A mere 6 months after launch and after burning through a good portion of the 1,75B USD it had raised from investors, the short form streaming platform Quibi is closing it’s doors.
Why? Because even if they were almost too big to fail they still managed to hit the one big pole, other entrepreneurs work their butts of to avoid ever getting into an infight with:
No market need.
Well done.
Quibi founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman even kind of admit so in their open farewell letter on Medium:
Quibi was a big idea and there was no one who wanted to make a success of it more than we did.
An open letter from Quibi. to the employees…
Exactly, you were pretty alone in thinking this would be a spectacular hit.
Ouch.
Quibi was an exercise in hybris. It was an exercise in the power of the idea alone; that if you build it, they will come.
Again from the open letter:
Although the circumstances were not right for Quibi to succeed as a standalone company, our team achieved much of what we set out to accomplish, and we are tremendously proud of the award-winning and innovative work that we have produced, both in terms of original content and the underlying technology platform.
An open letter from Quibi. to the employees…
Customers never really came. And those that did ran away as soon as they were asked to pay for it.
It is easy to poke fun of a grand idea flawfully executed. But you could also feel enraged;
That while aspiring entrepreneurs with truly great ideas looking to solve real problems, investors throw money at something that is…well, you get it.
This is what happens when people who don’t “get it” think they can become successful entrepreneurs if they just throw enough money at it.
This is what happens when the smartest people in the room decide to show the world just how smart they really are.
As such Quibi should be a lesson to all with no respect for the grind of trying to build on an idea and achieve product-market fit while at the same time be conscious about ressources spend.
It won’t be. It will happen again. And again.
Because Quibi will be forgotten soon.
That’s how ‘big’ an idea it was.
(Photo: Screenshot)