He's just worried about some of your choices. (pulse2.com)

Is there any startup that doesn't pivot at least a couple of times these days? The term is everywhere, to the point that, during a recent round of putt-putt golf, we overheard an entrepreneur passing off the many pivots of his e-commerce startup as acceptable first-date small talk.

Well, the Harvard Business Review has discovered the trend, and the venerable publication isn't so sure it likes what it sees.

The magazine's September issue takes a look at four recent(ish)ly released business books--The Launch Pad, The Lean Startup, Startup Weekend and The Ultralight Startup--and came away quite alarmed indeed. The title of its review: “Too Many Pivots, Too Little Passion.”

Tearing up one's idea halfway through the prestigious Y Combinator program? Simultaneously considering four different concepts? My God, what would Henry Ford say? It's just all so ephemeral:

None of the Y Combinator or Lean Startup companies seem destined to change the world (or, significantly, employ many people); instead of being “built to last,” these firms seem “built to be acquired by Google.”

Funny, Rupert Murdoch was just saying the same thing:

Just returned after three days in Silicon V and San Fran.Amazing sense of entrepreneurship but few new mind blowing innovations.

— Rupert Murdoch(@rupertmurdoch) August 25, 2012

But the article goes on, waxing even harsher:

The people in these books seem most interested in simply starting a company—any company—and their willingness to hopscotch between wildly different ideas can seem flighty or promiscuous. No less than Mark Zuckerberg expressed this view at a Y Combinator event, chiding the crowd: “You’ve decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you’re passionate about yet.”

"Promiscuous"? Pivoters, how does it feel to be slut-shamed by no less a moral authority than the Harvard Business Review?

(scaldoscoop.tumblr.com)

Some data from Fab.com's blog-happy CEO Jason Goldberg, who checked in with some data earlier this week from Fab's Cyber Monday sale. Mr. Goldberg includes a triumphant illustration that would be a hockey stick if it weren't a bar graph (and if it included all those early pivots). But as such, Fab's orders by month have been steadily growing and in November, the company had what looks like more than a 33 percent increase, likely due to the big sale. Fab did more than $1.1 million in discounted deals on Monday alone Friday through Monday, the company reports.

The company is getting members inbound through social sources, most notably Facebook, Mr. Goldberg says, with more than 25 percent of their sale revenue coming from users who were originally referred by the social network. Email invites and Twitter shares accounted for another 25 percent of sales on Monday.

"Meanwhile, it was certainly a blowout mobile holiday for Fab.com, as more than 20% of sales came via our iPhone, iPad, and Android apps," Mr. Goldberg wrote. If the growth continues and the sales keep up, it's a great success story for a startup that was once a struggling social network for gays, then a gay deal site, before finally finding its calling.

Modern love?

Kevin Ryan may be moving away from the flash sites that put Gilt Groupe on the map, but the sales device seems to be working just fine for Fab.com. After a smooth landing on a successful triple pivot [Ed Note: our bad, original idea plus two pivots does not equal three!]--from a daily deals site for gay men called Fabulis, to a flash sales sites for gay men, to a flash site for design for everyone, regardless of gender or sexuality--GigaOm reports that Fab.com has grown 800 percent since May. It's only been ten weeks, but the site is already approaching the 500,000 user mark. The key, according to CEO Jason Goldberg,  lies in part with a little feature they like to call the "inspiration wall."

The wall was initially put up in April to keep users sticking around the URL when it transitioned from a social networking site into flash sales. The feature lets users shares pictures of inspiring designs they find online, have stored on their computer, or feel like uploading from Instagram. Now users can upload products on Fab to their wall in the same way. Others can see their choices and follow a user whose taste they admire. Most anything on the site can be shared through Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+ or email. Mr. Goldberg says Fab has ten times more Twitter activity than other flash sales start-ups.

Betabeat first noticed Fab when one of our friends shared it on Facebook, and Mr. Goldberg concurred that most users have been added from social sharing rather than direct traffic. Old-school email, however, has proved more profitable,with visits via email yielding four times the amount of revenue.

The biggest driver of revenue, though, came courtesy of the wife of one of its investors. The power of Demi Moore's Twitter stream is not to be trifled with people.

Mr. Fertel, founder of dealburner.com.

