
Pivoting is critical. If you ever played basketball, you get the concept. In order to take yourself out of a jam, you plant your lead foot, swivel your body around that anchor, and shift into a new direction. Same with startups.
The unicorn world is replete with famous pivots: Starbucks began by selling coffee beans and pivoted to become the coffee house of a generation. Twitter started out as a podcast aggregator, before pivoting to become the great messaging aggregator (and more). Flikr famously started out as a multi-player game before pivoting around its photo-sharing tool.
Café Learn created a great tool for delivering teaching and learning in the way that we all learn today: high impact learning—everyday. That means learning is delivered short bursts, evergreen and personalized, tied to measurable performance improvement, social and mobile. Our initial market--higher education institutions--don’t have a sense of urgency around changing the way their learners learn. So, we turned to markets with an imperative to change now—and for whom our mobile-first app helps them drive change. We have pivoted to focus on workplace learning and on thought leaders who have great content, and need new ways to deliver the learning around it. So far, it’s a winner! We may have to make a few more pivots, but then we are high impact learners—everyday!