Successful Mobile App Pivots
“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often” — Winston Churchill
Customer habits, behavioral trends, current events, technology, and many other outside factors are constantly changing. Adaptation, foresight and a bit of fearlessness are absolutely essential to be successful and stay competitive. Most prominent companies don’t consider changes as something awful and terrible, therein lies their success. Pivoting means you are ready to give people what they really want, even if it’s totally different than what you set out to give them at first. It keeps companies relevant and inspires loyalty.
Here are vivid examples of successful companies that first had to pivot before they made their name and became the giant companies we know them as today.
The most famous pivot is the Odeo transformation into Twitter. Odeo was a service that revolved around personal podcasting and sharing audio content. But when iTunes started taking over the podcast genre, the creators realized they wouldn’t be able to compete. Within two weeks, employees came up with the idea of a microblogging site. Now people use Twitter to share thoughts (“tweets”) restricted to 140 characters.
Pinterest launched as Tote; it allowed users to browse and shop retailers and share products with others. But soon the founders realized that people were mostly interested in building and sharing “collections” of their favorite items. As a result, there was an idea of Pinterest. Now, this is an extremely popular “pinning” social network that has over 70 million users.
Instagram is a hugely popular photo-sharing app, but many of us don’t know its origins. First Instagram was called Burbn, an app where you could check into locations, earn points for hanging out with your friends, and share pictures inside of the app. Burbn was packed with a lot of unnecessary features, the creators decided to get back to Minimum Viable Product. They rebuilt a new version of the app that focused particularly on photos — it was clean and simple, and obviously, that was worth it.
Flickr
This is a photo sharing app, but initially, it was a role-playing online game “Game Neverending”, where people could interact with each other and buy, sell and build items. The game also included a photo-sharing tool, which was the most popular feature. The founders decided to engage that photo popularity and pivot to Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo. Now Flickr is a very popular app for sharing photos among amateur and professional photographers.
To sum up
As the phrase goes “The only thing constant is change” — so don’t be afraid of pivots, you do it all the time. Pivots lead to more decisions, more uncertainty, and more hard work. But if you’ve exactly decided it’s not a time to quit, but time to pivot then do it properly and go for it.
Almost all companies pivot on some part of their business model after founding. Startup without pivoting — it’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight.