Freespeech was serving half a million texts a day. But in a crowded market of group texting apps, some of which have received millions of dollars in funding and hired fancy PR teams, the three-engineer start-up wasn't getting enough traction. About three weeks ago, former financial services coder-turned start-up entrepreneur Jason Fertel decided to throw in the towel. "It was hard to be seen amongst the 20 other applications that did the same thing," he said. "On top of that, with Apple and Google and whoever else about to jump in that ring, it just didn't make sense to continue with it."

Bummer, Mr. Fertel and his team were shooting around some ideas at the keg at WeWork Labs in Soho when WeWork manager Matt Shampine started complaining about he kept checking in to a certain establishment where Fourquare was offering a free margarita, unaware that Scoutmob was offering a more hefty discount of half-off everything.

"It would be awesome if when I check in I get a text with those Scoutmob deals," Mr. Fertel thought. He started building it right away, and a few days later dealburner.com took its first steps on the world wide web, serving up deals instantly to users who check in on Foursquare and Facebook Places.

The service launched formally five days ago, and Mr. Fertel is pumped. Betabeat caught him on the phone this afternoon and he's planning to meet later today with Foursquare, which could benefit from the added incentive to check in as well as the furthering of the concept of instant deals as a marketing mechanism. Foursquare just announced it will be serving deals directly from flash services like LivingSocial and Gilt Groupe, within Foursquare--which makes Dealburner seem like a stop-gap solution or potential competitor, depending on how you look at it.

Unfortunately, Mr. Fertel wasn't able to bring along his Freespeech colleagues to the new start-up--yet. But he can imagine adding a lot of functionality to the simple concept of instant deals. In the big city, there's enough inventory to build out a simple real-time map of instant deals, for example. "I'll probably bring them on eventually," he said of his former co-founders. In the meantime, he's going to keep building out the product and scouting a bit for investors on the side. "I like to build," he said. "I like to make products. And I want to continue building this." He sounded pleased.

Mr. Lavalle.

Last week, the recently-launched curated recipe site Gojee scored a pick-up from swissmiss, a design blog and studio run by Tina Roth Eisenberg, which called Gojee "a beautifully designed new food lover destination." Swissmiss referred more users than a review by TechCrunch, co-founder Michael Lavelle told Betabeat this morning. "She put us up last Wednesday and it was pretty much insanity from that point on," he said, comparing the site's growth to the viral new music lover destination, Turntable.fm. "The post sent us 10,000 sign-ups in 24 hours, and it blew up from there."

But Gojee wasn't always a beautifully designed new food lover destination. 

1. Mint.com for food: Four months in development. Contract with a major New York grocery chain. Signed up 1,000 users in the first week. No one came back.

Once upon a time, Mike Lavalle and Tian He were two ordinary bankers at Morgan Stanley. They were bored, they were overworked, and they read in the news about the acquisition of Mint.com by Intuit for $170 million or so.

They decided to do the same thing for food. Mr. Lavalle met Nick D'Agostino at the gym and signed up the D'Agostino grocery chain as Gojee's first partner. The founders quit Morgan Stanley, Mr. He taught himself Ruby on Rails and "we pretty much built Mint for food. Lots of charts and graphs, budget, expenses, nutrition profiles." They launched and 1,000 users signed up in the first week.

"At the time we thought it was amazing," Mr. Lavelle said. "But then no one came back so we were like, uh oh, what's going on here... we took a big step back and said what did we do wrong?"

They decided there were three problems: people don't relate to food as quantitatively as they do to their banks statements, the design was poor, and people didn't like looking at the data--it didn't say what they wanted it to say.

2. Twitter for food. Four months in development. "Everyone just pooped all over it."

The pair decided it was time to switch things up. The data needed context, they decided.

"It was a stream of content that gives you stories or related qualitative context around your data, i.e. you went shopping for food, you bought chicken, mushrooms and onions, here's a recipe that uses chicken, mushrooms and onions," he said. "You bought this kind of peanut butter, here's a coupon for another kind."

This idea was hot, the pair thought. They'd been bootstrapping the start-up, but decided to raise a little scratch from friends and family and brought on two engineers, a designer, and a content manager and built a new site.

