Laypeople always seem shocked when a VC-funded company implodes. We should actually be surprised if we didn't see routine flame-outs, as that would mean VCs aren't taking on appropriate quantities of risk for the asset class.
As a final aside: I've lost count of the number of times I've pulled an about-face on businesses I initially thought were stupid -- once I had a chance to talk to the founders and better understand the vision. Many of these seemingly 'dumb' ideas have surprising depth.
Some, granted, are in fact dumber than a box of rocks.
Few would be surprised by a few million being spent looking for a market fit on a wacky idea, it's the scale and obvious demand to get involved at such a late stage.
Often times, if you can make a consumer happy with the experience, they don't care if they're overpaying for a terrible product.
The problem with Juicero is that their user experience laid bare how futile and ridiculous their product was by having consumers manufacture the product themselves.
If the Juicero simply made those juices in a bottle (EVEN IF the nutritional value was lost during bottling) I can see them succeeding based purely on their marketing and people suspending disbelief to support their idea they were being healthy while looking cool.
Blue Apron and every other meal kit delivery business sits on the other end of the same road, yet they seem to be doing okay and without the same level of ridicule.
I wonder whether Juicero could have avoided this outcome had they mailed their customers whole fruits and asked them to peel and fill their own juice bags, that way people will not be able to put two and two together to realise that it is just another beverage maker with DRM.
P.S. I remember Juicero being rather well received by the resturant industry as it is fully automated and requires minimal cleanup, so perhaps they marketed to the wrong crowd after all.
Juicero was too visible in high-standard markets and thus became an easy target. Whereas Blue Apron flew under the critic radar (mostly in Facebook mom feeds) before gaining enough market share for consumers to shrug off ridicule
https://www.google.com/search?num=20&q=fresh+food+delivery+s...
The last 3 words make this all the more stupid.
What juicero did was sell you an expensive machine to essentially squeeze odwalla bottles for you into a cup... something ludicrous like that.
There may be a market for juice bottles, but juicero wasn't selling juice bottles.
VCs are not idiots, they are probably much more humble than what ordinary people think they are, because any active VC--especially if they're successful--would have run into at least several cases where they passed on a company because they "looked stupid", just to find out that they went on to become wildly successful.
Once you go through this routine several times, you generally learn to appreciate and not immediately discount seemingly stupid ideas. This happens not just to VCs but overall if you live in Silicon Valley.
Since ideas alone aren't enough, the only good measure in my experience is looking at the person who's working on it. And here lies a lot of mistakes VCs make, they just look at some guy who was successful in the past and just think it's safe to bet on them.
To be clear, I also think Juicero was a stupid idea, and I think it was stupid of them to waste so much money upfront instead of starting scrappy, but my point is that there is no such thing as an "absolutely stupid idea". Ideas are contextual.
So I don't think it's completely crazy. But a back-of-the-envelope calculation should have shown that it's probably not a great idea.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/12/081210090819.h...
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/jan/05/is-sugar-wor...
Many people make coffee each day and they might even drink juice, but most people drink juice from bottles, so Juicero was solving a problem that didn’t really need solving for the average consumer.
Contrary to popular belief none of that stuff is healthy. It doesn't matter whether it comes from a juicero or from a bottle, it just all contains far too much sugar.
IMHO, of you take an apple and extract the fiber and water, you shouldn't be calling that fruit any more.
- Expressos are minimally hard to make correctly, and those capsules are above even the quality of some coffee shops.
- There is a big movement of gourmet coffee that favors high priced drinks with the correct marketing (not perfectly correlated with quality).
None of those seem to apply to Juicero. They may have aimed at the last point, but I don't think it's something you can create on a startup's budget.
Capsule is far more expensive over the it's lifetime than something like a Gaggia Classic. Capsules aren't anywhere near the quality of coffee shops, unless you're counting Dunkin.
Nitpick on your nitpick. While the word originated in Italy as espresso and that is mostly what we use in the English-speaking world, expresso is not totally uncommon and it's not necessarily a misspelling or folk-etymological error. French and Portuguese use the expresso variation for instance, and the x spelling is considered 're-latinized'.
Depending on where you live the beverage may have entered your culture via French or Italian influences, perhaps one reason why expresso seems more common in Canada than in the US (though espresso dominates in Canada as well, no doubt helped by the ubiquity of Starbucks).
To add on to this - many offices replace their teas with Keurig capsules as well. This leads to a tea that's much more expensive (capsules are something like 4 or 5 times the cost of a tea bag), dirtier, more complicated and more time consuming to make.
Looking at the popularity of Keurig machines, I'm not surprised people saw potential in Juicero.
Portuguese is my first language, and I never even noticed it's written differently in English. Noticed now.
As I said in my gourmet item, it is not something that correlates perfectly with quality. It may correlate better with price than quality. It's a property coffee shares with wine.
The cheaper capsule machines are about the same price as the cheaper non-capsule espresso machines.
It's true that the high end of espresso machines goes well above the high end of capsule machines, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant.
If you look on gumtree (like craigslist here in Australia) by far the most common appliance item by a very large margin are basic juicers. People like the idea, but in practice they go un-used because they're a pain to clean and people can't be bothered.
Best I could tell that was the same idea Juicero was after.
I get my beans whole, by subscription, grind them myself just before making an espresso. Another advantage of starting from the beans (apart from something that is actually pleasant to drink) is that you can select lots of other brewing methods, whether it's aeropress or moka pot, cafetiere or filter, with different grind levels as appropriate.
Also if you like milk-based coffee products (where the taste of the coffee is far more diluted, and the quality is less relevant), having a steam wand is handy and much better than any attachment I've used on any coffee machine, including Nespresso, and other much more expensive models that do bean to cup.
That is 100 seed rounds that never happened. Could we have learned the lessons here for less?
I'm gueessing yes; the ridiculously over-engineered [1] juice press is a good sign that efficient use of capital was just not a priority.
[1] https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensi...
Was the price too high? Didn’t manage to turn PR against them? Was it designed to fail?
I think the product is awesome in every possible way.
The model worked for Nespresso (Kruger or smth in US), printers, dishwashers, Soylent, etc.
I'm pretty sure this is a deliberate reference to the specific thing. I'm not sure if I won't end up looking stupid for saying the obvious, but this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
If one negative article about your product can kill your company, your problem is not a couple of journalists. It's your product.
Hate to be glib, but I'm pretty sure it's all about e.g. Redfin and Vanguard, and that there's a sucker born every minute.
I am NOT saying anything bad about the DSC, I love the commercials, but you have to wonder about a company who's business model is intertwined with subscribing to a product.
I order diapers for my kid on a subscription. As a consumer it works great for me since I didn't have any upfront one time cost like $700.
The problem I see with Juicero and its investors is that the machine is not unique, it is redundant, the investors were clearly blinded by the founder's pedigree to overlook the simple clear fact that the machine was not needed and the founder was delusional to think the machine was needed.
Can someone watch the video in the article and explain what sort of mindset you have to be in and think that this is a good idea? Perhaps the initial vision was different somehow and the final product does not align with what you thought you were putting your money behind? Is it possible that you see the issues, but have so little faith in consumers not to buy crap that it seems like you'll make a reasonable profit? Maybe there's something you see or know that I don't -- perhaps some sort of shake up in the fruit industry was set to make this a hit only to not meet expectations?
I am now more deeply concerned than ever about the effect that an exploding tech bubble is going to have on our economy.