients going from wanting our products to not wanting in a span of 3-months. The situation was pretty bad.

At that point, I had to sit with the team and be transparent about our situation (from both a financial and a market standpoint). Luckily for us, the team was willing to undergo a pivot and throw everything we had previously built away. But we all agreed to do so under one condition: we will only pivot to a problem that we're passionate about and that is worthwhile.

The problem? We found the market we were interested in (Gamers & Content Creators), but we could not exactly pinpoint the problem we wanted to solve at the time. But we had (and still have) an amazing team so we believed it would be a matter of time until we figured the pain-point out.

At that point (August 2020), we only had 5-months worth of runway. We knew from consuming content (and creating it ourselves) how difficult it was to get discovered as a content creator, so we spent two months building a website that allowed Livestreamers to mirror their Twitch streams while also posting short-recorded content in an attempt to help them funnel in more viewers to their livestreams. We launched bith.tv in November 20202, and in our first year we had (organically) around ~250K unique viewers, then we decided to pivot once again. In that one year, we managed to pinpoint the actual pain-point after noticing how a) difficult it was for gamers to edit their content and b) how overwhelming it was to tailor their edited content to the various social media platforms that exist and cross-post it across them all.

So in November 2021, we underwent our second pivot and since then have built an easy-to-use cloud-based video editor with social media publishing tools in an effort to simplify the entire content creation journey for gamers.