As the category has expanded to millions of users, Segal says cheaper look-alikes have popped up. “There’s a lot of noise, a lot of knockoffs,” he says.Segal was born in Moscow, and counts himself lucky that his parents were able to leave with the wave of Jewish emigrants when he was just one year old. They fled to Vienna, then Italy, and settled in Philadelphia in 1989. His parents worked as computer programmers; no one in the house talked about business.
Over time he learned about business, then left to launch his own startup, a marketplace for handmade goods. It flopped. He returned to Harvard for business school and to lick his wounds. “I was this golden child,” he says. “The problem with that is you’ve never fallen on your face. With that first failure, I fell pretty hard.”
Customers for either product pay the same price for the device , and those who use it for photos pay an additional $39 a year subscription. Sales grew rapidly, reaching $30 million in 2019, before more than doubling to last year’s $75 million. Meanwhile, Skylight’s user base hit 5 million.
Just got one for Xmas. Genius.