When OnePlus was founded in 2013 and released its very first OnePlus One, the disruption was felt in the industry; a true “flagship killer”. It was a formidable spec-heavy product, with an incredibly affordable price point, and it catapulted OnePlus into infamy, putting it on a trajectory to become a global player in the smartphone field, with extremely notable success in both India and Europe.

Fast-forward to 2020, and the price of flagship-level smartphones for all brands has alienated a large majority of the market, with prices inching closer to $1000 dollars. The OnePlus 8, despite still carrying a serious value proposition, is tailored to those that will spare no expense for the absolute best specs, and as such is still out of reach for many consumers.

On June 23rd, OnePlus CEO Pete Lau made a post on the OnePlus forums (OnePlus’ go-to platform for engaging deeply with our community of fans and customers) beginning with "hi friends", and an image saying “New Beginnings”, and told them of our endeavor to bring the OnePlus experience to a more affordable product, and that the product is indeed, on the way. At the end of his post, there was one link: a private IG account, with the handle @OnePlusLiteZthing. This moment was the start of a month-long campaign to launch the OnePlus.. Lite.. Z… thing.. but for real, what’s the actual name?

Pete posted at 8PM, and by 9PM, it became physically impossible to keep up with the follower requests. Turns out, it’s really difficult to hit approve on thousands of people, one-by-one, by hand. After 7 days, 115,000 followers, with 5 people, internationally, working around the clock to approve requests, Instagram pumped the brakes and told us we had to take our account public because of “suspicious activity” (AKA: success!). But by this time, the hook had already been set.

A series of posts counted down to June 30th, but instead of releasing a single detail about our product, we peeled back the curtain and released Episode 1 of our documentary series: New Beginnings, which details former co-founder Carl Pei’s assembly of a crack team, and kicking off the most rapid product development process and product launch in the history of the smartphone. The documentary’s vérité-style was also in keeping with OnePlus’ tradition of maintaining an obvious and straight-forward openness and visibility with our customers and fans.

The media and fans went wild, with every tech publication and their parent company reporting and speculating, which led to a record IG follower growth rate. All of this, without us even mentioning a single feature about the product.