As in life, so in business: Evolve. Adapt. Survive.
My recent discussion about how Pulse evolved out of the learnings from our first business led me to reflect on the Darwinian nature of entrepreneurship. Our experiences have shown that the principles of business are an extension of the laws of nature: you have to evolve with your surroundings and adapt to the situation you find yourself in, or you won’t survive.
Nor were we alone in reaching these conclusions. Companies that started out with a different focus are not hard to find! As a daily reminder, just around the corner from our New York Office is the building formerly known as the American Express Stables. Now a luxury residential property, the building used to be the headquarters of the American Express Shipping company. That’s right: in 1850 American Express was founded as the counterpart to the United States Postal Service and only expanded into the financial services area in 1857.
Wrigley’s started as a soap and baking powder brand. Founded in 1891, Wrigley’s was initially sold door-to-door. As part of a marketing effort, customers received two free packets of chewing gum with every can of baking powder. The chewing gum quickly became more popular than the baking powder! Just like we experienced with Pulse, Wrigley’s marketing strategy actually turned out to be the better business plan and they founded their first two gum brands in 1893.
The social media space is even newer, and the pace of evolution even more rapid!
Many of the business we know, love, and use today have been — and continue to be — challenged to evolve. When looking closer at today’s big players, it is fascinating to see how they continue to transmute: adapting both to shifts in the competitive landscape as well as changing consumer expectations.
Twitter is now a giant of the social media world. However, it started as a company called Odeo, which — ahead of its time — began a network where people could find and subscribe to podcasts. The company grew very slowly, and when Apple announced it was entering the podcast space with iTunes they feared the competition and saw the need to adapt their business model. The company had a team brainstorming session and future CEO Jack Dorsey came up with the concept of “status”. Based on the blogging services popular at that time and the then frequently used “away” status, he saw the potential for an app where people could publicly post their status and/or short commentaries on everyday situations. Twitter as we know it was born.
Ever heard of Burbn? This was the original name for Instagram (and yes, it was inspired by) the drink!). Burbn was not terribly successful; the large number of different features (gaming, photo) made it hard to navigate and the overall user experience was too complicated. After carefully analysing their user behaviour, the team decided to focus on their photo-sharing infrastructure and cut away nearly all other elements, leaving only the photo, comment, and like features. Instagram has never lost the culture of evolution, responding to TikTok’s success by putting video at the centre of their current growth strategy with the development of Instagram Reels.
Today everyone has pinboards to save inspirations for events such as weddings or their next holiday. Few, however, know that Pinterest started as a network for consumers to browse and shop their favourite retailers. What the team noticed is that the majority of users were predominantly interested in collecting their favourite items to share with their friends. With most social networks now working on in-app shopping, it will be interesting to see Pinterest return to its roots. Sometimes you’re too late to the party — in Pinterest’s case, it seems they were a fraction too early.
What do all these companies, offering such a wide variety of products and services, have in common?
They all identified an area in their business that either wasn’t working or saw the potential to do something even better: they weren’t afraid to shift focus. This process is what I like to call looking at the world through your “entrepreneur glasses” — making decisions about the future based on the past does not move the business forward and sometimes it takes trial and error to find your business’ true calling. As in life, so in business: Evolve. Adapt. Survive.