Business
Top 7 Businesses That Became Better Than Their Original Idea
Some of the world's most successful businesses began by solving a completely different problem. A wallpaper cleaner became a childhood staple. A failed computer game left behind the foundations of a workplace revolution. A video dating site became the place the internet goes to watch almost anything. These seven businesses found something far more valuable than the idea that originally brought them into existence.
Before it became one of the world's best-known children's toys, Play-Doh was a cleaning product. Kutol manufactured a soft putty used to remove coal dust and soot from wallpaper. When cleaner wallpaper and new heating systems made the product increasingly unnecessary, a teacher discovered that children could use it as modelling clay. The company recognised the opportunity, repackaged it for children and launched Play-Doh in 1956. A product designed to clean houses became something children have spent generations making a mess with.
William Wrigley Jr. initially sold soap, then moved into baking powder. To encourage customers to buy it, he offered free chewing gum with each purchase. The gum proved so popular that he started selling it in its own right, launching Juicy Fruit and Wrigley's Spearmint in 1893. The promotional freebie became the actual business, and one of the world's most recognisable confectionery names was born.
YouTube was originally conceived as a video dating website. The founders imagined people uploading short clips describing the partners they were looking for, even using the slogan “Tune In, Hook Up”. When almost nobody used it for dating, they removed the restriction and let people upload whatever videos they wanted. It turned out that the world had a much bigger appetite for sharing everything than finding a date. Google bought the company for $1.65 billion in 2006, barely a year after its launch.
Slack emerged from the wreckage of an online game called Glitch. Its creators at Tiny Speck had spent years developing the multiplayer game, but it failed to attract enough players to survive. During development, however, the geographically dispersed team had built an unusually effective internal messaging and collaboration system. They realised that the tool they had made to help build a game might be a much better business than the game itself. Slack was eventually acquired by Salesforce for $27.7 billion.
Shopify began because its founders wanted to sell snowboards online. In 2004, they launched Snowdevil, but were frustrated by the limitations of existing ecommerce software. Rather than settle for an inadequate platform, they built their own. They eventually realised that the software they had created could help thousands of other businesses sell online too. The snowboard shop became one of the world's leading ecommerce platforms.
Instagram started life as Burbn, a complicated app combining location check-ins, social gaming and photo sharing. The founders noticed that users were particularly interested in the photographs, while the rest of the product was getting in the way. They stripped away almost everything, concentrated on making photo sharing simple and relaunched as Instagram. Within two years, Facebook agreed to buy it for approximately $1 billion.
Nintendo began manufacturing traditional Japanese Hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto in 1889. For decades, it was a card-making business, but later experimented with toys, games and electronic entertainment before finding its defining identity. The company that once made physical cards for playing games eventually created some of the most influential games and characters in entertainment history. Mario, Zelda and Pokémon are a rather spectacular departure from a pack of cards.
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