What are some startup examples, like Paypal, that launched with a very different vision than what eventually led to their success?
Can people help me with examples of startups that were successful on a product/service that was very different from the original founder's vision? One example would be Paypal, which raised it's initial VC capital as a service for transfering payment via a PDA. Thanks in advance for your help!
Answers (18)
Ramesh K.
CTO & Human Search Engine
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Myspace ( 2003. Facebook followed in 2004)
YouTube ( 2005)
Wikipedia (2001)
All the three are different
Ramesh
The Hman Search Engine
Richard K.
MBA, CIW World’s 1st Marketing Sociologist; digital marketer & journalist #1 Linkedin PR answers 2012, 2011, 2009 & 2008
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Mr. Ellis:
This may not fit, but there was a fun and funky Web site called Dirtyscottsdale.com. The guy did it during his lunch break at a telemarketing job.
Then he got successful and ruined it by calling it thedirty.com. Trying to do too much.
Links:
Companies that win with original vision are the exception rather than the rule. (Pretty sure there's some data out there that suggest that only 1 in 10 companies win with original vision.) Google started as search service, then added text ads three years later, which are 90% of today's revs. Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma has lots more on this theme. If you've got an upward trajectory and some happy users, then stick with it. If not, scramble.
You rarely hit your big idea the first time so iterate quickly.
The fact is, most startups end up nothing like the initial idea. The main value of your initial idea is that, in the process of discovering it's broken, you'll come up with your real idea. A story I like to tell to elaborate on this is one that I ran across during my days at Yahoo!. Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, originally was working on a gaming project before she ended up creating Flickr. After seeing some initial success on Flickr she quickly changed her vision. So, think of the the initial idea as just a starting point-- not a blueprint.
Links:
Not sure what your success metric is, but I believe that De Carta started as a company making software for the blind and is now a leading LBS SaaS provider. They still are active with the blind community, I've heard.
Autodesk started out with the intent to make a suite of office productivity software, but had a hit with their 2D drafting tool at an early conference and has become a $2.5B software company with a focus on engineering design software in many, many fields.
Don't forget Google was founded on a idea to provide users what wanted to find on the interest and redirect them to the site as quickly as possible. This was in contrast to then prevailing idea of portals who wanted you to linger on their site as long as possible.
I may be wrong but I think Google was funded on the idea that once the search technology was found functional then they could turn around and sell their search technologies to then heavyweights such as Yahoo or rent out search support to portals as AskJeeves, AOL and even Yahoo.
Prashant B.
Founder at Awazdo
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Hi,
The history is full of such examples.
The need for global computing is just once pc. - IBM.
640K is all the memory you will ever need. - Microsoft.
Page rank for search engine service - Google.
This is a rule more than an exception.
On a human front, what was your vision as a child about yourself. What are you doing now for your wealth - health and happiness?
Best wishes.
Prashant.
Dev K.
Venture investor in India at Lightspeed Ventures and former entrepreneur
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I think almost every startup (well, more than 50%) changes their goals/visions over time. The book "Founders at Work" chronicles several such startups.
MySpace seems like a pretty good example to me - as I understand it, their original goal was to provide a promotional vehicle for independent music artists (which I suppose they did also), but ultimately provided a platform for much more generalized social networking. Perhaps the substantial overlap in functionality between original vision and ultimate success makes this less relevant for your purposes, or maybe I'm wrong about their original goals, but this was the first thing that popped into my head.
Landon R.
Founder and CEO - OfficeAutopilot.com, marketing automation for SMBs.and SendPepper.com, self-service integrated mrktg.
GotoMeeting was originally launched as a social-tech-support app. Can't remember the name, but the idea was that if they created easy screenshare, techy people would offer their support services (a la elance) to end users for on-the-fly tech support.
That didn't go well, and they burned some serious cash on the idea. Fortunately, they'd raised even more, and they were smart enough to change up the model. They eventually (like, 2 years later) sold to Citrix for around 250M, I think.
Amazon: bookstore -> Amazon: cloud computing
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Sanjay M.
Evangelizes Social Media as Speaker and Writer, Entrepreneur, Mentor, Business Owner and Jt CEO, Social Wavelength
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I agree with the larger number of responses here, that echo the same thoughts, that it's the rule rather than the exception, that original business models change over time, especially in dynamic businesses like the Internet based ones.
To share my own experience, over nine years from inception to divesting of our startup venture, Homeindia (www.homeindia.com), the business morphed at least 4 times, and significantly too. So much so that if you had to compare the start of the business to its current activities, you would not imagine the two to have any connections whatsoever!
IBM is a very good example. IBM was actually late in the market for computers. Historically IBM produced Business Machines, and eventually moved into the mainframe market.
IBM first truly became involved in computing in 1952 with the first magnetic storage systems. In 1956 the first magnetic hard disk. In 1958 IBM actually was involved in the SAGE system. IBM became a leader in computing in 1964 with the SYSTEM / 360
Links:
Clarification added January 26, 2009:
Additional Link:
http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/
Ian M.
Talent Acquisition Specialist | Career Coach | Trainer
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I think my current employer is a good example. Perficient started as a dotcom ASP type of firm in the early 90s.
After the dotcom crash, the company deliberately morphed and has now become the fastest growing IT Solutions firm in the US today.
www.perficient.com
This is old school...but look into Autodesk. In the early (80s) days of the PC revolution, they set out to "automate your desktop" with all sorts of tools. The only one that took was their computer aided design package... aka Autocad.
Lance L.
CEO at Closed Loop Marketing, Author of best-selling book "Web Design for ROI"
Don't forget HP. Bill and Dave's first product was a radio oscilloscope. While the test and measurement division was certainly successful on its own, that isn't what made HP the global force that it is today.
Seeing all these examples makes me think about that great line from Good to Great: "Get the right people on the bus." Get the right people on board and working together and they'll find a way to succeed.
Twitter is a great current example coming out of Obvious. The prior incarnation as a podcasting company definitely didn't work.
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Prashanth M.
Publishing Editor, Business & Economics at Springer Science+Business Media
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www.meebo.com
Wanted to be launched as a MMORPG game portal, but ended up being a great multiple IM client.
