24 Big Pivots Businesses Had to Make in Order to Survive
Pivoting is a fact of life. Whether your employer lays you off, an injury throws a wrench in your workout routine, or a relationship turns sour, we must often adjust our routine to maintain and progress. Whether a course correction comes from necessity or choice, a strategic pivot can unlock earning power, lead you to your life partner, or help you find the peace you seek.
Businesses are like humans in that they often reach a fork in the road that will define them for years to come. Some businesses take the wrong path (looking at you, Radio Shack), miscalculating their role in the marketplace and eventually going under. Other organizations pivot brilliantly, rebranding themselves or making necessary tweaks that lead to unfathomable growth.
Several of the most successful businesses started as something entirely different. These organizations recognized that their way of doing business was not working, changed course, and became indomitable brands due to their rebranding. Pivots can be used as inspiration to recognize how you might upgrade your own life — professionally or otherwise.
1. Amazon
I challenge you to find a sector in which Amazon isn’t involved. Sure, Jeff Bezos has yet to enter the petroleum extraction game, but you’d be unwise to assume that’s not in Amazon’s future blueprints. The world’s most popular two-day shipper has completed one pivot after the next since its inception in 1995.
Back then, Amazon was merely “the world’s biggest bookstore,” offering one million titles in hardcover and paperback form. Though Bezos always had an eye toward product diversification, today’s Amazon is far more than the world’s most prodigious book peddler.
Only a couple years after its founding, Bezos & Co. expanded the brand from books to CDs and, in due time, sold everything from dog beds to silicone caulking and burrito-centric card games. Failed ventures like Amazon Auction prove that even Jeff Bezos pivots in the wrong direction occasionally.
2. Netflix
Some of us are old enough to remember the joy of opening our mailboxes and seeing the vibrant scarlet hue of a Netflix envelope. The by-mail DVD model accelerated Blockbuster’s downfall, and Netflix perfected the art of delivering entertainment in an envelope. As streaming technology evolved, Netflix became a digital behemoth and mailed its final DVD in 2023. This development confirmed that we were getting old.
Netflix has lost some ground in an increasingly crowded streaming marketplace, and its leaders have initiated their next pivot. Interactive films, including Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, hinted at the streaming platforms’ entry into the video game space. The streaming service has hired a former Electronic Arts executive and Halo developer to oversee its growing catalog of gaming titles.
If there is one defining characteristic of Netflix’s continued relevance, it’s a forward-looking vision that allows the company to evolve with the ever-changing times.
3. Nintendo
Japanese gaming giant Nintendo has had a Godzilla-sized impact on popular culture and how we spend our downtime. The Kyoto-based tech company is responsible for classic games, including the Mario franchise and The Legend of Zelda, but gaming has not always been part of Nintendo’s repertoire.
Founder Fusajiro Yamauchi launched a playing card company in 1889 and, in 1902, began crafting Western-themed cards to expand the brand’s appeal. By 1959, Nintendo had formed strategic partnerships with the likes of Disney, peddling its plastic cards throughout much of the world. Only in 1963 did the beloved company enter gaming, planting the seed of its eventual cultural explosion.
Along its evolution over a century-plus, Nintendo has produced arcade machines, personal gaming consoles, massive video game franchises, cocktail table games, movies, and much more.
4. Instagram
Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of social media sensation Instagram almost didn’t happen. The addictive app that allows users to share the vivid details of their Mykonos vacation or market their clothing line was, once upon a time, something entirely different.
The origins of Instagram began with Burbn, an app that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom described as “cluttered” and “overrun with features.” After about a year of work building Burbn, Systrom and fellow founder Mike Krieger pivoted to a more streamlined application whose value pitch was far simpler. The partners scrapped extraneous features and were left with a platform on which users posted photos, commented, and liked others’ content. This final product was, in a word, Instagram.
5. PayPal
PayPal serves as an example of the fact that one pivot is rarely enough to find the gold mine you seek. The payment processing platform with a market capitalization exceeding $70 billion began as a service for encrypting handheld devices. Co-founders Max Levchin and Peter Thiel abandoned that idea in favor of PayPal’s next iteration, Confinity. However, this Palm Pilot-focused application would soon also be doomed to abandonment.
Finally, on the third try, Thiel and Levchin came up with PayPal. The web-based payment system allowed one person to email funds to another, a revolutionary concept ripe for further expansion. Integration with eBay and a merger with Elon Musk’s online bank (X.com) transformed PayPal into a lightning-fast means of buying products online.
The founders expanded their product’s usefulness without losing the essence of letting customers send money to their landlord (or anyone else) with a couple of clicks of the mouse (or smartphone screen).
6. Play-Doh
One man’s Play-Doh is another man’s…soot cleaner? Your child’s (and perhaps your own) favorite multi-colored molding clay is the product of ingenious pivoting.