It bombed. There was overwhelming negative feedback from everyone they showed the site too. "This is getting pretty bad," Mr. Lavalle recalls saying to Mr. He. "We're nine months deep, blowing through all this money, and we have nothing to show for it. We just built two shitty products."

3. A new kind of recipe site. Three months in development. "We're afraid to touch it because people love it so much."

"It was March 3, at 3 a.m. We're trying to fix Twitter for food," Mr. Lavalle recalls of the pivotal conversation with his co-founder. "It's been nine months and we haven't done anything well. We have to build something amazing that's going to be fun for us too. We're tired of building things that we aren't excited about.

"We know we can crush recipes," he said.

They redesigned Gojee to be a curated recipe recommendation site, that suggests recipes from a hand-picked database based on what users say they're craving, what they don't want to eat, what they have in the pantry, and what their recent purchases were. They're still working with the data set they started out thinking about--food purchases from rewards cards--which Mr. Lavalle says has not been delivered to users yet in any form.

The layout is simple--it's basically giant pictures of food--with simple drop-down menus and an obvious experience. The designer, Adam Meisel, sent a link to swissmiss, and then it got picked up by Gizmodo and other blogs. User engagement is also high, with new sign-ups returning and using the site.

The team is waiting for the user growth to settle down before iterating, although they are working on adding filters for vegetarians and gluten allergies. Gojee is currently raising a round of funding and there is significant investor interest, especially on the West Coast, Mr. Lavalle said--with any luck, this will be the company's final pivot.

Pivot Prof. Billy Chasen

There is no more overused and reviled word in the world of tech start-ups than pivot. Pivot. Pivot. Pivot.

It seems to capture the manic energy of the current tech industry, in which an idea can get millions in funding before building a product and, if the users never materialize, or the business model never emerges amidst all hype, simply change their direction and try something new.

No company better epitomizes this idea of second chances than Turntable.fm, a social music site, born out of the ashes of a failed venture called Stickybits. Founders Billy Chasen and Seth Goldstein raised almost $2 million for Stickybits and worked on the project for about a year. The idea was to leave little stickers on physical objects that contained links to stories, photos and video on the web. Big brands like Pepsi thought it was a great idea. Users, not so much.

With little momentum and cash running low, they decided to pull a monster pivot. Turntable.fm, which launched a little over one month ago, has already attracted over 300,000 users and the interest of top tier investors on the east and west coast. Suddenly a team that was running low on funds is being courted for a fresh infusion of $5-10 million at a $40 million valuation, Betabeat has learned from multiple sources.

Exclusive: Turntable.fm's #1 Spinner, DJ Woooooo, Shares his Secrets

Update: Fred Wilson, Kleiner Perkins and Accel in Bidding War Over Turntable.fm

“Pivoting is sort of unique to the tech world,” said Kevin Ryan, probably New York’s most successful serial entrepreneur. Doubleclick, the ad serving platform Ryan founded during the dot-com boom, was eventually purchased by Google for $3 billion, and remains New York’s biggest exit. “Most people don’t realize this, but that company was actually a pivot,” says Ryan, leaning back deeply into a leather chair at the offices of his largest current company, Gilt Groupe.

“We were an ad sales network, a media company, and maybe ten percent was dedicated to tech for ad serving. What we saw was that the majority of the company was not growing or producing like the sliver focused on tech. So we sold off 90 percent of the company, something like 600 employees.” He stops and take a big sip of diet Pepsi. “As far as pivots go, that was a double backflip with a twist, because we had already taken the company public, and while tech folks understand the pivot, hedge fun managers do not. People thought we were crazy at the time, but Doubleclick wouldn’t be powering Google today if we hadn’t made that change.”

Pivoting isn’t unique to the East Coast, but New York is the first tech center to institutionalize the pivot as strategy for creating internet companies. Betaworks, where Billy Chasen cut his teeth as an entrepreneur, began with a simple maxim. 100 days and $100,000 to get a company into beta, a working product that can be released to users for feedback. “If you can shrink the cycle between idea, scrawling on a napkin, and testing with users, that is the most important piece of the puzzle,” said betaworks CEO John Borthwick, seated in front of a green chalkboard, pushing his bushy hair out of his eyes.

