Andre Youkhna had a problem.

After spending hours doomscrolling through social media posts, photos and videos, Youkhna often had trouble falling asleep until 4:30 in the morning. He tried using a feature phone, the classic flip phone used before the smartphone came into existence. While the constant social media scrolling stopped, there were still some limitations – namely, not being able to access bank accounts, email clients quickly, unlock a Tesla (which uses a smartphone as a key) or use two-step verification for certain accounts.

In 2023, Youkhna cofounded The Minimal Co. in Glendale with his cousin, Armen Youssefian, to address this problem. The pair aimed to make a phone that kept up with the hyperconnected life of everyday Americans without enabling them to feed their worst vices.

“I kind of had to have a happy medium between having a really dumb phone and a very smart phone,” Youkhna says.

How it works

The Minimal Phone – the company’s version of “a happy medium” – looks like something between a Blackberry and a Kindle. The phone is compatible with service providers like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, runs on a standard 4000mAh battery and operates on full Android, which means users can download any app from the Play Store. The phone also comes with a camera.

The Minimal Phone’s key differentiator from standard smartphones is its e-ink display. E-ink displays, which are popular on e-readers, reduce eye strain and conserve more battery than standard digital screens. The downside is its low refresh rate – watching videos on e-ink chunks up each frame, diminishes video quality and washes out color with its black-and-white display. While you can access TikTok and Instagram, Youkhna and Youssefian say, you wouldn’t necessarily want to.

“We’re trying to get away from people using their phone for media consumption and just wasting a lot of time,” Youssefian says.

The phone also features a QWERTY keyboard, which makes up for delays in the e-ink display. Instead of typing on the screen itself and waiting for each letter to render, users can use the physical keyboard.

The rise of the feature phone

Feature phones, also called “dumbphones” (“I don’t like to use that word, but that’s what they call it,” Youkhna says,) are making a comeback. The Light Phone, a New York-based startup, raised $12.45 million in a handful of crowdfunding and seed funding rounds between 2015 and 2023. Its e-ink display phone costs $499.

There’s also Brick, a physical device that locks programmed apps and needs to be tapped to unlock them. (The idea is to keep your Brick in a physical location separate from where you need to focus.)

“There’s a lot of people in this segment where they want a dumbphone, but a dumbphone is very limiting,” Youssefian says.

Utah-based Troomi uses the “dumbphone” model for children by allowing parents to block any apps or content from children’s phones while still allowing them to access maps and communication features. Texas-based Techless has a dumbphone that costs $399 and comes with subscription tiers, which allows users to access certain apps based on their specific needs.

“I could imagine feature phones becoming more profitable if there is a way to generate recurring revenue from the hardware, like a smaller-scale version of the installment payment plans Apple introduced to the market years ago,” says Jared Brenner, counsel to tech firms at Sherman Oaks-based Stubbs, Alderton and Markiles LLP. “However, venture capital funds generally rely on outsized returns and mass adoption of software, and their needs seem incongruous with the concept of a dumbphone.”

The investment problem

Despite all the companies popping up to create some version of a feature phone, venture funding in the space has been sparse. A sizable number of investments in feature phones are taking place on crowdfunding platforms. The Minimal Co. raised $719,000 from over 1,000 backers on Indiegogo.

“It is about scalability and the recurrence of revenue,” Brenner says. “The average smartphone user is an exponentially more profitable customer for a venture-backed software business because it’s almost impossible to generate advertising impressions or collect usable behavioral data from a feature phone.”

The demand for a feature phone in the U.S. is pretty small. Outside of the U.S., tech giants like Google are capitalizing on the growth of feature phones in developing areas – according to Counterpoint Research, consumers in India remain steadfast in their faithfulness to feature phones compared to smartphones. A 2023 data report from Counterpoint Research found feature phones to represent only 2% of the handset devices market in the U.S.

“Although there will not be a significant spike for feature phones in the market, there are consistent needs that create the steady demand for feature phones in a smartphone-dominated market,” the report concludes.

The Minimal Co. founders have been contacted by several high-profile celebrity investors – including UFC fighter Michael Chandler, “Peaky Blinders” actor Paul Anderson and Comedy Central comedian Ronny Chieng – but aren’t looking for additional capital.

“We don’t have a lack of funds to complete the project as we speak,” Youssefian says. “We have a lot of preorders. So we’re just banking on having a great product and great reviews.”

The Minimal Phone costs anywhere from $399 to $499. (For comparison, the iPhone 15 retails at $799 on Apple’s website.) The company is developing its engineering sample and expects to ship orders in October.