Flock

Flock was the photo-sharing app built by David Lieb and the Bump team after user conversations showed that Bump’s heaviest users were often sharing photos. In David Lieb on Bump, Google Photos, and Returning to YC, Flock is important less as a successful standalone product than as the failed experiment that clarified the eventual Google Photos direction.

The beta worked well in a friendly network, including YC people, but the public launch exposed a chicken-and-egg problem: users had to convince friends and family to install another photo app before the product became useful. That failure pushed Lieb toward the conclusion that the solution had to live at the camera-roll layer rather than as another separate sharing app.

Connections

• David Lieb and Bump - founder and technical base.
• Power User Discovery - user-research signal that led to the product.
• Google Photos - product direction clarified by Flock’s failure.
• Customer Pull and Fast Product Validation - validation concepts reinforced by the gap between beta enthusiasm and public adoption.