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.
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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.