Birthday Alarm Pivot Success

A story about how Michael Birch discovered his successful business Birthday Alarm by listening to customer feedback and pivoting from his original idea.

"When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I worked with Michael Birch who had built multiple successful tech companies. He put me on his oldest company from 2001, Birthday Alarm.

He told me that for his first startup, he quit his high-paying insurance job while his wife was pregnant to build an internet company. He spent nine months trying to create a self-updating address book - where if you moved, it would automatically update your info in all your friends' address books.

He was doing everything himself - design, development, ops, and customer service. While spending 7 hours a day trying to figure out why nobody wanted his main product, he noticed something in the customer support tickets: people kept thanking him for the birthday reminder feature, which was just a throwaway idea he had built in.

He ended up throwing away the entire original product and renamed the company birthdayalarm.com. What he expected to go nowhere had generated about $20 million in pure profit for him and his wife by that time, making a few million dollars in profit every year. And it's still generating a few million dollars a year in profit today.

The incredible business only came because he was answering support tickets and got curious about why people kept talking about the birthday reminder feature. He rebuilt the product people actually wanted in just two days."