Your father or grandfather might have recognized Play-Doh as Kutol Wallpaper Dough, a must-have for any household with a coal-powered stove and soot on the walls. When gas and electric stoves became universal household items, the inventors of Kutol Wallpaper Dough had to consider other applications for their malleable, sense-pleasing product.
Taking a hint from his schoolteacher sister-in-law, Kutol Products founder Noah McKiver repurposed his household cleaner as a child-safe modeling clay, and the rest is history.
7. Twitter
Twitter has undergone a recent pivot, rebranding as X and disavowing a recent history marred by allegations of censorship and outside influence. However, Twitter’s history includes an even more monumental pivot from a podcasting platform to a factory for bite-sized quips and news breaks.
The original iteration of Twitter (or X) was Odeo, one of the earliest podcasting platforms. Odeo became obsolete once Apple’s larger, more established platform, iTunes, entered the podcast game. Odeo’s leadership team saw podcasting as a low-ceiling venture and altered course to create something novel. The company’s employees (including a “star” named Jack Dorsey) engaged in “hackathons” in which groups would break off to pursue the most promising projects. Dorsey eventually pitched Twttr (the original name), a means of blasting out your “status” to your friend group through a single text.
By March 2006, Odeo had developed its Twitter prototype, the first tangible step in a pivotal rebrand that birthed the X platform we know today.
8. Starbucks
Starbucks’ pivot from serving bare-bones coffee to sugar-drenched, neon-colored concoctions has been well-publicized. Less known is Starbucks’ bigger-picture shift in its fundamental business model.
When the global chain launched in 1971 in Seattle, it did not even serve fresh coffee to its clientele. If you shopped at Starbucks in that era, your choices were limited to bags of beans, coffeemakers, and other coffee-centric products.
The re-hiring of former employer Howard Schultz as CEO in 1987 forever changed Starbucks’ trajectory, making the now obvious decision to eliminate the labor for the customer and sell fresh brew. Schultz saved the brand again in 2008 by, of all things, abandoning breakfast sandwiches and infusing Starbucks stores with the pungent aroma of freshly brewed Joe.
9. Groupon
Who doesn’t love a deal? Groupon’s value proposition appeals to our penny-pinching instinct, connecting brands from Sam’s Club to Burberry with customers lured in with steep discounts. However, Groupon wasn’t always Groupon. The immensely successful company began as The Point, a fundraising platform with a premise similar to that of Kickstarter.
While Kickstarter’s business model has also proven successful, the concept proved a financial sieve for founder Andrew Mason and The Point in the mid-2000s. While the site was hemorrhaging money, users were attracted to The Point’s group-buying discounts. Mason and his team leaned into the good thing, calling hundreds of vendors each day to secure group discount deals. Groupon’s first deal went live in 2008, and the platform quickly emerged as one of the fastest-growing companies in American history.
10. YouTube
YouTube is more than a video streaming platform. For many, it is the vehicle for lucrative careers, side hustles, and creative expression. How would we learn to change our car’s coolant or watch free World War II documentaries without the ‘Tube?
If it weren’t for YouTube’s leadership’s early strategic pivot, the aforementioned question might not be rhetorical. YouTube co-founder Steve Chen originally envisioned YouTube as a means for hopeful singles. Daters would upload a video of themselves listing their criteria for a soulmate, and other users could evaluate the poster’s looks, personality, and undoubtedly unrealistic expectations. The concept didn’t work, even after bribing users to upload videos.
Chen and his team decided to go hyper-general, opening YouTube for anyone who wanted to upload a video. That concept stuck, proving to be a veritable gold mine. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 and, a decade and a half later, earns about $20 billion per year through the video streaming platform.
11. Facebook
If you have seen The Social Network, you have a loose understanding of Facebook’s origins as a platform for rating the attractiveness of Harvard students. Originally dubbed Facemash, founder Mark Zuckerberg re-launched it as TheFacebook.com in 2004 and allowed users to post both pictures and personal information in personalized online profiles. Facebook’s leaders have since engaged in “an endless pivot,” opening an online marketplace, disseminating news, testing out cryptocurrency and podcasting ventures, and even rebranding as Meta as it seeks to build an alternate digital reality.
As an interesting aside, the Pentagon’s LifeLog project, an “ambitious effort to build a database tracking a person’s entire existence,” reportedly ended around the same time that Facemash went live. We’re not saying the two are connected but let this be the launching point for your rabbit hole.
12. Honda
In the shadow of World War II’s devastating fallout, Japanese auto manufacturer Honda sought to parlay domestic success in motorcycle sales into an entry into the Western market. However, the manufacturer of ultra-reliable automotive machines found it immensely difficult to penetrate a market dominated by the likes of Harley-Davidson and Triumph. In short, Americans did not like the style of Honda bikes and saw little reason to abandon their American-made machines.
