from Hacker News

Startup Pivots

by marco1 on 12/2/19, 4:54 PM with 43 comments

  • by DoreenMichele on 12/2/19, 6:47 PM

    There's a military saying that "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy." Business seems to generally be the same.

    You try a thing, learn that it doesn't work the way you envisioned and you modify it accordingly, informed by new info. If you do that well, the result is a functioning business.

  • by georgewsinger on 12/2/19, 6:09 PM

  • by guelo on 12/2/19, 7:54 PM

    What struck me about this list is how old these companies are. It's sad because that web gold rush seems to be over. Do the lessons from that generation of startups apply to the much more consolidated web of today?

    Instagram 2010, Whatsapp 2009, Groupon 2008, Twitter 2006, Youtube 2005, Facebook 2004.

  • by dr_dshiv on 12/2/19, 6:20 PM

    Flickr beginning as "game never ending".. Slack beginning as the game "glitch", both magical failures of Stewart Butterfield.

  • by michaelbuckbee on 12/2/19, 7:37 PM

    The term "pivot" has been so overused as to be a joke. These are typically much more like "focusing" or "refining" of their original premise.

    These services almost all had a handful of features to start and then found through use that they had a bunch of lackluster features and one killer one (Burbn -> Instagram) is a good example.

  • by choiway on 12/2/19, 7:07 PM

    There's survivorship bias here. Where's the list of companies that pivoted to oblivion?

  • by xwowsersx on 12/2/19, 6:39 PM

    Is there a lesson to be derived here or is it just to point out that oftentimes the thing that gains traction in the end isn't what they were originally working on? If there is a lesson, what would it be? Just work on anything to get your head in the game and into the mindset of solving problems? I can see how people overvalue the original idea, but it matters to some degree, no?

  • by elicash on 12/2/19, 7:20 PM

    I'm not sure how the lesson (if any is intended) applies to some of these.

    For example, YouTube started as a dating site. I genuinely don't know enough about the history of the website: is it that they had a decent dating website going that had videos as a feature, but talking to their users and studying the analytics they saw the video feature taking off and decide to revamp accordingly? Or did the dating part just fail, and the choice was to pivot to something else in their wheelhouse or risk losing investors? I genuinely don't know.

    My sense of Twitter and some others is that it was the former. But for companies in the latter category, the lesson maybe it just "don't give up" rather than lean startup principles.

  • by aj7 on 12/2/19, 11:16 PM

    Spectra-Physics, the first laser company to exceed $100M in sales and get a major stock listing, began as a semiconductor stepper company. They pivoted to making HeNe lasers.

  • by the_arun on 12/2/19, 7:04 PM

    A meticulous plan needs ton of effort & assumes dependencies. How well we perform in "Guerilla tactics"is what makes us (humans) different from super computers.

  • by gumby on 12/2/19, 10:19 PM

    The most famous example is probably Cisco, which was founded to build a clone of the PDP-10 small mainframe computer. To make some money they sold routers on a design they had developed for the Stanford network.

    But was it a pivot? The founders later went and started a company XKL doing just what they had originally intended to do: PDP-10 clones.

  • by aosmith on 12/2/19, 10:38 PM

    Was there ever a pizza place in the 600 West building? All I remember in the sandwich place (Snarf's?)

  • by jonplackett on 12/2/19, 10:55 PM

    Interesting but was hoping there would be more than the famous ones.

    Would also be interested in a list of Super successful startups that started exactly as they were and didn’t have to do a massive pivot.