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.
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.