One of the biggest questions you might face as an entrepreneur is if you should pivot your business, and when you should sell:
1/ From the outside and in retrospect, Twitch looked like a straightforward pivot from our generic live-streaming site Justin.tv. What people don’t see is that we tried many small pivots before.
2/ These included:
Justin.tv itself, which pivoted from a reality tv show
an app that let you challenge people to create live video about a specific thing
white-labeled live streaming API
livestreaming for Twitter
livestreaming mobile app
…& others I’ve forgot now
Justin.tv itself, which pivoted from a reality tv show
an app that let you challenge people to create live video about a specific thing
white-labeled live streaming API
livestreaming for Twitter
livestreaming mobile app
…& others I’ve forgot now
4/ We couldn’t agree as founders on what to pivot to, so we simultaneously started 2 pivots, which became Socialcam & Twitch. This is a bad idea for many reasons, primary of which is lack of focus. What we did well was agreeing a priori on aggressive 6 mnth goals for each project
5/ We figured that the likely outcome was that one of the projects would hit its goals, then we would fully commit to that project. If both projects hit 6 month goals, it was a champagne problem.
6/ Ultimately Twitch hit its goals, and became the main focus of the company. Socialcam - we didn’t have the stomach to kill our own baby so we spun it off, and it was acquired a year later by Autodesk for $60mm(!)
7/ Re: Selling, if you have momentum as the category leader in a growing market, and your product is defensible, generally you shouldn’t sell! Of course that is easy to say in retrospect. ;)
8/ My friend @immad wrote about his experiences pivoting and selling two companies on the Atrium blog today: atrium.co/blog/pivot-sel…
