The Art of the Pivot: How Many Companies You Know Almost Became Something Completely Different

The plan you started with is not always the plan that saves you. Sometimes the pivot isn't the detour. It's the destination.

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Here is something nobody tells you when you're building a business: the original idea is rarely the one that works.

Not because the original idea was bad. But because the market, the timing, the customer, the world — none of it holds still long enough to cooperate with your plan. The founders who build lasting things aren't necessarily the ones with the best original ideas. They're the ones who stayed alert, stayed humble, and recognized the better idea when it showed up uninvited — usually wearing the clothing of a failure.

We call this a pivot. And the history of business is quietly full of them.

The Game That Became a $27 Billion Company

Between 2009 and 2012, Stewart Butterfield and his team at Tiny Speck spent years building an online multiplayer game called Glitch — a whimsical, nonviolent world described at the time as "Monty Python crossed with Dr. Seuss on acid." It gained a devoted cult following. It never scaled. In December 2012, they shut it down.

But while building Glitch, the team had created something else entirely by accident: an internal communication tool that made their distributed team — spread across the United States and Canada — remarkably productive. It wasn't a product. It wasn't a business. It was just the way they talked to each other. And when the game died, Butterfield spent about eight days with his co-founders asking one honest question: what do we actually have here that's worth saving?

The answer was the chat tool. Not the game. Not the years of creative work they had poured into Glitch. The side effect.

They spent what remained of their funding turning it into a product, invited friends at other companies to try it, and watched it spread through word of mouth faster than almost anything the tech world had seen. They called it Slack. In 2020, Salesforce acquired it for $27.7 billion. (Business Leader, 2023)

The game failed. The accidental byproduct of the game changed how the entire world communicates at work.

What Butterfield understood — and what most founders in that situation would have missed — is that the pivot wasn't a retreat. It was an honest reading of where the real value actually lived. His team had built something genuinely useful. It just wasn't what they thought they were building.

The Dating Site That Pivoted to Become The Largest Video Sharing Platform In The World

In February 2005, Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen launched a video dating website. The premise was simple: users would upload short videos of themselves describing their ideal partner, and others could vote on whether they were interested. It was meant to be a kind of video-based matchmaking service — the next evolution of online dating.

After one full week, not a single video had been uploaded. Not one. The site sat completely empty. Nobody wanted to put themselves on camera for a dating service, and nobody was watching anyway. The concept was, by any measure, a total non-starter.

At that point, most people would have walked away. The founders didn't. Instead, as co-founder Steve Chen later described in an interview on Sequoia Capital's Crucible Moments podcast, they asked a different question: instead of giving up, why not give this another try? "Instead of it being focused on dating videos," Chen said, "let's just open it up completely to general — any video that you want to upload and you want to share." (Sequoia Capital, Crucible Moments podcast)

That was the pivot. One week in. Zero users. Total failure on the original concept — and the clarity to recognize that the platform itself had potential even if the application didn't.

So they redesigned the UI (user interface) and YouTube became the general video sharing platform we know today. Within eighteen months, the site was hosting more than 100 million video views per day. In October 2006 — just over a year after relaunch — Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. (TRUiC, 2024)

The dating site lasted one week. The pivot that followed it became one of the most transformative platforms in the history of the internet.

The Playing Card Company That Invented Mario

Nintendo was founded in 1889. Its business was handmade playing cards — specifically, traditional Japanese hanafuda cards, hand-crafted and sold in Kyoto. For the better part of a century, that's what Nintendo was. Not a tech company. Not a gaming company. A card company.

Then the playing card market collapsed. By the mid-1960s, Nintendo's stock had fallen from 900 yen to 60 yen following the Tokyo Olympics as consumer tastes shifted sharply away from traditional card games. (Business Leader, 2023) The company that had dominated Japanese playing cards for generations suddenly had no core business.

What followed was one of the more remarkable periods of corporate wandering in business history. Nintendo tried a taxi service. It tried instant rice. It tried operating short-stay hotels. None of it worked. None of it was remotely connected to anything Nintendo had ever done or was particularly good at.

But in the early 1970s, Nintendo noticed the growing popularity of electronic entertainment — early arcade games, the first primitive home consoles — and made a deliberate bet. It pivoted into video games. Not because it had a special advantage. Not because the path was clear. But because it was paying attention to where the world was going and was willing to follow even if it meant abandoning everything it had been.

By the 1980s, Nintendo had given the world Donkey Kong and Mario. The Game Boy followed in 1989 — the first portable handheld gaming system with interchangeable cartridges, revolutionary for its time. The Nintendo Switch, launched in 2017, has sold more than 132 million units. (Business Leader, 2023) Nintendo finished 2023 with an operating profit of $3.8 billion.

A hundred and thirty years after selling playing cards in Kyoto, Nintendo is one of the most beloved entertainment brands on earth. Because when the original business died, they stayed curious instead of staying rigid.

What These Stories Tell Southern Utah Entrepreneurs

The pivot is not a failure dressed up with a more flattering name. It is a skill — arguably the most underrated skill in business. And these three stories, taken together, reveal something important about how it actually works.

It requires honesty before it requires anything else. Steve Chen and his co-founders looked at a week of zero uploads and didn't rationalize it away. They called it what it was. Butterfield looked at a shuttered game and asked what was actually worth keeping. Nintendo looked at a dying business and didn't pretend it wasn't dying. The pivot starts with telling the truth about what's in front of you.

The answer is usually already in what you've built. Slack was hiding inside a failed game. YouTube was hiding inside a failed dating site. Nintendo's gaming instincts were hiding inside decades of entertainment experience. The pivot rarely requires starting from scratch. It usually requires looking more carefully at what you've already created and asking which part of it is actually resonating — even quietly, even unexpectedly.

Courage is the last ingredient. Changing direction when you've already committed — when investors are watching, when your team is bought in, when your identity is wrapped up in the original vision — is genuinely hard. It feels like quitting. It isn't. Quitting is walking away. Pivoting is staying in the game with better information and the honesty to use it.

Your original idea got you started. It gave you the energy, the momentum, the reason to begin. Honor it for that. And then stay honest enough, attentive enough, and courageous enough to follow the better idea when it reveals itself.

Because it usually does. The question is whether you're paying attention when it arrives.