It's hard to predict what Foto will become in the future, especially as a software company & social platform. Some may see this as a lack of vision, but if you study the history of companies, many initially started as one thing but ended up somewhere else.
Here are five examples.
1) Amazon started as an online retailer of physical books in the mid '90s.
Today it dominates e-commerce and cloud computing. Much of the internet runs on Amazon's servers.
Book sales now only generate 10% of Amazon’s total sales. That’s still a huge number, but 90% of their sales come from other areas.
2) IBM was one of the world’s top computing hardware manufacturers until 1993, when they posted an 8 billion dollar loss in a quarter. Yup...they lost $8 billion in 3 months.
They had to reinvent themselves and pivot to software, the opposite of hardware.
3) Slack, the massive business collaboration and chat application, originally began as a company called Tiny Speck that made a computer game called Glitch. The game itself was a failure and was shut down in 2012.
4) YouTube used to be a dating site.
The Co-Founders of YouTube even took out ads offering to pay people $20 a piece to post videos of themselves.
After seeing how users were using YouTube, they pivoted to a broader application of user-generated videos.
5) Twitter was originally a podcasting company called Odeo in 2004. They pivoted to being a short messaging service with social network features in 2006.
I'm encouraged by the early interest in Foto, given that we haven't launched the app yet. I appreciate all the questions about what Foto will become and how we'll get there. Any answer I give now may likely change over time.
Looking at business histories, users of Foto will help form it into something I can't conceive of right now.
The standard startup playbook is...
1) Launch
2) Feedback
3) Iterate
over and over and over.
Right now, we aren't even to step one yet, so the road before us is long and filled with strange twists and turns.
That's part of what makes building a company exciting. You don't know where you'll be in a year. You don't know where this ride will take you.
Next Thursday, I’m doing a Twitter Spaces to discuss Foto at 11 am CST. You can set a reminder for the open Q&A at the link below. That tweet is pinned to the top of Foto’s Twitter profile.
If you are reading this, then you are here early. You are joining me at the beginning of a long and wild journey. Thanks for supporting this project! Your interest in what we are up to means everything.
Cheers,
Michael
I’ve had a good feeling about this since the moment I heard about it. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. You’re doing good work Michael 😎 💥
Would love to interview you.