Recognizing the large-bike market as impenetrable, Honda executives leaned into their smaller motorcycles like the 50cc Super Cub. Buyers seeking a cheaper bike suited for short rides and off-roading embraced Honda’s pint-sized motorcycles, transforming Honda’s status from an afterthought into a dominant force in their niche.
13. IBM
Founded in 1911 under the name Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), IBM was an entanglement of four companies ideally seated at the crossroads of a rapidly evolving American landscape. Founder Charles Ranlett Flint was more concerned with seizing a monopoly over varied technological sectors rather than forming a cohesive business strategy. This led to allegations that the company was overvalued and unnecessarily bloated.
In 1914, a new executive team led by Thomas J. Watson, Sr. (of IBM Watson fame) streamlined the vision. Focusing on the data-processing sector, Watson and his team emphasized training, information sharing, and unity of purpose throughout the organization. This pivot from a loosely cobbled alliance of four organizations to a singular force seeking control of the data-processing space made IBM into the international behemoth it is today.
14. Western Union
Formed as a telegraph company in 1851, The Western Union Company served a seminal role in America’s technological evolution. However, after Western Union failed to capitalize on the emergence of telephones and could not adequately monetize other ventures like undersea cables, it faced dire financial straits by the 1980s. Surviving by the skin of its teeth through restructuring and mergers, Western Union was born again in 2006 as a company resolved to thrive in the money transfer space. It found a strong foothold serving migrant communities who regularly send money to relatives in their native countries.
Western Union once again faces a forced pivot as digitized payments have altered the landscape of how people send and receive money. As other financial institutions have enabled cross-currency and cross-border transfers (long Western Union’s bread and butter), the company has focused intently on specific customer verticals, including leisure travelers. By identifying the specific problems international travelers face when sending and receiving money, Western Union aims to remain relevant in the crowded payments space.
15. Wrigley
Have you ever popped a piece of Juicy Fruit into your mouth and tasted the mild tinge of soap? Perhaps you were one of the early adopters who lived to see Wrigley’s pivot from soap manufacturer to baking soda titan and eventually Wonka-level gum producer.
The Wrigley Company is a prime example of letting the market dictate your strategy. William Wrigley Jr. inherited the Wrigley Scouring Soap empire from his father, and business was booming for many years at the turn of the 20th century. Seeking to maximize soap sales, the Wrigley’s began offering free baking soda with their household cleaner and eventually pivoted when demand for the baking soda outpaced demand for suds.
Replicating the two-for-one marketing strategy, the Wrigley Company began offering free chewing gum with its baking soda. As you might guess, the gum became the main attraction, and the company once again diverted resources to make the sideshow the main show. Thus, we have Juicy Fruit.
16. Android
Were it not for a pivotal change of direction, you might not have to deal with the frustrating green text messages — we might all be iPhone users. Android is one of the two primary operating systems American cellphone users rely on, but the company was not always in the mobile business. Android co-founder Andy Rubin explained in 2013 that he and his team originally pitched cloud storage and other Android features not for phones but to maximize storage for digital cameras.
The rapidly evolving smartphone sector offered far more growth than digital cameras, though. Rubin and his team pivoted, and the Android smartphone operating system is now more popular than Apple’s iOS. Google purchased Android in 2005, and the Android app store alone generated $25 billion in revenues in 2019. Meanwhile, consumer digital cameras have gone the way of the compact disc.
17. Nokia
The brand Nokia has more staying power than most organizations can fathom, with 160 years under its belt (which has a flip-phone holster latched onto it, by the way). You don’t survive more than a century and a half without changing directions multiple times, so the pivot is an indelible feature of Nokia’s story.
Nokia’s original purpose in 1865 was churning out paper from a factory in Tampere, Finland. The company became a manufacturing powerhouse, producing a wide range of products from rubber boots to televisions. The explosion of interconnected technologies in the 1990s led Nokia’s leadership to invest heavily in cell phones and the networks that power them.
This all-in approach to phones allowed Nokia to become the top mobile device seller in the world at one point. As Nokia’s sales freefall, it appears time for Nokia to enact its next life-saving makeover.
18. HP
Frustrated customers may know Hewlett-Packard (HP) as the company that pigeonholed them into buying marked-up ink cartridges. While ink profiteering is one of HP’s lesser qualities, there is plenty to admire about the company’s dynamism. Founded by two Stanford engineering graduates in 1939, the Hewlett-Packard Company made audio oscillators and other sophisticated tech for the likes of Walt Disney.
