Last year, Snapchat rebranded itself as more than just a messaging app. Snapchat would become Snap, a corporate entity encompassing Snapchat. It also announced a new eyewear product, Spectacles, and began calling itself a “camera company.” It was not a subtle hint that the Los Angeles–based company had an initial public offering in its sights. “Changing our name also has another benefit: when you search for our products it will be easier to find relevant product information rather than boring company information or financial analysis,” C.E.O. Evan Spiegel wrote in a blog post announcing the changes. “You can search Snapchat or Spectacles for the fun stuff and leave Snap Inc. for the Wall Street crowd :)”

Though Spectacles is Snap’s only camera product so far, it’s not the only camera-related product the company has considered. On Wednesday, on the eve of Snap’s highly anticipated I.P.O., The New York Times confirmed a story originally reported by Business Insider: Spiegel has been exploring developing a drone product to bolster its re-orientation as a modern-day camera company. As B.I. originally reported, Snapchat had been in talks with a Berkeley-based selfie drone manufacturer, Lily Robotics, but the talks hadn’t turned into anything substantive. (Lily shut down in January after receiving more than $34 million in pre-orders for its product, but before it could figure out how to produce its drones.)

It remains unclear whether Snap is still pursuing the technology, or whether it is intended to be released to consumers. TechCrunch separately reported on Wednesday that Snap has considered selling a Snap-branded 360-degree camera, though the company is reportedly still in early phases of exploring such an endeavor. (A representative for Snapchat declined to comment for this story.)

The fact that Snap has looked to drones as another potential platform for its disappearing photo-and-video service raises a number of questions. For one, the market for drones is crowded: GoPro has its own camera-enabled drone—which it recently had to recall but plans to relaunch—as does Chinese drone company DJI. More important, it suggests that Snap is still experimenting with its revenue model ahead of its I.P.O., and that it has yet to settle on any kind of comprehensive hardware strategy. When Snap first released Spectacles, it referred to the device as a “toy,” allowing the company to temper expectations and downplay the product’s significance as a potential revenue stream. Yet hardware is central to how Spiegel is selling itself to investors. With the company’s core revenue streams not yet creating enough money to offset costs, the 26-year-old C.E.O. has expanded the scope of Snap’s ambitions to compensate.

This sort of shell game is nothing new in Silicon Valley. Uber, for one, has repeatedly sold investors on bigger and bigger promises, tacking on new features and services—food delivery, carpooling, trucking, self-driving cars, unmanned drone aircraft—that continually increase the size of its total addressable market. (CB Insights’s Anand Sanwal, who has made this argument, has called Uber a “ponzi scheme of ambition.”) Snap, however, doesn’t have that luxury. Soon the company will go public, and instead of relying on its ambitions, or the illusion of expectation that every Silicon Valley upstart sets for itself in its early days, the company will have to deliver for shareholders. For many potential investors, it remains unclear what it is, exactly, that Snapchat can deliver, aside from a messaging app that must now compete with Facebook and a potential hardware product that may have no purpose except to stoke interest in its I.P.O.