“What that means simply is you want to get to market as fast as possible, test and trail and then pivot if need be. Because the moment you get into the process of fundraising you begin to lock yourself up, both literally with investors, and psychologically, that I am going to build a business around X. Because my experience is, once people actually start to use your product, that X can turn into Y very quickly.”

As one of the co-founders of betaworks, Mr. Chasen built a product called Firef.ly based on the 100 days $100,000 model. It began as a way for web site owners to see how users were mousing around their site. But seeing what people were doing in real time didn’t help publishers learn much. So when this failed to catch on, Firef.ly pulled a quick pivot, adding a feature that let users visiting the same web page chat with one another. Problem was, users ended up talking about Firef.ly, instead of browsing the site. So the team at betaworks changed direction again.

“It’s most aptly described as a 180 degree pivot, because we sort of turned the product on its head,” said Mr. Borthwick. Instead of showing exactly what users were doing, or letting them interact, betaworks created a product that showed website owners exactly how many people were on their site, where they were coming from and what they were reading. That product, renamed Chartbeat, now has thousands of clients around the globe and millions in annual revenue.

It’s successes like that which have made changing ones mind and abandoning the original project a strategy without a stigma in the New York tech scene. Howard Morgan, the partner at First Round Capital who led the $1.6 million Series A in Stickybits, recently declared, “When we fund a company, we hope that we have picked the combination of a great entrepreneur and his/her team, along with a great product in a large available market. But sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way we all expected. Perhaps we need to modify the old adage to 'If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then pivot, don’t be a foolish slave to the first idea.'” Knowing that Chasen had pulled off an acrobatic pivot of Chartbeat’s caliber was part of the reason First Round backed him in the first place.

Chris Dixon, who recently pivoted his new startup Hunch from a consumer facing taste engine to a platform for businesses who want to offer recommendations, thinks most entrepreneurs don’t pull the trigger fast enough. “The most common mistake is to pivot too late. You have sunk costs. You get sort of married to your project. I find a sign of a mature entrepreneurs is someone who can throw away original hypothesis, and some of the dreams around that. That is a difficult thing to do.” It’s the language of romance applied to a labor of love. Some entrepreneurs learn to settle for good enough, some keep chasing after that elusive Mr. Right idea.

Back when Billy Chasen was still working on Stickybits, he sat down with Mr. Dixon for an interview on TechCrunch TV. Talk turned quickly to the merit of pivots and how Stickybits was refocusing itself. ““If your not willing to fail fast, not willing to figure out what’s working and what’s not, you’re going to have to do something like completely shut down and start over or ditch the project entirely,” said Mr. Chasen, who ended up doing just that with his move to Turntable.fm.

The two entrepreneurs, handsome and casually dressed, chatted on stools inside the Stickybits office. “It’s a tough trade-off, because on the one hand its important to be iterative and listen to the market, on the other hand some of the greatest companies were formed by very stubborn people,” said Dixon.

“You kinda doubt yourself sometimes, because you had this vision for something, you’re like, how stubborn will I be, because you know there are people who are stubborn and then time proves them...” said Mr. Chasen, looking a little abashed, before Mr. Dixon cut him off, throwing up his hands in agreement.

“Steve Jobs is an example, he doesn’t listen to the market at all, just decides what its gonna be!”

The stubborn success of Silicon Valley visionaries like Mr. Jobs haunts the agile New York entrepreneur. With all the emphasis on capturing user feedback and moving to where the market seems ripe, local techies have yet to build a true titan on the scale of Apple, Facebook or Google.

“I don’t know if I would have done the same thing as Mark Zuckerberg, with introducing the news feed,” said Mr. Chasen. “When they first did that everyone cried privacy—‘This is an infringement, this is horrible this isn’t what I signed up for.’ He said, 'you’ll get used to it and you’ll like it.'”

The streaming music service Pandora recently filed for its IPO, giving hope to a young company like Turntable.fm that a big payday awaits at the end of a tough road. But Pandora was unprofitable for the better part of a decade before finally coming into its own with the emergence of mobile apps. Things would have turned out very differently if founder Tim Westergren had been a student of the pivot, instead of stubborn perseverance.

