Case Study: Twitter achieves resilience and success from failure with iContact

Twitter - Customer Case Study

Twitter faced severe early-stage challenges: repeated service outages (the era of the “fail whale”), product pivots and failures at predecessor company Odeo, and leadership strain as the team tried to scale a new social platform. This case study is presented by iContact and draws lessons from Biz Stone’s account of how those struggles shaped Twitter’s path.

iContact highlights the approach Twitter used to overcome these problems: treating failures as experiments, running hackathons that produced the Twitter concept, iterating rapidly, and improving leadership accountability. According to iContact, those steps transformed repeated setbacks into product‑market success, driving rapid growth, greater service stability over time, and a company culture focused on learning and giving back.

Twitter

Biz Stone

Co-Founder