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.
I was listening to a podcast the other day (I can't remember what it was) but when pressed about how the term "pivot" is overused, the intervewee mentioned that the term comes from the idea of one foot being firmly planted and pivoting in new direction. He suggested there are two types of pivots. One of product and one of customer. You can't pivot on both, so, to be a pivot, you are either keeping the same customer but providing them a different product, or keeping the same product and finding a different customer.
As an example, YouTube started as a dating site, but it was a video dating site. They had built the video upload and streaming (product) and kept that but pivoted to serve a different market.
I don't think Twitter really "pivoted", they didn't change market or product really. Ok, they started with SMS, but for a LONG time you could still tweet via SMS (maybe you still can) but the core of Twitter is you can publicly post short messages. Still the same product it ever was.
Well, would you say that the pivot from a dating app to what YouTube is today is a joke? Is that just a refined product? Same for games turning into social networks or productivity tools.
It's not the action itself just the impreciseness of the label that I'm objecting to as I do think there is a difference between a video dating app that re-uses their underlying technology to become a general video hosting service (a refinement) vs say a Magic the Gathering collectors site that becomes a cryptocurrency exchange or a product company that just cancels their product and rebrands as a consultancy.
Comments
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.
I was listening to a podcast the other day (I can't remember what it was) but when pressed about how the term "pivot" is overused, the intervewee mentioned that the term comes from the idea of one foot being firmly planted and pivoting in new direction. He suggested there are two types of pivots. One of product and one of customer. You can't pivot on both, so, to be a pivot, you are either keeping the same customer but providing them a different product, or keeping the same product and finding a different customer.
As an example, YouTube started as a dating site, but it was a video dating site. They had built the video upload and streaming (product) and kept that but pivoted to serve a different market.
I don't think Twitter really "pivoted", they didn't change market or product really. Ok, they started with SMS, but for a LONG time you could still tweet via SMS (maybe you still can) but the core of Twitter is you can publicly post short messages. Still the same product it ever was.
Well, would you say that the pivot from a dating app to what YouTube is today is a joke? Is that just a refined product? Same for games turning into social networks or productivity tools.
It's not the action itself just the impreciseness of the label that I'm objecting to as I do think there is a difference between a video dating app that re-uses their underlying technology to become a general video hosting service (a refinement) vs say a Magic the Gathering collectors site that becomes a cryptocurrency exchange or a product company that just cancels their product and rebrands as a consultancy.