When I posted about failing quickly, someone brought up a recent article written about Pure Digital, the company behind the Flip Camera (which was recently bought by Cisco for nearly $600 million).

Here’s the article at TechCrunch: Flip Video: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong And Then So, So Right. by Michael Arrington.

Pure Digital got it wrong to start with. I can’t remember how long those cameras were on the shelves at CVS, but it wasn’t long. They were a cool idea, but an instant failure. The company gave up on the idea of “renting” cameras for $20 a pop and started to sell them like hot cakes for $99 and $150 each. It was only after they gave up on their idea of rental that they were able to excel selling the cameras.

On Twitter, Phil Thomas DiGiulio had this question:

Short story, I think it’s the complete opposite. Sometimes, ‘Just a little patience’ is in order no?

I would argue that the company didn’t have patience for the first business model and moved on to something else. They had no patience for a product people were unenthusiastic about and were hacking to circumvent bringing the cameras back. Instead they embraced the Pirate’s Dilemma model and enabled everyone to own the cameras and record video to their hearts content.

In Pure Digital’s case, it wasn’t about their idea being a failure, just their implementation of that idea. Had they stuck to their guns and continued to be a disposable digital video camera, they might have wasted their early investments of $28 million. Instead, they switched their focus, had some early success and sold to Cisco for $590 million. Pretty good for an early failure, right?