Deepa: In 2009, during a huge TV show, Dancing with the Stars, Apple ran an ad.
Yusuf: Right, for an app, no?
Deepa: Yes! For this new app called Bump. And, you know, it was quite something.
Deepa: Within just ten minutes of that ad airing, the company's traffic, it spiked by a thousand times. A thousand X! And all their servers? They just completely crashed.
Yusuf: Almost a thousand times in ten minutes? (beat) Just... think about that. That's, that's wild for an app, no?
Deepa: I know, right? All their servers, they just completely crashed. (laughing) Can you imagine? And my first thought, back then, was 'This is it, this is the future!' Such a breakthrough, no?
Yusuf: A crashing server from too much demand... that's usually the best problem to have, for a startup, no? The dream, even.
Deepa: That's what you'd think, wouldn't you? But this article, it's about how an app can be this wildly popular, achieve this massive scale, and still, somehow, be a complete failure as a business.
Yusuf: A failure? After all that? How is that even possible? I mean, a thousand times traffic spike...
Deepa: Well, because... the behaviour it needed from people? It just wasn't, you know, regular enough. It was... it didn't create a habit. It was more like a... a neat trick, actually. Not a, a full product.
Yusuf: A feature, not a product. Hmm. Like, a really cool party trick, but not something you actually need every day?
Deepa: Exactly! The core idea was super clever, mind you. You wanted to exchange contacts or photos with someone. You opened the Bump app, and you physically 'bumped' your phones together. And like magic, the info transferred.
Yusuf: I remember this! I always thought it was using NFC, you know, like the contactless payments.
Deepa: See, that's what everyone thought! But no, it didn't use NFC at all, because iPhones didn't even have it back then. This was a really, really smart hack.
Deepa: It used this really proprietary server-side algorithm.
Yusuf: Proprietary?
Deepa: Yes! And it was looking at accelerometer data—so how you physically moved the phone—and GPS from both phones.
Yusuf: At the same time?
Deepa: Exactly! It would match them in real-time, then transfer.
Yusuf: So, they had to invent their own clever way to make this work, rather than just plug into existing hardware. That's some serious engineering, no?
Deepa: Yeah, but serious engineering for what was, honestly, a very shallow use case.
Yusuf: Shallow, but massive, no? It went viral.
Deepa: Massively viral! Billionth download, you remember? And Apple put them in national ads even.
Deepa: But people only really used it when meeting someone new, you know? Exchanging details. And that's not a daily thing for most people. Or even a weekly thing. No, it wasn't... it was a 'one-off' moment, a novelty.
Yusuf: Right. So it's like, brilliant for that one moment, but then... it just sits there. Gathering dust, almost.
Deepa: Precisely. The team eventually realized their core assumption about the product was wrong. The co-founder, David Lieb, he actually called Bump's top 100 users, personally.
Deepa: And he found out their primary use case wasn't exchanging contacts with new people. It was actually sharing photos with existing friends. Can you believe it?
Yusuf: Sharing photos with existing friends? That's interesting. So, not even the original problem they set out to solve, really.
Deepa: Not at all. But even photo sharing, for that specific 'bump' mechanic, wasn't frequent enough. And this is where the platform, Apple itself, kind of pulled the rug out from under them, eventually.
Deepa: Then, 2013, Apple... they announced AirDrop.
Yusuf: AirDrop. Oh no. (beat)
Deepa: Exactly. For iOS 7. And it was a native file-sharing feature, right? Did exactly what Bump did, but for free. Just... made it redundant.
Yusuf: So, why would you ever download a separate app when your phone can just... do that? For free? That's, that's brutal, Deepa.
Deepa: Brutal, truly. I mean... it's just, it's over, no? Your whole business model, gone. Finished. Just like that.
Deepa: So, what happened to Bump? Well, it ended up as an 'acqui-hire.' Google acquired them, you know, for what they call an 'acqui-hire.' For a rather... modest sum. Like, thirty, thirty-five million? The article says it was 'definitely not a home run' in terms of an exit.
Yusuf: Modest, yes. Considering they burned through, what was it, something like twenty million in VC funding? So, the company didn't exactly make a huge return for its investors.
Deepa: No, it didn't. Google shut down the Bump app, and its companion app Flock, and they just hired the team.
Yusuf: So, the company itself, the product, was a failure. It burned through money, it got acquired for not much...
Deepa: Very little, honestly.
Yusuf: ...and then it was just shut down. That's a pretty clear failure, Deepa.
Deepa: But the team! That team, led by David Lieb, went on to create Google Photos. A product that now has over a billion users, Yusuf.
Yusuf: Okay, Deepa, that's a different story, truly. The company Bump, that was a failure. It burned through something like twenty million in VC, never found a business model...
Deepa: But the talent!
Yusuf: ...and ended in a low-value acqui-hire where the product was killed. The business failed.
Deepa: But for the founders and the team, it was a massive success! It served as a four-year public audition that landed them prime roles at Google where they built a billion-user product. The company failed, but the team won, you see?
Yusuf: An audition tape that cost twenty million dollars. I mean, good for them, truly, for landing at Google and doing what they did. But I still struggle to call the Bump company a success. It's a complicated one, no?
Deepa: It is. It reframes what 'winning' means, I think. I'm Deepa.
Yusuf: And I'm Yusuf. This has been Startups RIP's Station.