Introducing Trap Tap - The Great Winnipeg Pivot Story

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often” – Winston Churchill

The most critical decision for an entrepreneur is to know when to stay the course vs. change direction. "Pivoting” is a familiar word in the start-up world.  When your first business model isn’t working (and this happens more often than not), the CEO and team pivot to plan B.  These are deep breath moments!

But pivoting doesn’t necessarily mean desperation.  It can be a tool to discover additional growth--growth you might otherwise have overlooked.

Businesses can grow beyond their initial dreams by re-imagining their assets and talents, thinking more broadly about the customer problems they solve.

Here are some extraordinary examples of pivots from companies that I bet most of you have heard of, but most of you likely didn’t know that these companies didn’t start off doing what we know them best for today:

Twitter

The most legendary pivot in social media history is the transformation of Odeo into Twitter.  Odeo began as a network where people could find and subscribe to podcasts, but the founders feared the company’s demise when iTunes began taking over the podcast niche.  After giving the employees two weeks to come up with new ideas, the company decided to make a drastic change and run with the idea of a status-updating micro-blogging platform conceived by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone.

PayPal 

PayPal has always focused on payments, but it has gone through many permutations. It was developed by a company called Confinity in 1999 to allow people to “beam” payments from their PDAs (handheld digital computers, such as the Palm Pilot, an early incarnation of the smartphone). After merging with a financial services company called X.com, PayPal became the preferred online payment system for eBay sellers, which propelled its name into payment processing fame.

Pinterest

This incredibly popular “pinning” social network pivoted from “Tote” which allowed people to browse and shop their favorite retailers, and sent them updates when their favorite items were available and on sale. The creators realized that the users of Tote were mostly interested in building “collections” of their favorite items, and sharing these collections with friends. Since its repositioning, Pinterest now has over 70 million users with approximately 80% of its users being women. While its pivot has been wildly successful in terms of user growth, Pinterest is trying to figure out how to get back to Tote’s ecommerce and revenue roots.

Instagram

Instagram is the most widely used photo app for iPhone, but many don’t know its origins. Instagram began as Burbn, a check-in app that included gaming elements from Mafia Wars, and a photo element as well. The creators worried Burbn had too much clutter and potential actions, and would never gain traction. So they took a risk and stripped all the features but one: photos. They rebuilt a version of the app that focused solely on photography—it was clean and simple, and clearly it paid off.

Tap Trap

As we speak a Winnipeg Company called “Trap Tap” may be writing its own pivot story. On Tuesday of this week, Trap Tap launched their Kickstarer campaign in order to raise money to complete the commercial roll out of their “Wireless Speed Trap Indicator”.

What many of you don’t know is that the founders of Trap Tap had originally came up with a crowd sourced parking control application called “Spot Squad” in which members could take photos of parking violations which would be sent to the local parking authority and the “tattle tale” would receive a commission. To be fair this ill-conceived idea was born during a “Ramp Up Weekend” in which local entrepreneurs attempt to create a functioning business with 52 hours.   

The good news was that Spot Squad received an amazing amount of press all over the world, the bad news is that the founders received a very large number of death threats if they actually continued with the launch of the application.

Smartly, the founders of Spot Squad retooled their idea and developed Trap Tap which is a crowd sourced Wireless Speed Trap indicator which was designed to help save drivers money.

If you are interested in learning more about this amazing Winnipeg Start-up or are interested in helping fund their campaign on kickstarter please click on the following link to do so.

TrapTap Kickstarter Campaign

Sources:

How Twitter Was Founded

PayPal Puts Dough In Your Palm

What Is The Genesis Of Instagram? 

The Pinterest Pivot

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