YouTube: From Dating Site to Video Giant

In early 2005, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim launched YouTube as a video dating site: post a clip of yourself, find a match. Almost no one did. The team grew desperate enough to pay women to upload content. But people were posting other things entirely, funny clips, home videos, random moments, and the founders noticed. By late 2006, about eighteen months after launch, Google bought the company for roughly $1.65 billion.

This beginner-level case is a crisp study of the gap between what you built and what people actually do with it. It sharpens the founder's hardest reflex, knowing when to abandon the original plan, and asks what your own users are doing that you never intended. The pivot looks obvious in hindsight, but the case withholds the principle so you can feel how non-obvious it was in the moment.