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.
Comments
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.
For YouTube and Groupon at least, it definitely was the latter. This can be seen in the sources.