Overnight successes are usually anything but.

In most cases, what appears to be a sudden rise to prominence is often the the manifestation of years of frustration, trial and error and time spent honing one’s craft.

When it comes to success in the startup or corporate world, there is no fast track to a meteoric rise. However, there’s a number of examples of companies who after many years of said trial and error, eventually pivoted and in some cases also rebranded, to become the brands we know and love today.

Here are five of my favourite  ‘overnight successes’ that seemed to come out of nowhere.

1. Instagram was Burbn

Burbn was a confusing check-in app that tried to do too many things. It combined elements of gaming, checking-in to locations, earning points and photo-sharing. Without much traction, co-founder Kevin Systrom noticed that users engaged most with posting pictures on Burbn. He streamlined the user experience into until all that was left was a lean photography app with the ability to comment and like. Within hours of launching Instagram, it had more users than Burbn had acquired in more than a year of work. Instagram was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion.

2. Yelp was an email system

The original idea behind Yelp was an email-based referral network. The platform allowed people to contact others for recommendations on local businesses. Yelp's initial email-based system was convoluted and the idea was rejected by investors and did not attract users beyond the cofounders' friends and family. A review of the data collected showed that users did not answer requests for referrals, but were using the "Real Reviews" feature, which allowed them to write reviews for fun. Yelp successfully capitalised on the market for online reviews of local businesses. In 2016 alone Yelp recorded a revenue of USD $713 million and as I’m writing this, currently has a market cap of USD$2.5 billion.

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