Online video platform
Exploring an interesting piece of internal tech: Realized there wasn't value in the problem space (video dating), but the tech they built could be generalized.
Dating site where people upload videos of themselves talking about the partner of their dreams
Lukewarm interest
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/16/youtube-past-video-dating-website#maincontent https://web.archive.org/web/20050428014715/https://www.youtube.com/
“When YouTube first launched in May 2005, it was still intended to be a dating service, rather than a generalized platform for all types of videos. So in the early, early days, it was trying to see if there was a need for a video platform for dating (rather than just photos/messages). I remember trying to recruit users to come to YouTube for that reason. We quickly realized that a dating platform wasn’t in demand of videos as the media type, so we opened up the app to go after all types of content creators. I think the hardest part was to admit that we were wrong; our idea of a dating video site was not going to work. The easy part is the execution in changing the site to match what we want it to be—that kind of work, we do every day. The hard part is making the critical business decision, and that’s the stuff we don’t do every day!” —Steven Chen, co-founder
1 week
The core product, applied to a different problem