How to pivot without breaking your company
TQD: Issue 07
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In this issue:
How do you pivot your company without screwing it up? JK’s dropping some sweet knawwwledge 🧠
Justin is becoming the first to mint a YouTube video! AND, he’s giving away $10,000 in Bitcoin 👀 👀 🤑
👆🏼 This could be you
An exciting announcement for our upcoming guest! You’ve met Bryce Hall, now get ready for more Sway House action and the CSO of Triller…
How to pivot your company without breaking it
As it turns out, Justin’s life was pretty boring for a livestreaming online reality show. Fortunately, the founding fathers of Justin.tv successfully steered the ship towards an open platform for live broadcasting and saw some promising success.
However, they encountered two major problems pretty soon:
Traffic growth was plateauing, and if something on the Internet isn’t growing, it’s probably going to die pretty soon.
The founders were split on which direction to pivot, and none of them were technically wrong.
Emmett Shear (Twitch CEO) wanted the platform to focus on livestreaming gaming, an extremely niche category at the time. (Spoiler: it worked out pretty well). On the other hand, Michael Seibel was more bullish on portable content, and wanted to build a mobile video app. Sound familiar? (Hint: rhymes with SikSok).
Justin was pretty torn - he liked both ideas. And so, a competition arose; the founders split into separate teams, working on both directions to determine which would be more successful in 6 months’ time.
👾 Emmett led the gaming initiative which obliterated their goals and would eventually become Twitch. 📱 Justin led the mobile app team, spinning off as SocialCam. It didn’t do so well.
Justin’s advice for a successful pivot:
🗣 Talk to your customers
This is the fundamental rule of startups. Emmett was successful because he communicated and listened to his target customers - streamers on their platform. Justin and Michael didn’t make it easy enough for their customers to create native mobile video from the app itself. SocialCam failed because they failed to communicate with their users.
🍑 “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” - Ron Swanson
Trying to do too much at once can be distracting. Working in different directions almost derailed Justin.tv. They operated on the idea that if one initiative failed, they could always fall back on the other. This didn’t create the element of urgency that is needed in a startup environment.
💡 Something that seems small can grow into a BIG idea
Don’t underestimate a niche. Justin and Michael weren’t the only ones who grossly misjudged the potential for online gaming content. The most important thing to focus on is making your customers love you. Building that dedicated base first is essential. You can always grow into adjacencies later on, or the market will grow around you.
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💰 NFTs | $10,000 Giveaway (BTC)
Therapist: “Don’t worry, Laser Eyes Justin Kan isn’t real. He can’t hurt you.”
Laser Eyes Justin Kan:
In this video, Justin explains the wacky world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). You can now collect JK’s YouTube videos as digitally signed and minted originals for #braggingrights!
Check out the full collection here!
And yes, you read that right. He’s giving away $10,000 (in Bitcoin) to one lucky bidder if the collection is sold out! Don’t miss it :)
In case you missed it:
📦 Laura Behrens Wu: Into the Valley at 22
Born and raised in Germany, Laura Behrens Wu came to Silicon Valley at 22 to intern at a Y Combinator-backed startup. In just 4 years, she decided to 'figure out shipping' and built Shippo, an E-commerce software startup which raised more than $57 million in funding and now serves one-third of businesses exporting from the U.S. This coming-of-age story involving 2 cities, 170 employees and 100M packages shipped!
Check out the full episode below on Spotify.
Strapped for time? Get episode highlights from The Quest Minutes!
👀 Coming up next…
Internet viral sensation, fellow Sway House alumn of Bryce Hall, entrepreneur, a must-watch Gen Z VC, and CSO of Triller.
At just 19 years old, Josh Richards has made some big moves - but he’s just getting started. Don’t miss our next episode, going live on 2nd of March 9AM PST. See you there. 👋🏼
Thank you for the startup advice Justin! :)