As a product team, your first ideas aren’t always your best. Oftentimes, concepts for viral products crop up after months of user testing, feedback, and behavior analysis.

What follows are five stories of lackluster products that turned into viral successes with massive valuations after product teams made the key decision to kill their darlings and instead go all-in on a different product strategy.

These viral products sometimes started as single features with potential, and other times were entirely new concepts with a better chance of winning addicted users.

The unifying thread across each of these stories is that maintaining an open mind, having a willingness to cut your losses, and encouraging your team to think creatively months or years into working on a stagnant product can mean the difference between success and failure.

Pinterest

It all began with a mobile app called Tote designed to let shoppers easily buy clothes from the comfort of their own phones. The app pulled data from the online product catalogs of major retailers and presented items from American Apparel, Anthropologie, Banana Republic, and others in one digital storefront.

Despite fervent support from investors, a slow, faulty payment processing system stopped Tote in its tracks. Users couldn’t seamlessly buy clothes from their phones as initially promised in Tote’s pitch, rendering this early concept inviable.

While Tote didn’t have sophisticated enough functionality to deliver on their main value prop, they did have engaged users. The Tote team saw that, even though users couldn’t actually purchase the stylish clothes of their dreams, they seemed to simply enjoy creating collections of items they wanted in the app and sharing these collections with their friends.

About a year after launching Tote, CEO Ben Silbermann took this signal from users and pivoted to a new concept singularly focused on users' proven interest in curating and sharing images they loved. The team moved away from mobile and created a website that enabled people to create and display visual collections – called “boards” – that captured their personal flair. And so, Pinterest was born.

Only six months later, Pinterest users, who gained access to the app on an invitation-only basis, had created 80,000 collections centered on a variety of topics. Each image board communicated their creators' interests, aspirations, and personalities.

In this case, Silbermann’s refusal to give up on his fledgling startup despite a legitimate product-defining failure proved to be an invaluable asset. Instead of starting from square one, he observed user behavior, built a product around that behavior, and let his customers validate the market themselves.

Yelp

The world’s best tool for complaining about bad service started as an email messaging system enabling users to ask friends and family for direct recommendations for a variety of services, from plumbers to doctors.

In 2004, users on Yelp needed to type their friends’ email addresses into the site so it could then send their requests for a recommendation to these people, and also send recommendations to people from the site’s database that were in the same geographical area or entering similar queries. Yelp collected any responses and returned a list of resources to the initial user.

All in all, a cumbersome, circular, inefficient system. Especially since it’s a lot faster to just directly email your own friends yourself.

That all changed in February 2005 when Yelp launched a version of its site allowing users to publicly post reviews of different services and products. Yelp made this decision based on user feedback – users pushed to be able to view and post public reviews and showed no interest in the friend-to-friend email recommendation service at all.

Fighting the urge to fall for the sunk cost fallacy, Yelp cut their losses and went all-in on reviews. This, as we know, was massively successful, in part due to the petty nature of human psychology. People like recommending great restaurants and services, but they love posting negative reviews after a bad experience – especially if their negative reviews could influence potential customers away from the businesses they dislike.

Following user feedback helped Yelp ditch a product that hardly justified its own existence to launch a product that many people now can’t imagine living without.

The lesson here: yes, follow user feedback, but perhaps more importantly, avoid falling for the sunk cost fallacy. It’s okay to start from scratch if all signs are pointing your product team in a more intuitive direction.

YouTube

Dating sites and apps have become increasingly popular and profitable in recent years, but the world still isn’t ready for a video-based dating service in 2022. One can only imagine how wildly unpopular this concept must have been in 2005.

But that’s how YouTube started – as a video-based dating site where users uploaded videos talking about themselves and what they look for in a partner, and then perused other video diaries to find their perfect match.

After failing to attract any obsessed users, YouTube decided to significantly widen the lens. The company moved away from its focus on dating and became a general video hosting and streaming service.

The new target persona: anyone. They had no rules or suggestions about the kind of content users could or should post.

Author Kim Hvidkjaer recounts in How to F*ck Up Your Startup that a co-founder tested the concept by posting a video of himself titled “Me at the zoo,” where he recorded himself at a zoo looking at elephants. Users loved it, and they were excited at the prospect of uploading their own videos about – well, whatever they wanted.

Fast forward a bit and this pivot ultimately ended up earning YouTube a $65 billion acquisition from Google. Sometimes sticking to a hyper-specific market or a handful of use cases improves the effectiveness of targeted marketing campaigns, and other times it’s the only thing standing in the way between you and billions and billions of dollars.

Twitter

Ever heard of Odeo? That was the chrysalis that birthed Twitter, now worth $13 billion. It started as a podcasting platform, cut short by Apple’s decision to host podcasts on iTunes. The company needed to pivot, but it wasn’t sure of a direction.

According to Twitter lore, then-Odeo engineer Jack Dorsey developed a social media messaging service allowing users to post instant updates to a public platform. The CEO of Odeo at that time gave $5 million in seed capital back to investors and pivoted the company in this completely new direction after seeing Dorsey’s app.

Fast Company reminds the public that Dorsey didn’t do it entirely on his own – Noah Glass, who got his start as a Product Manager Intern at Shutterfly – thought of the name “Twitter” and championed the pivot within Odeo.

His dedication to reconfiguring the business and the mission to support this new direction was instrumental in creating what would become a hyper-successful tech company others now view as one of the great stories of the startup canon.

Twitter’s arc gives credence to the idea that recognizing a great concept with potential and rallying for executive buy-in by creating a compelling use case can be the difference between a unicorn and another failed company.

Winning over executives is a key function of the product management role – if you can’t sell the story of a product or a set of features, internal stakeholders won’t be willing to abandon a concept that burnt months or years of cash runway in favor of a new direction.

Slack

You’re probably using Slack, Classify is using Slack – it’s become a must-have product in most startups’ internal comms stacks. Before it was Slack, it was a massive multiplayer video game.

Slack’s origin story is one of an unusually hard and unexpected pivot. How did they go from Point A to such a drastically different Point B?

Point A began at a company called Ludicorp. Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield was trying to build a game that went on ostensibly forever without the player winning or losing, aptly named Game Neverending. The company failed, and then, after working for a few years at Yahoo, Butterfield tried to launch the game again at a new company, Tiny Speck, under the name Glitch. Again, it failed.

But, as part of the effort to launch Glitch, the team at Tiny Speck needed a way to allow its developers to quickly collaborate on bugs and other issues that crop up spontaneously. So they built an internal messaging platform that enabled teams to quickly chat on different subjects in different channels.

They saw that this – not the game it was built for – was the real moneymaker. And about a day after announcing their launch, Slack had 8,000 users on the tool. Long story short, they reached a $1 billion valuation faster than any company ever.

As seen across many startups that make a pivot, the lesson here is that individual tools or features embedded within a company sometimes create massive value on their own. The bells and whistles and videogames these features or tools support may not be worth much, but recognizing when to strip a product or company down into its most valuable parts is worth a lot.

As a product manager, knowing when to follow user feedback and user behavior to the next big idea – or when to push for executive buy-in on a simple but profitable concept – is key to potentially turning stagnancy into massive success.

Being attuned to these opportunities and increasing the amount of time you can focus on big issues is also important.

Classify can help you do more of the stuff that matters, and spend less time on the stuff that doesn’t. We built it specifically for product managers. It’ll help you stress less.