Having executed its graceful pivot, Turntable.fm seems well situated. Investors are looking to cut the company fat checks, and Facebook is sweating about the platform’s viral growth while struggling to get its own social music app launched with Spotify. But a little further down the road—if, say, the users stop signing up in droves, or the major labels start sending out their lawyers—Mr. Chasen will face a stark choice. Should he dig a little deeper and push on despite the challenges, or keep on running and gunning, moving to meet the market and every so often stumbling into success.

For the average entrepreneur, the best strategy for success is to fail, to learn and to change. But what if, like Jobs or Zuckerberg, the rest of the world just doesn’t understand, and the only way to make it big, really big, is to just ignore what the market is telling you, and follow your gut instead. The central paradox of the pivot is this: how do you know if you’re a visionary?

Alternate headline: Productivity Plague as Turntable.fm Sucks in Start-Up After Start-Up!

StickyBits is now Turntable.fm, and while we bet that makes some investors very, very happy--namely First Round Capital, Polaris Ventures, and Mitch Kapor, who gave the company at least $1.9 million--others must be smiling through their teeth. "Biggest threat to productivity today: turntable.fm," tweeted FastSociety's Andy Thompson. Foursquare's Tristan Walker called it "WAY too dangerous." There are rooms for Foursquare Zynga, Twitter, Facebook, Formspring, TechStars, YouTube, Chartbeat, TicketMaster, Zaarly, Uber,  and Google Wallet, plus the Coding Soundtrack room, which at time of writing had 137 listeners and at one time was speculated to be open in the browser of every developer in Silicon Alley.

So what is Turntable.fm? It's a browser-based chatroom that streams music based on the choices of a rotating cast of DJs drawn from whoever is in the room. There are up to five DJs at any one time who create playlists; the station cycles through the playlists one song at a time, moving from one DJ's pick to the next, as the room votes on how "lame" to "awesome" the track is. A (sometimes fast-moving) discussion takes place in a chatroom on the bottom right of the screen. DJs get points for picking popular songs and if enough people think a song is lame, it skips to the next. You can upload songs or search through the Medianet-powered library to create your playlist when it's your turn to DJ.

The app is also, presumably, making money by helping people discover new music socially. Mouse over a song you like and click "add to iTunes" to buy it.

Even though the app seems ubiquitous in Silicon Alley/Valley, it's actually still in semi-closed beta. Users need to connect with Facebook and will be allowed in if a friend is already using the app. As TechCrunch's Alexia Tsostis joked, it's now a useful sign of how well connected your company is. "New hot startup metric: The # of listeners in its Turntable.fm room."

StickyBits/Turntable.fm, now down to just three employees on the seventh floor above Dogpatch Labs, where they got their start (and their Polaris funding), feel they're not ready for prime time yet. Betabeat ambushed the CEO, Betaworks veteran Billy Chasen, and developer in the office last week, hoping to score the first exclusive interview, but we were politely told the company is not ready for interviews yet as they're still working out bugs with the app. And while the Valley has clearly gotten the memo--Mr. Chasen splits his time between coasts--not everyone is in the know. "What is this magical turntable.fm that I am not allowed into?" pouted Cheezburger CTO Scott Purad today.

So while we're still waiting for the full story on how StickyBits, the database of barcode-based messages, pivoted to a music start-up--one of the toughest industries to start up in thanks to its outmoded attitudes regarding copyright laws--we do know the company has been working on Turntable.fm since January, its userbase is growing fast, and it's available outside the U.S.--or at least in Germany, where it went similarly viral after a music blog discovered the site and blew it up.

(We just stopped by the Twitter room--"What's Golden" by Jurassic 5 was playing. "Can I get a job at Twitter here?" user @lay2000lbs asked in the chatroom. In the meantime, betaworks co-founder Andy Weissman noted on Twitter that "Turntable.fm is growing so fast there are now back channel chats going on in some rooms." Programmers with great taste in music just got a new way to land the perfect gig.)

We have heard some bug reports since we started trolling the rooms of Turntable.fm, including repeated errors when uploading songs, sound problems and "a weird black box" that flashes over the screen, so it would seem Turntable.fm has some work to do before it can open to more users. Maybe when it rolls out in public it will have added some of the most requested features: the ability to let others see your uploaded tracks, and the ability to throw drinks at the DJ.

UPDATE - Mark Zuckerberg and Ron Conway were among the 100 + avatars chilling in the coding soundtrack room this afternoon.