𝟰 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘂𝗽𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗦𝘂𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗯𝘆 𝗟𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗚𝗼 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗹𝗮𝗻

When a startup is struggling, the advice often sounds the same: Stay optimistic. Keep going. Believe in your vision.

“In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong

in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where.”

— Paul Graham

Sometimes, though, the startup is not going to break through on its current path. A major change is needed, and for some fortunate leaders, that breakthrough becomes apparent, leading to a successful pivot.

The four companies below found their next direction by paying attention to those signals.

Their breakthroughs weren’t simply acts of optimism. They were acts of attention.

Slack: The game failed

Stewart Butterfield’s company, Tiny Speck, had raised $17 million to build Glitch, an ambitious online game. But the game never attracted enough players to sustain the business. In 2012, Butterfield faced shutting it down and laying off 37 of their 45 employees.

To get work done internally, the team had developed something useful: a system for communicating and organizing its work. Conversations, searchable information, and updates from other tools could live together instead of being scattered across disconnected systems.

Rather than preserve the game, Butterfield and a smaller team decided to turn what they had learned into a communication product for other companies. They would rebuild around a broader promise: all of a team’s communication in one place, searchable and accessible wherever people worked.

That product became Slack, which Salesforce eventually acquired.

The revealing signal was the team’s own love of something they had built to do their jobs.

Instagram: Users liked one feature

Before Instagram, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger were working on Burbn, an app that combined location check-ins, plans, points, and photo sharing.

It offered plenty of things to do, but not enough people were doing them. Burbn stalled at roughly 100 users.

When the founders examined how people used it, they noticed that photo sharing attracted more activity than the other features.

Systrom and Krieger stripped away the broader check-in concept and concentrated on making mobile photo sharing simple and appealing. Instagram launched in October 2010 and attracted about 25,000 users on its first day. In 2012, Facebook announced an acquisition valued at approximately $1 billion.

The pivot was about building more around what people already appreciated.

Groupon: Traction from a specific transaction

Andrew Mason’s original company, The Point, was built around collective action. People could commit to doing something, but their commitment would take effect only when enough others joined.

It was a flexible idea with many potential applications. It also struggled to gain traction.

Instead of asking people to understand an open-ended platform, the team tested a much narrower proposition: If enough people wanted the same offer, they could unlock a discount together.

An early deal was almost comically modest compared with the original ambition: two pizzas for the price of one from the restaurant downstairs. Twenty people bought it.

The team leaned into the concrete use case: local businesses, specific offers, an immediate reason to participate. What began as a deal experiment became Groupon. In 2011, the company raised $700 million in its IPO.

The founders didn’t abandon the underlying mechanism. They found a specific version of it that people had a reason to use.

Shopify: The obstacle became the business

Tobias Lütke wanted to sell snowboards online through a store called Snowdevil. But the available e-commerce software was frustrating. The difficulties extended beyond designing a storefront: even setting up payment processing involved cumbersome steps.

The original goal was to get his store running. Then other merchants began asking about the technology behind it. They wanted to use the software for their own stores.

Lütke and his co-founder recognized that helping other people sell online had greater potential than selling snowboards themselves. They launched Shopify in 2006.

The problem they had solved for themselves turned out to be worth solving for others.

The Lesson: Follow the evidence

“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.”

— Uri Levine

Perseverance matters. But these founders didn’t succeed simply by pushing harder on their original plans. They noticed what customers or employees already valued and made it the focus of the business.

Success starts with understanding the problems your customers are trying to solve and being willing to follow the evidence, even when it leads away from your original vision.

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Photo for "4 Startups That Succeeded by Letting Go of the Plan" by Vladislav Babienko.

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