When World War II broke out, the great minds at HP diverted their genius to the Allied effort, creating artillery fuses and counter-radar tech. Co-founder David Packard even became Secretary of Defense during the Nixon administration, at a time when HP was pioneering personal computing (with help from an intern named Steve Wozniak). The company’s history is far richer and pivot-filled than lawsuits involving overpriced ink cartridges would let on.
19. Flickr
Flickr, an image and video-hosting platform, may have been aptly named Pivotr due to founder Stewart Butterfield’s ability to catapult companies on life support to massively profitable heights. Though the emergence of other, more profitable social media platforms has dimmed Flickr’s star in the past decade-plus, the company’s origin story is a lesson in making chicken salad out of…you know.
In 2002, Butterfield and his wife were developing a multiplayer online video game called Game Neverending, and the headaches were never-ending. With no apparent path to monetization, the couple was facing a financial abyss with the game still incomplete. Out of desperation came invention, as the Butterfields repurposed the code powering the game’s chat feature into a photo-focused social platform that would come to be known as Flickr. When life hands you a failed videogame, make a multi-million-dollar photo-sharing site.
20. Avon
You might have Avon to thank for your wife’s favorite lipstick or the moisturizer that keeps you looking five years younger than you are (or ten, if you’re lucky). The company that aims to make life beautiful has also made life profitable by generating several billion dollars in annual global revenues.
The women’s cosmetics space would lack Avon’s versatile line of products if the company’s founder had not chosen beauty over books in the 1800s. Founder David McConnell was knocking on doors to sell his books in 1886, but female homemakers tossed the books aside in favor of the free perfume samples McConnell used as an enticing perk.
The California Perfume Company (CPC) became the precursor to Avon, and McConnell enlisted the same women he was selling books to as his sales force. The rest is bag-hiding, wrinkle-eliminating, lip-puckering history.
21. Suzuki
Japanese automotive giant Suzuki produces boat engines, four-wheelers, motorcycles, and cars. Inventor Michio Suzuki was not always a motor vehicle and watercraft enthusiast, though. The founder’s original business in 1909 produced ergonomically sound looms to serve Japan’s cotton production industry. Despite enduring the shelling of World War II, natural disasters, and financial difficulties, Suzuki survived until 1952. However, the company needed to rebrand as its looms were built to last (and therefore had a cap on total sales).
As a visionary who saw the inevitable spread of motorized vehicles, Suzuki introduced the “Power Free” motorized bicycle in 1952. Motorcycles and pint-sized automobiles followed. Suzuki has become a fixture in competitive motorcycle racing and dirt biking, while its boat engines and motor vehicles remain important products of the company’s successful pivot.
22. Pinterest
Pinterest boasts the 15th-largest user base of all social media platforms. It serves as a hub of inspiration for users looking to redecorate their living room, elevate their mother’s quiche recipe, dominate the summer fashion season, or keep tabs on virtually any other interest. The origins of Pinterest are rooted in a dashed dream, as Pinterest began as Tote, an app you’ve probably never heard of, in 2009.
Former Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann conceived Tote as a way for online shoppers to keep tabs on their favorite brands. Shoppers could receive notice of sales and new releases and even purchase items through the app. However, a clunky payment infrastructure prevented Tote from reaching its potential. Silbermann liked the concept of allowing retailers (and regular folk) to display their creations and collections, and by 2010 the Pinterest pivot was underway.
23. Fab.com
Fab.com (also known as Fab) began as a fabulous dating app for the homosexual community. In March 2011, though, it had become clear to founders Bradford Shellhammer and Jason Goldberg that the competition (Grindr) had a stranglehold on the market. Naturally, the founders rebranded Fab for a purpose their target demographic would gravitate to, offering significant markdowns on luxury home goods in a flash-sale format. About $1 million members joined in the next six months, proving that Fab was a veritable flame to bargain-hunting moths.
All did not end well for Fab.com. Described as “The Tech Titanic,” Fab went from a $900 million valuation in 2013 to laying off two-thirds of its workforce. The writing was on the wall, and Fab would sell for a measly $15 million. This shows that a single pivot can be lucrative but is not always sufficient to secure long-term success.
24. Slack
Without Slack, millions of remote workers would be hamstrung by disjointed, non-urgent email communications. Slack has done for digital communication what cell phones did for telecom, allowing users to communicate with entire teams on a sleek interface instantaneously. Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder who pivoted Flickr into a social media behemoth, also conducted a similar rebrand as a co-founder of Slack.
Slack’s roots lie in a failed video game called Glitch. While Glitch did not garner the following the founders hoped, they found that users interacted frequently using the game’s messaging feature. Salvaging gold out of the rubble of a dumpster fire, the optimistic entrepreneurs repurposed the messaging feature, added widgets and features based on user feedback (the snooze notifications button is utterly essential), and built Slack into a platform that more than 10 million remote workers and creatives can’t live without.
