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

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

#161

Post by swyx »

paxys wrote: post #158
obayesshelton wrote: post #48

Slack 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...

In fact the gaming company had already failed. They shut down the product and laid off employees, and offered to return the remaining money to their investors. The investors instead said keep it and try building something else. It wasn't a random pivot either. Real-time multiplayer gaming and real-time group chat share a lot of the same characteristics. Discord has the exact same origin story.

> Real-time multiplayer gaming and real-time group chat share a lot of the same characteristics

i mean... yes we have n=2 data but does that claim pass the sniff test? group chat is a lot easier graphics and physics and latency wise

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

#162

Post by swyx »

bjrobz wrote: post #33

Air 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

I mean if we're going with Airbnb then might as well mention Uber's pivot from black car service to ridesharing (along with new CEO.. basically rebooting the company)

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

#163

Post by swyx »

rparmar wrote: post #82
bjrobz wrote: post #33

Air 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

This is perhaps the best talk I've ever heard on startups, ever. Chesky is such a good story teller and Reid Hoffman is such a great interviewer. I think a lot of founders would benefit from watching this.

narrative fallacy is a cruel master though.

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

#164

Post by swores »

forkLding wrote: post #129

Arguably more an expansion of the original idea than a pivot, but Twitch used to be justin.tv which was just a single 24-hour livestream of Justin Kan, they later expanded it to allow other people to broadcast as well and then noticed their gaming channels was doing really well and rebranded as Twitch to solely focus on gaming.

From Justin.tv (the streaming service) to Twitch (the gaming-focused streaming service) was definitely more change in strategy (focusing on what was organically working best), but the original change really was a pivot from content creation (which happened to need the ability to stream) to providing others with that ability to stream as a service.

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

#168

Post by kulor »

Xcelerate wrote: post #84
hbrn wrote: post #30

Plaid was originally a budgeting app. After realizing how terrible banking APIs are, they pivoted to building a developer-friendly banking API. Now their valuation is 10B+.

So what goes wrong with budgeting apps? Sounds like there would be a huge market for personal (or small business) finance, targeting traditional CPA/CFP approaches.

I can't find sources but having made a budgeting app in the past have first-hand experience from being in the domain.

Small businesses are well catered for with tools like Xero, QuickBooks etc.

There's a psychological issue of people treating their budgeting app as the bearer of bad news (shooting the messenger effect), which results in churn.

There's also a high correlation between people looking for budgeting solutions being in a bad financial standing which makes the justification of paying for the software less likely.

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

#170

Post by mkoryak »

samizdis wrote: post #155
1024core wrote: post #95

HotMail (remember that?) started this way. The founders had an idea for a database hosted on the web(?), and pitched it to some VCs. They had been working on it as a side gig. Naturally, the VCs asked: did you do it on company time? Did you communicate via the company's email system? Nope, came the answer. We thought about that and built this email system to exchange messages while we worked on the product. And the V…

That's one of many stories told nicely in The New New Thing by Michael Lewis, which I really enjoyed reading.

And just like that, I bought a book
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