The Flip Camcorder: Think LightWeight
By Paul Rosenfeld on March 19th, 2009
Here’s a great tale: tiny start-up decides to enter a market dominated by the biggest companies in the world. Existing products from these companies are bloated feature beasts. Tiny company tries to grow, fails, again and again.
Learning what works and doesn’t work, tiny company shifts gears, hits it big, keeps improving, until it’s bought by a giant company for a ton of moolah.
That’s the Flip.
I love stories like this for 2 reasons: David vs. Goliath, naturally; and because it’s a tale of disruption. The original Flip was a disposable camera. Eventually they moved to disposable video cameras, and the to the Flip as we know it. But they’ve always been about figuring out that people don’t NEED all those silly bells and whistles typical cameras and camcorders come with.
They just needed figured out something tiny: Keep the product simple, but don’t make it disposable. Voila! A $500M sale.
Lesson to all product developers: Think LightwWeight.
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