Friends,
One of the most common questions we get is: why start a company in such a competitive and saturated market? I thought it would be good to write a few words about this, because there's a lot of different interpretations on our strategy.
Recently, as we set our goals for 2017, we paused again to reflect on this question. We are not smarter than anyone else, and have limited resources, so how do we stay competitive in a brutal industry like this? What's the reason to our existence?
The answer we came to was the same insight that led us to embark on this journey in the first place; Never Settle. Despite a lot of things changing, our hearts are still in the same place.
We started OnePlus because we couldn't find any smartphone product that could satisfy our needs when it came to polish, attention to details, and overall experience. Many products look good on paper, but just don't deliver a good day to day experience. Being such an intimate part of our lives, a smartphone shouldn't just feel amazing the first week. It should keep bringing you joy a year on.
2017 is different from 2014. Everyone has improved. There are no bad smartphones anymore, and it's a great time to be a consumer. However, OnePlus still has a very clear opportunity, and that is to bridge the gap between a good product and a great product. Many people are satisfied when they do good work, and call it a day. You see this in a lot of products. If we were to also do so, we'd have no advantage in the market against larger players.
Instead, our strategy is to set a high bar for ourselves, to find the right industry benchmarks within each part of the product, and force ourselves to reach or exceed those benchmarks. This is what we mean with Never Settle.
To give a concrete example, look at the buttons on the OnePlus 3 and 3T. Back in the day, Apple had the best button click experience. It's not impossible to achieve, it's just that no one else cared as much. So we went to learn about it. Turns out, in all types of industrial grade mass manufacturing, there's always variance. Sometimes buttons are slightly larger and sometimes slightly smaller. Sometimes the button cut-out on the housing is slightly larger, sometimes slightly smaller. The secret behind a great click lies in measuring and manually sorting buttons and housing plates into two sets, matching the slightly larger buttons with the slightly larger button cut-outs, and vice versa.
Our strategy is simple. Make the best product. No detail is too trivial. And going from good to great involves all facets of the product, even those too small for consumers to notice. That's Never Settle. And that's our reason to be.
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