
An Intimate Portrait Of Innovation, Risk, And Failure Through Hipstamatic's Lens - jayzee
http://www.fastcompany.com/3002103/intimate-portrait-innovation-risk-and-failure-through-hipstamatics-lens?src=longreads
======
geoffschmidt
This sounds like a company that would have benefited from a program like YC.
It would have given them a peer group of entrepreneurs that would have
pressured them to keep shipping product, filled in some of the totally
understandable gaps in their knowledge (for example around engineering
management and best way to time their Series A), and kept their success in
context (just about everyone feels like a little fish next to Dropbox and
Airbnb, and little fish swim harder.) If they'd had these things two years ago
they might be in a very different position today.

------
pirateking
I can't tell whether I should laugh, cry, or puke. A really well made,
polished, fun app. Not innovation.

If we had meaningful innovation in the areas of education and computing,
things like Hipstamatic and Instagram would just be fun hobbies, or even just
well made grade school projects - not billion dollar businesses. That would
open up avenues for true innovation in other fields like photography.

~~~
keithpeter
Kodak made plenty from popular photography in the twentieth century. Popular
photography is a major part of most people's lives in the industrial west. I
can understand why these apps/services make money.

The question for me from this article is why assemble the development team and
then not integrate it into the rest of the company. The idea of programmers
being left with _nothing to do_ and _no direction_ strikes me, as an outsider,
as daft.

------
stevenwei
I don't see how you could look at an ~11 employee company that made $10M in
2011 and $22M in 2012 _selling an iPhone app_ and consider it a failure. In
the world of the App Store I would consider that a huge success.

But I guess after Instagram, any result for any other company short of
"selling to Facebook for $1B" is failing. An unfair and unrealistic benchmark,
in my opinion.

~~~
danso
I think the company going bankrupt is what constitutes failure in this
situation.

~~~
stevenwei
It's not entirely clear to me that the company is actually going bankrupt. The
author of the article seems to imply it, but obviously he's never seen the
company's financials.

Still, with 11 employees as of July 2012[1] (and fewer now), even assuming
$200k/year salaries, that barely puts a dent into the $22M they made this
year. They make an iPhone app, so I can't imagine them having many expenses
besides people. The math doesn't really add up to me.

[1] [http://www.inc.com/30under30/nicole-carter/lucas-buick-
ryan-...](http://www.inc.com/30under30/nicole-carter/lucas-buick-ryan-
dorshorst-synthetic.html)

------
ghshephard
My takeaway from that really well reported article by Austin Carr, is that
lack of leadership and inability to focus is what help Hipstamatic back. They
had the App, the mindshare, and the interest from acquiring companies - they
just couldn't push it over the line, or, were unaware of their limitations and
thought they could go it own their own.

------
adrinavarro
Yet, nobody has really gone the long way to bridge the gap between the quick
and 'hipster' photo retouching like Instagram does, and real cameras (point
and shoot, DSLR). I'm pretty sure that there's a niche market there.

I have a hard time actually believing that Instagram killed them. It's just
that Hipstamatic didn't do their job right.

------
danso
Fascinating profile, partly because I was under the perception that
Hipstamatic was run by a couple of folks as a hobby...there was no other
explanation for how such a popular app could do virtually nothing in adapting
to Instagram's offering.

> _Despite Buick’s resistance toward changing Hipstamatic’s direction, the
> company embarked on a series of toe-in-the-water attempts at social. The
> first was Family Album, which launched in the summer of 2011, a product that
> enabled users to create and co-curate photo albums together. The other, D
> Series, was an app that aimed to capture a retro, disposable camera
> experience on the iPhone. Friends could purchase various packs of digital
> cameras together for 99 cents, and take and share up to 24 shots per roll--
> before having to buy another pack of cameras. “It was definitely a reaction
> to the social photography wave,” Polkus says. “The products were in response
> to people saying, ‘Okay, well we can take pictures, but how do other people
> see them without using Instagram_

It's bad enough that they didn't realize the bottoming out of the paid app
market (who could justify paying $1.99 for Hipstamatic when Instagram offered
the same product...and angry birds was just $.99?), but their pivots toward
social were incredibly dumb.

~~~
ryannielsen
Given the revenue mentioned in the article, it's obvious that many were
willing to justify paying $1.99 for Hipstamatic, and then more for additional
filters. Frankly, it's rather nice to see a company better value their work
and become a strong success. I hope that happens more often.

Based on what I read in that article, I consider their failure to be that they
neglected a successful, revenue generating product and instead joined the race
for the bottom. $10MM/yr is fantastic revenue stream, and they were willing to
throw it away on a whim… yes, a $1B acquisition is cooler than $10MM in yearly
revenue, but $1B acqs are incredibly rare and at least Hipstamatic can claim
they made money, a goal that Instagram can't claim to have reached. And making
money doesn't rule out a fantastically large acquisition; just look at Yammer.

Hipstamatic could have intelligently reinvested their revenue in enhancements
to Hipstamatic, built out other products and services alongside the cash cow,
and might have scored their $1B++ exit later. And even if that acq never came,
at least they'd still have a successful business doing tens of millions in
revenue.

