Working at a startup is difficult, fun, agonizing and life-changing all at the same time. I would liken the experience to the first time you’re hosting a Thanksgiving Day dinner at your house for the in-laws, which includes 30 guests, tight space and multiple personalities. Now multiply that planning, developing, creating and managing situation by 100 times and have it reoccur daily!
The normal startup lifecycle is: 1) idea; 2) plan; 3) develop; 4) launch and 5) and optimize. Sometimes, along the way, your initial idea gets trashed and falls to the wayside…other times, it’s the only idea you ever needed to become a success. And then there’s what happens most often…you have an idea, it becomes a plan, gets developed and then takes a turn, fumbles and ultimately evolves to become something entirely different. In the lexicon of the Silicon Valley, that change in direction is generally called a “pivot.”
A number of successful companies have “pivoted” from their original ideas. Some, more than others, as we’ve seen many companies’ initial ideas become substantially different than what they had originally set out to become.
For example, Yelp was originally an email-based recommendation engine. Flickr was an online role-playing game, and YouTube started out as an online dating site. They ultimately recognized an opportunity to evolve, and they jumped into it…can you imagine YouTube as a video dating service?
MEETS
At Eventure, we embrace how technology helps people navigate the digital landscape to make their lives more efficient and we recognized how it has fallen short on improving the way people plan and interact at events. Thus, at the heart of Eventure’s mission is to connect people locally to maximize their participation at events and ultimately have fun.
We began developing a social calendar platform that solves for these shortcomings by empowering people to plan, interact and seamlessly create lasting memories at an event. At the core of our solution is a social calendar app that gives users total control of their privacy, allowing them to organize, participate and share event experiences with only their intended audience, or with the world if they wanted to be super open.
During development, we recognized that people were also having difficulty capturing and collecting memories and connecting with new people at events. So we added networked cameras and event-centric games to our social calendaring platform to help solve those inherent challenges, and to make the user experience much more relevant. .
We didn’t necessarily “pivot” by Silicon Valley’s terms, but we did recognize an opportunity to evolve our initial social calendaring app and aspire to create a portfolio of products and features that enrich event participation. Our platform, which includes a suite of portable, wearable cameras and mobile games help people connect while at events and make events more memorable. (by the way, stay tuned for more on our connected devices and games in subsequent blog posts).
So, our initial idea was to create a mobile app with the objective of helping users plan, live and share their events and event memories. Now it has become “Eventure Everywhere,” a connected platform technology that ties mobile devices, smart cameras and games together to enhance and optimize event participation. We don’t consider this a “pivot” since our initial social calendar will still anchor our solution…what we do call it is an evolution of our platform…one that supports our inherent goal of making events remarkable!
Image Attribution:
- Featured Image: http://permanentcultures.com/permaculture-an-evolution-of-consciousness/
- Fortune cookie: http://nytm.tumblr.com/post/32070061415/exploring-new-yorks-tech-ecosystem
- YouTube Logo: www.youtube.com
- Hot or Not: www.hotornot.com
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