Hollywood Spent $1.75 Billion on an App Nobody Wanted

The story

In April 2020, Quibi launched with $1.75 billion in funding, two of America's most famous executives, Hollywood's biggest stars, and a Super Bowl ad. Six months later, it announced it was shutting down.

This is the story of how Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman built a premium streaming app for your phone, why only a small fraction of early users paid after the free trial, and what every business owner can learn about testing demand before spending big.

Three lessons

1. 1

   Money cannot replace demand. Quibi had every resource except proof that people wanted it.

2. 2

   Test small before you spend big. A cheap experiment could have revealed the problem before billions were spent.

3. 3

   Don't fight how customers already behave. People share, screenshot, and watch on any screen. Quibi made them stop.

Chapters

1. 0:00Intro
2. 0:39The Dream Team
3. 1:11The Money Machine
4. 1:53Launch Day
5. 2:28The Free Trial Cliff
6. 3:01Blaming the Virus
7. 3:30Six Months
8. 4:13Three Lessons
9. 4:47Outro

Sources

Every fact in this file is checked against published sources before release. See our standards.

• CNBC, Quibi to shut down after just six months
• Realscreen, Quibi confirms shutdown (open letter quotes)
• TechCrunch, The short, strange life of Quibi
• Variety, Just 8% of Quibi's initial free-trial users converted (Sensor Tower)
• Variety, Katzenberg: "I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus"
• MacRumors, Roku acquires Quibi content for less than $100 million