“Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” Henry Ford is credited with saying that long before many successful modern companies we know and respect, such as Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, felt the pressures of impending failure and changed course to become some of today’s most prevalent brands.
On May 29, 2014, Biz Stone, Twitter’s co-founder, tweeted, “It takes ten years to become an overnight success.” Some people look at Twitter today, in its current iteration as a global means for communication and solidarity, and miss the fact that it rose out of another business’ failure.
According to a Business Insider article titled, “The real history of Twitter,” the company started under a different name, and with a different purpose, back in 2005. At that time, it was called “Odeo,” a podcasting platform that Biz Stone and the other founders were busily developing. It was July of 2005, and they had their product. By the fall of that same year, they also had an office, 14 employees and lots of venture capital funds, but they were about to suffer a serious blow. It was right then that Apple Corporation announced their plan to include a podcasting app in all of the millions of iPods that the market was already in love with. That’s when George Zachary, the Charles River Ventures partner who led the investment in Odeo, was quoted as saying, “the [expletive] hit the fan.”
The company’s founders and investors could clearly see that Odeo was not going to be the winner they’d planned for.
L. Ron Hubbard writes, in an article titled, “THE ECONOMY,” “When times get worse or conditions are not of the best, one has to study and work that much harder to make it.”
The key executives at Odeo had to put their heads together fast and do something about it. They pulled everyone into discussions intended to surface and assemble concepts for alternative technical products.
In that same article, Mr. Hubbard further elaborated on what to do when faced with a gloomy economic picture: “One studies the area, one takes the data he can get, one develops what he can get, one applies what he finds. And the result is a real product.”
One of the new ideas that came out of research and discussions, then dubbed “twttr”, was proposed as a micro-messaging status update concept. By July of 2006, Odeo had a functioning version of “Twitter.” Even then, their team could not envision the game-changing social media force that Twitter would become, eventually boasting over 300 million users globally. The lesson in this example is, of course, that when the market moved against them, they acted. They developed a new plan and technology, and in time, they succeeded.
So few members of a market ever get to see or hear about the failures on the road to “overnight success.” We don’t realize how few companies get it right the first time. Winners and their great ideas seem to just show up in our lives, but we don’t always learn about how they struggled and what they overcame in order to achieve iconic status.
Take, for example, the espresso machine vendor in the 1970s who didn’t find a place in our hearts until they pivoted their entire business in the 1980s to sell coffee—now recognized globally as the successful brand, Starbucks.
Meet Challenge With Ambition, Teamwork and Real Products
How about the company named Confinity? You remember them, right—the company that set out to create a way to “beam” money from one Palm Pilot to another? No? Maybe you know them better under their current name, PayPal.
What about the tech brand, “Burbn”? Not ringing a bell? According to an article in the Washington Post, they were “just an HTML5 app that combined a mix of check-in and gaming functions—think Foursquare meets Mafia Wars—in a single app.” It didn’t get any traction, either, so they studied the situation and distilled the technology until it just delivered the photo element of the Burbn app with an ability to comment on the uploaded photos. That is how Instagram was born, and within an hour of its launch, they had more users than Burbn had earned over the entire previous year.
Did any of you use the online dating site that launched on Valentine’s Day, 2005, with the slogan, “Tune-in, Hook-up”? I’m comfortable predicting that none of you did, but I’m sure every one of us uses YouTube now. At the time of this writing, the YouTube website reports that they have over 1 billion users who upload over 300 hours of video every minute!
Big market shifts or a bad economy can be an outgoing tide that lowers all ships. As businesses compete to stay afloat, proper situational assessment and navigation are critical to avoid becoming completely stuck in the mud.
“In times like these one has to manage very industriously and watch outgo very carefully and somehow expand income.” —L. Ron Hubbard.
History has shown us over and over again that knowing your tech and working out your plan the first time don’t prevent a business from failing. Challenges will come from inside and outside your company. Economies will change; technologies will adapt; your audience will move; and you must improve along with it all.
“There’s no question of lying back and letting it ride. That would be pure self-destruction. So the way out in life is the way through.” —L. Ron Hubbard.
In the subsequent article “How to Break Free of a Bad Economy”, we’ll provide some advice from the works of L. Ron Hubbard to help you overcome business and market challenges.
o0o
Sources:
Lift. “It Takes 10 Years to Become an Overnight Success.” ~ @Biz Stone, Twitter Cofounder Pic.twitter.com/Cc7N1qNFjf.” Twitter. Twitter, 29 May 2014. Web. 08 Sept. 2015.
“Press Statistics.” YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 08 Sept. 2015.
Carlson, Nicholas. “The Real History Of Twitter.” Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 13 Apr. 2011. Web. 08 Sept. 2015. Forbes: 14 Famous.
Nazur, Jason. “14 Famous Business Pivots.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 8 Oct. 2013. Web. 08 Sept. 2015.
Basulto, Dominic. “The 7 Greatest Pivots in Tech History.” Washington Post. The Washington Post, 2 July 2015. Web. 08 Sept. 2015.
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