Why Insta360's Founder Says the Real Market Is Unmet Problems, Not Sales

Ten years ago, the Insta360 Nano was a weird accessory. You plugged it into an iPhone's Lightning port, and it looked like a camera that had lost its way. The pitch required a lot of explaining. What is a 360-degree camera for? Who needs to see the whole room when you can just point and shoot?

Back then, the workflow was a chore: shoot, transfer, stitch, and then hunt through a sphere of footage for the one good angle. It was a tool for tinkerers, not for your aunt at a wedding. But something interesting happened. People started strapping the Nano to helmets and selfie sticks for skiing and biking. They didn't care about the specs. They cared that they could press record and worry about the framing later.

Today, Insta360's founder, Liu Jingkang, sees a bigger shift. According to company data, more than half of all 360-camera buyers now use them for travel and family memories, not extreme sports. That's a different customer. That's a customer who doesn't want to learn editing software or spend hours picking clips. And that's the problem Liu is trying to solve with the new X6.

The 'Unconscious' Camera Is the New Sales Pitch

Liu's philosophy sounds almost anti-tech: the best camera is the one you forget is there. He calls it 'wu gan'—no feeling, no awareness. For a decade, his company has built cameras, and the goal is to make you stop thinking about the camera entirely.

That's not just a design principle. It's a sales strategy. When a product demands too much attention, it stays niche. When it disappears into the background, it becomes a habit. And habits are where markets are made.

The X6 is a step toward that invisibility. It packs a custom 1/1.1-inch sensor co-developed with Sony (33% larger than the X5), a 4nm Qualcomm chip with five times the AI compute, and native Dolby Vision. But the hardware is almost beside the point. The real story is what the camera does after you press stop.

From 'Shoot Now, Frame Later' to 'Don't Even Edit'

360 cameras already solved one problem: you don't have to compose before you shoot. Every angle is captured, so you can pick the frame later. That was the original appeal for action sports, where you can't stop to line up a shot while flying down a mountain.

But the flip side is that someone still has to edit. That's the bottleneck Liu identifies: 'The most ideal camera should let you forget it exists. Our ultimate goal is to make the camera unconscious. So we introduced zero-clip editing—we want the camera to automatically select the best shots while it charges and syncs to the cloud.'

The X6's new 'AI Director' does exactly that. Powered by a self-developed multimodal model called PanoMind, trained on over 10,000 hours of footage across 30+ scenarios (travel, cycling, diving, skiing), it analyzes your day's clips while the camera charges overnight. By morning, you have a finished edit—no timeline, no cuts, no decisions.

There's also a first-person head-tracking module that lets you mount the camera on your chest and simply look where you want to record. It outputs a flat video, no 360-degree fuss. And a new 'Cloud Mode 2.0' uses the full sphere to create a virtual gimbal, so you can pan, zoom, and track with a joystick on a selfie stick, producing 4K video directly, with the option to keep the raw 360 file.

Recording, Not Creating: The Market Nobody Serves

Liu makes a distinction that shapes his entire sales approach: 'Our mission is to record and share, not to create.'

Creative types have plenty of tools. Pro cameras, cinema rigs, editing suites. If you want to make art, the market is saturated. But ordinary people—parents, travelers, people at a birthday party—just want to capture the moment without it becoming a project. 'You can't hire a photographer for every precious instant,' Liu says. 'Recording is never fully satisfied.'

This is where the growth is. It's not in the adrenaline junkie segment. It's in the daily, the mundane, the moments you'd otherwise miss. Liu points to two 'biggest common denominators' in consumer demand: how to make a girl look good in a photo, and how to document your kids growing up. Neither requires artistic ambition. Both require a camera that's always on, always easy, and never in the way.

Market Size? It's About Problems, Not Predictions

When asked about the ceiling for 360 cameras, Liu doesn't trot out a TAM forecast. He says, 'Market size isn't predicted by a model. It depends on how many problems you solve.'

He compares 360 cameras to bottled water or smartphones. 'We won't talk about a ceiling until everyone has one, like a phone. We're still two orders of magnitude away from that.' And that gap is opportunity. Every unsolved problem is a potential sale.

That's why Insta360 keeps pushing into new territories. The original Nano wasn't designed for sports—users made it a sports camera. Now, the X6 isn't designed for robot training, but customers have started using it to collect data for embodied AI robots. Why? Because a 360 camera captures the whole environment, not just what's in front of a first-person camera. That's a new problem, a new market.

The Future: Cameras That Think Like You

Liu's long-term vision is the 'AI photographer'—a camera that understands what you care about. The head-tracking module is a hint. Future models will learn your editing preferences, your favorite angles, your sense of rhythm. 'It will be like an AI that knows what you're paying attention to,' he says.

He also sees resolution climbing to 12K or 16K, not for the sake of pixels but because 360 footage gets cropped so heavily. And he predicts a return of VR, where immersive playback makes 360 content truly shine. But the ultimate goal isn't a better camera—it's a 'photography robot,' a concept that might not even include a camera you hold.

'One day we might become a software company,' Liu admits. 'AI could even eliminate the need for a dedicated 360 camera.' He imagines a future where you capture a few flat images and AI reconstructs the entire space. But even then, he believes the core need—to genuinely record a moment that happened—will remain. 'The original motivation to record is because this moment is worth remembering. That won't be replaced by AI.'

For now, the X6 is a step toward that invisible future. It's a camera that edits itself, understands your attention, and lets you live in the moment. And if Liu is right, that's not just a product upgrade—it's the most compelling sales pitch a camera company can make.