Hey, it happens.
You spend months or perhaps years working on a product. Maybe you work on it in stealth, maybe with a few trusted confidants, or maybe you are transparent about what you are doing.
You create the vision, code the product, create the go-to-market materials, and train the salespeople.
After the months/years of preparation, you launch your product. And something’s not right.
Sometimes you need to re-position the product.
Sometimes you need to trash the product and re-position everything.
Glitch didn’t work
Johnny Rodgers tells the story of joining Stewart Butterfield’s company Tiny Speck, which had worked for years on an ambitious multi-player online game, Glitch.
“Glitch was an unusual, clever, heartfelt game. Within the realm of Ur, dreamt by eleven magical Giants, players created playful new identities for themselves. They designed and clothed their avatars to their heart’s content, delighting in new hats and a rainbow of possible skin tones. They crafted working music boxes and decorated their architecturally-unlikely homes.
“They planted and grew gardens and milked the local butterflies. They collected pull-string dolls of modern philosophers – including plausible Nietzche and Wittgenstein quotations. They climbed into enormous dinosaurs, passing through their reptilian intestines and out of their helpfully sign-posted butts.”
Users loved it, but Tiny Speck’s revenue wasn’t covering its expenses. Butterfield tried several different re-positionings, but nothing worked.
And the future looked even worse.
“Moreover, with the rise of smartphones and the incompatibility of our Flash-based game with mobile, we didn’t have an easy way to meet new players where they were spending their casual gaming time.”
Butterfield told Rodgers his idea: shut down Glitch entirely.
The alternative idea
And concentrate on an internal tool that Tiny Speck had developed for its own benefit.
Rodgers was shocked.
“Our IRC server?”
They were discussing an internal tool (based upon an old technology called Internet Relay Chat) that Tiny Speck used for chat, and many other things.
- File uploads into the chat.
- Categorization of the chats into channels.
- Integrations with external systems.
“[W] whenever a new user signed up for Glitch, or bought credits, or wrote in for support, it showed up in a channel. Whenever we deployed code, or got a new review on the App Store, or tweeted from our Twitter account, it showed up in a channel.”
- Storage of everything in a searchable database.
Talk about a pivot. Butterfield was going in an entirely different direction. What was the sign on Stewart Butterfield’s butt? He told Rodgers.
“I’m thinking of calling it Slack. We can come up with a better name later.”
They never did.
Bredemarket 