There are two categories where people pivot while crushing it:
One. The problem domain they are in is on its way out, and they've decided to defect instead of being the ones left holding the bag.
Two. They hate what they do for a living.
The first company to stop making buggy whips probably did not do it because they weren't selling any. The fact that they ceded market share to their top competitors probably sunk the barb in deeper for them: Yeah people are buying cars but our sales numbers are still going up so why should we change?
In tech we see companies all the time end up being complicit in the destruction of their own industry by reducing its relevance in some manner or other, and by exiting early they have more options of destination. If I jump to the same industry as a competitor a year later I just look like a copycat. While some copycats copy other people, only better, they are the exception to the rule. Most churn out uninspiring derivative work, and if they can't at least do it cheaper then they end up on the scrapheap of history.
In our case, it's more just an intermediate state between "crushing it" and "failing". We had a product that was working for a subset of engineers, but was running into structural and scaling problems. Simply put, it was (sort of) "crushing it" but was foreseeably not going to keep doing so.
At that point, you can either keep going with what you're doing (and run into an inevitable wall later on) or you can foresee the future problems and pivot before they become unmanageable (which is what we did). Relatively few startups find their final model from minute one.
One. The problem domain they are in is on its way out, and they've decided to defect instead of being the ones left holding the bag.
Two. They hate what they do for a living.
The first company to stop making buggy whips probably did not do it because they weren't selling any. The fact that they ceded market share to their top competitors probably sunk the barb in deeper for them: Yeah people are buying cars but our sales numbers are still going up so why should we change?
In tech we see companies all the time end up being complicit in the destruction of their own industry by reducing its relevance in some manner or other, and by exiting early they have more options of destination. If I jump to the same industry as a competitor a year later I just look like a copycat. While some copycats copy other people, only better, they are the exception to the rule. Most churn out uninspiring derivative work, and if they can't at least do it cheaper then they end up on the scrapheap of history.