Before Twitter became a microblogging sensation it was a podcasting business. YouTube’s founders were convinced they’d hit the jackpot with a video-dating site. PayPal’s original mission was to beam IOUs from Palm Pilot to Palm Pilot. Flickr grew out of a massive multiplayer online game as a way for players to drop photos into text messages. Groupon emerged from a community promoting political action while online flash retailer Fab.com came out of a failed gay social network called Fabulis. Instagram’s founders created a check-in technology called Blurbn before settling on photos. Pandora was a B2B music recommendation service. Yelp transitioned from email recommendations from friends to a local search and user review web site.
Our new series examines the “do-overs” of today’s most successful startups. Read more->
