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(#5) Instagram
Before it was everyone's favorite place to post selfies, Instagram started as a location-based service called Burbn, which was similar to Foursquare. You could check into locations, earn points for hanging out with their friends, and share pictures inside of the app.
Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion. -
(#9) Fab
Fab co-founders Jason Goldberg and Bradford Shellhammer made a risky decision back in 2011. They decided to kill off their social network for gay men, Fabulis, and relaunch it as an e-commerce design site called Fab. Soon after the pivot, the site grew to more than 12 million members generating more than $200k a day. -
(#4) Twitter
Months before making microblogging wildly popular, Twitter was founded as Odeo, a platform on which to post, subscribe to and listen to podcasts.
Twitter went public in 2013 and set their IPO price at $26 a share, which valued the company at $14.2 billion. -
(#8) Groupon
Groupon started as a side project of founder Andrew Mason, who predominately ran a site called The Point, which aimed to raise funds from donors to do social good. Donors would only pay if the funds reached the "tipping point" to get the job done.
Mason used the same "tipping point" concept to unlock discount on activities and services through Groupon. Probably not surprisingly, people swarmed to the daily deals site while Mason's "social good" concept did not do as well. -
(#2) Facebook
- Social Network
Before it was Facebook or The Facebook, it was Facemash, where users (basically college-aged bros) could compare two faces side by side to vote on which was hotter. Needless to say, Facebook was the much more successful venture.
Facebook's IPO was one of the biggest in technology (and Internet history), with a peak imarket capitalization of over $104 billion. -
(#7) Pandora Radio
At first, Pandora sought to develop a music recommendation service that could be sold to companies like AOL and Yahoo then passed along to the masses but when that didn't work, they went right to the people, added in a social aspect and became wildly successful.
Pandora's 2011 IPO raised nearly $235 million and ended up giving them a market value of $2.78 billion.
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About This Tool
Nowadays, the most successful companies are of various sizes, and they have very good qualifications in their respective fields. Sometimes the strategy and its execution will go according to plan, but sometimes the company must often change its entire foundation in order to achieve the greatest success. These top companies have become the pivot of Internet development, these the most successful and well-known technology companies have experienced critical moments.
This page shows 9 items that some pivots shaped the modern Internet, such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and more. These companies started down a different path. You could also search for other interesting things with our random tool.
Our data comes from Ranker, If you want to participate in the ranking of items displayed on this page, please click here.