My first app was a total failure. Nobody downloaded it. But I noticed users were saving products obsessively. The collecting behavior was the product.
We pivoted Circle three times before USDC. Consumer payments, crypto exchange, tokenization — none of them stuck. USDC stuck because it solves a real problem: moving dollars at internet speed. Pivoting is not failure — it's search.
We started Near as an AI project. When we realized the infrastructure for decentralized AI didn't exist, we pivoted to building the infrastructure. Sometimes the best companies are the ones that solve the problem before the problem they wanted to solve.
The hardest part of any pivot is convincing your team that the old version of the company is not the same as giving up.