Clever product changes that made companies millions

YouTube may have failed as a dating site, but it succeeded at taking over the online video world. Here, we look at how small changes reaped huge rewards for these products and companies.

Not every world-beating product starts out an instant success.

In fact, some are an outright flop to begin with and only take-off after clever positioning by company executives.

We look at some of the world’s most popular products that had to be tweaked to hit the big time.

YouTube – from failed dating site to internet domination

These days, video-sharing site YouTube is big business.

Recent analysis by data site Statista found YouTube was responsible for a staggering 37% of all mobile Internet traffic.

Yet this world-beating brand had an underwhelming start to life.

Set up by three former Paypal employees and based in a garage, YouTube was first founded as a dating website.

The concept was that single people looking for a date could upload a video of themselves explaining what they were looking for.

YouTube’s domain name was even registered on the 14^th February 2005: “Just three guys on Valentine’s Day that had nothing to do,” co-founder Steve Chen told the South by SouthWest Tech, Music and Film conference in 2016.

However, after five days when nobody had uploaded a single video to the site, YouTube’s founders had a rethink and decided to open the site up to any type of video.

Now, nearly a decade and a half later, YouTube boasts 1.5 billion users.

Bought out by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion (£883m) in shares, in 2015 it was valued by analysts at the Bank of America as worth $70 billion (£47bn) on its own.

Botox – cross-eye treatment becomes Hollywood must-have

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In the 1970s, San Francisco-based Dr Alan Scott , an ophthalmologist, was on a mission to find a treatment for strabismus, or cross-eye disorder, and began experimenting with the highly poisonous Botox as a way of relaxing muscles.

He remembers his patients joking that they came to him just to get their wrinkles straightened out: “’Oh, Doctor, I’ve come to get the lines out’,” Scott told CBS News in 2012.

However, he paid little attention to this, preoccupied as he was with his work.

Scott received approval for the treatment he called Oculinum in 1989 and later sold the drug to Allergan, which at the time marketed contact lenses and products for dry eye.

The firm saw the drug largely as a niche product as 4% of the US population suffer from cross-eye disorder, notes Time Magazine.

However, in the late 1990s, Allergan’s new CEO David Pyott saw the potential for Botox as a wrinkle treatment and by 2002, the product had won approval from the US Food and Drugs Association to treat ‘frown lines’.

Botox’s sales soared from $310 million (£207m) in 2001 to nearly $2billion (£1.3bn) by 2013.

In fact, Botox seemingly has myriad potential applications – doctors have been using the drug off-label to treat other conditions such as migraines and depression – although admittedly, Allergan was fined $600m (£388.5m) in 2010 for unlawful promotion of the product for off-label use.

Soya milk – saved by the fridge

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Plant-based milk sales have soared (Image: Shutterstock)

Plant-derived milks are a common choice in coffee shops and grocery stores alike, but this wasn’t always the case.

As recently as the 1990s, soya milk languished in the supermarket carton milk aisle and struggled to make sales.

However, its big break came in the late 1990s, when Colorado-based firm WhiteWave made a simple but vital discovery: if they put their product in the refrigerated aisle next to cow’s milk, it flew off the shelves.

The company christened its new refrigerated soya milk Silk and marketed it as a low-cholesterol alternative to dairy milk.

Now, plant-based milks are a $16 billion (£12bn) a year industry – half of all American shoppers buy them and UK sales of them have risen by 30% since 2015, reports the Guardian.

Viagra – from heart drug to $1bn ‘potency pill’

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Back in the 1990s, scientists at Pfizer were hoping their new product, Sildenafil, would help patients with heart problems by dilating the blood vessels in the heart.

The compound worked effectively in animal trials and so entered trials with human patients.

Researchers were amused to find most of the trial’s male patients kept lying on their stomachs on their hospital beds, until a nurse explained that many were embarrassed by a surprise side effect of the drug – it brought on erections.

Sildenafil was working alright, but not in the right part of the body!

Pfizer switched tack and began developing the drug to treat erectile dysfunction and Viagra was born.

The blockbuster product, approved in the US in 1998, generated $1.9 billion (£1.2bn) in sales in 2008 alone and has boasted 62 million customers.

Last year, Pfizer launched an over-the-counter version of the drug.

Sales are falling now as in many countries outside the US Viagra is off-patent.

But there could be life in the old drug yet: a new version of the drug, Revatio, is now also approved to treat pulmonary arterial hypertension.