Insta360’s Liu Jingkang: From Following to Moving Ahead

Insta360’s Liu Jingkang (July 27,1991) As the professional-camera market shrinks rapidly, Insta360 leads outdoor-action and panoramic cameras. Global professional-camera sales stood at 121 million in 2010 but plunged to 8.3 million in 2024, replaced by phones and action cameras. Within action cameras, this is a very small category. According to Frost & Sullivan, Insta360 has 67.2% of the global panoramic-camera market and has ranked first for six consecutive years. ---- Liu loved electronic games, taught himself programming, and secretly brought a computer into his dormitory to study. This supposedly wayward child won first prize in a national computer-creation competition for Chinese primary- and secondary-school students with his own program. It added 20 points to his university entrance score, helping him enter Nanjing University’s software school. Zhou Hongyi, Li Kaifu, and others admired this daring technology enthusiast and invited him to join their companies, but he declined. Exploring what to build, Liu’s team created the “名校直播” (Mingxiao Zhibo) app and “V直播” (V Livestreaming) project. He turned a traditional video-production switching system costing around ten thousand yuan into free software, and sold related livestreaming services to event organizers. He discovered that high-quality livestreaming equipment was scarce, and began considering camera hardware. Since the Mingxiao Zhibo project, the team had accumulated over 30 patents and met well-known entrepreneurs and investors. While exploring entrepreneurship, the young geek chose to focus relentlessly on panoramic cameras, turning a niche enthusiast’s toy into a popular filming tool among university students. Hardware differs from internet and financial businesses that can become overnight sensations: at heart, it is manufacturing. Manufacturing has fewer stories of instant wealth from catching a fashionable trend, and more solitary persistence over a decade and continual, incremental improvement. Trends move and tides recede. Those with solid fundamentals are the ones who remain after the waves wash through. Liu was not the first to think of panoramic cameras. The initial wave began with US company Oculus, which released its first head-mounted display in 2012 and was acquired by Facebook in 2014. Google released AR glasses that same year, sparking VR and AR entrepreneurship. Sony and HTC developed VR equipment, but cameras for producing VR content were scarce. Traditional VR filming used several cameras simultaneously and stitched the footage afterward, requiring considerable time and effort. Japanese camera giant Ricoh was the first to develop a 360-degree panoramic camera: two 180-degree ultrawide lenses and a small battery in one device could record the full scene. For giants, this was merely exploratory business for emerging industries such as VR. They mostly pursued a professional, high-end, narrow market, and sales were unremarkable. Seeing Google’s and Ricoh’s products in 2014, Liu decided to enter panoramic cameras. Like many young entrepreneurs, the then 24-year-old was chasing a trend, especially one major companies endorsed. But major companies can misjudge trends too. Between 2012 and 2017, VR went from widespread enthusiasm through a bursting bubble to fading from mainstream attention. Problems included poor user experience, low resolution, motion sickness, and short battery life, as well as weak content. Most importantly, equipment manufacturers had not worked out product positioning. Liu could not escape that reversal. “When we launched the Nano panoramic camera in summer 2016, revenue initially reachedRMB 20 million a month, but soon fell to only several million. The main reason was that consumers had no concept of panoramic cameras.” In fact, not just consumers but major domestic and international brands lacked a clear target audience and use case for panoramic cameras. #EntrepreneurshipMustFindTheRightUseCaseForGoodTechnology Insta360’s confusion resembled DJI’s earlier problem, a common manufacturing issue: good technology does not necessarily make a good product, and good products do not necessarily sell. Without a use case, products stay in warehouses. DJI initially possessed world-class flight-control technology, but it could only be used in model aircraft and remote-controlled toys, failing to open a broad market. Entering camera stabilization, it discovered that flight-control technology could stabilize camera footage. DJI then put cameras on drones, giving rise to aerial photography. Successful aerial photography further demonstrated the quality of DJI’s flight controls. Its professional stabilizers and handheld cameras subsequently succeeded too. The technology simply moved to a different application. Finding the right use case created a large consumer market. Liu believed panoramic cameras should not be limited to VR-content production: action cameras were their consumer market. In an interview, he candidly described this as “picking GoPro’s fruit.” GoPro’s founder enjoyed surfing and initially built an action camera for his own needs. Surfing is expensive, so participants want to record the experience. GoPro added wide-angle lenses, stabilization algorithms, and slow-motion recording. One problem remained: the camera could not capture everything. A single wide-angle lens has a fixed field of view, and in extreme sports, capturing the moment matters more than capturing it beautifully. Panoramic cameras avoid missing the action because their two wide-angle lenses cover the whole scene. “We saw people recording panoramic videos while skiing, mountain biking, or doing downhill runs. We started shifting from panoramic cameras toward action cameras, leading to the Insta360 ONE series and other products,” Liu says. Insta360 transformed the use case from professional VR equipment into action cameras ordinary people could use, becoming the market leader. It also sought openings in traditional action cameras. For example, it added a flip screen to the Ace Pro, enabling professional-camera-style selfie angles at one-third the price of a competing Sony product. Across ten years, Insta360 often followed others: Ricoh in panoramic cameras, DJI in stabilizers, and GoPro in action cameras. Yet it consistently innovated in particular functions, sizes, and use cases, attracting consumers in specific segments and rising to the industry’s forefront. Looking from another angle and continually seeking openings has characterized Liu’s entrepreneurial path. Markets, use cases, and consumer needs keep changing. No product can meet everyone’s every need. Entrepreneurs always have opportunities in niches, but opportunities do not wait passively for you. Pursue them, think beyond habitual assumptions, and once convinced, do not give up lightly. Xiaomi also made a 360-degree panoramic camera, but exited early. Reentering now would depend on how wide market leader Insta360’s moat has become. DJI recently announced its entry into the business. Roles have reversed: DJI is following Insta360. Such a dramatic scene happens only in an era full of opportunity. Every generation has its opportunities. Even a century-old camera industry offers new possibilities. Every generation, after all, has its own “point-and-shoot” camera. #KanTianxia202517 ----- Robin: “This is a long article about how Liu Jingkang, born in 1991, built a successful hardware venture, moved from following to pulling ahead, found product positioning, and found use cases for technology. All are worth studying. “Compared with pure software, Taiwan may be better suited to hardware or integrated hardware–software startups. But the competitors will be Chinese manufacturers: DJI in the sky, Dreame on the ground, Insta360 outdoors, and numerous electric-vehicle brands.”