It's amazing how you can write a whole article on this, but the gist is they built something with low utility value. period.
If you look at it from this point of view, everything else is just side effect.
- It failed because it's not fashionable? => No. See bluetooth headset. Also see Crocs. If it's useful, people will use it.
- It failed because it waited 5 months to sell it? => No. See Apple.
- It failed because the excitement died off by the time it shipped? => No. See all kinds of films that succeeded WITHOUT any initial hype (such as the Matrix)
- It failed because it couldn't get any influencers to endorse the product? => No, see Snapchat. Yeah their original app itself.
- It failed because the content couldn't be ported over to other platform without cropping? => No. In fact, if Spectacles would have succeeded, Techcrunch would probably be blabbering about how the key to success is how brilliant its marketing strategy was, so that all the videos uploaded to youtube and instagram had the "signature snapchat crop", which got everyone else curious.
The only arguments I agree with in this article are related to its utility--how it's considered rude to be video taping someone else, and how it was limited to sunglasses format.
The rest is bullshit because they're one of those "MBA case studies" type after-the-fact interpretation, which in most cases are bullshit.
Just go build something useful and you will never have to worry about being "fashionable" or all the gimmicks. In fact as a tech company you should never see yourself as a fashion company. It's a myth created by ignorant media pundits who's never built a product in their life.
I disagree with your entire comment and here’s why - in my view, saying that the reason something failed because it relieved no itch or there was insufficient utility is at par with suggesting that trading is simple because you have to “Buy Low and Sell High, d’oh”. It teaches no one anything they don’t instinctively know.
Everything the article says - be it about influencers not picking up and promoting the Spectacles to difficulties with porting content without cropping - is extremely useful to anyone else looking to launch a Spectacles type device.
>Everything the article says - [...] - is extremely useful to anyone else
The post you replied to tried to explain why it's actually not useful. The journalist uses a style of seductive writing (some call it "narrative fallacy"[1]) which connects plausible-sounding causes to its supposedly logical effects. That style of explanation can actually make readers dumber about what happened because it leaves out counterexamples.
That "narrative fallacy" is common in writings from Harvard Business Review, histories, biographies, newspapers & pundits trying to explain why the Dow Jones Index went up/down, why startups/products failed/succeeded, etc. All of those suffer the omission of counterexamples.
Of course it would be tautological to say "what's useful is useful" but that's not what the parent is saying.
The parent is saying that usefulness is the main, if not only, cause of success, and that other factors are in fact irrelevant (namely, fashionableness, launch strategy, celebrity endorsements, etc.)
You can agree or disagree with that thesis, but here you're misrepresenting it.
“Usefulness” is not a metric that can measured or sought in isolation. Usefulness needs an actor trying to perform an action desiring a result.
When OP says something failed because it isn’t useful, they are deliberately ignoring the subject and object of the equation.
When the article says that influencers didn’t glom on to Spectacles, they are making a statement about influencers not finding it useful but if you read the parent comment, this observation is useless because it obfuscates the true problem - that Spectacles is “useless”.
P(Success) is highly correlated with (Marginal Value / Marginal Cost)
The original Snapchat app succeeded because the marginal cost is low (everyone already has a smartphone) and it provides a good marginal value to a subset of population (over other social networks).
Spectacles carry higher monetary and more importantly convenience and social costs to use and add little extra value beyond existing solutions.
The same framework could be applied to Uber, AirBnb, ... as well as many startup failures. Note that P(Success) or probability of success implies that there are factors other than those included in the model.
I’d love to have refinements or counterexamples to the model if anyone is interested.
The entire luxury market disagrees with this. This isn't a small market: companies like Louis Vuitton, BMW, etc (and even arguably Apple) are huge, profitable entities selling large numbers of goods to large numbers of people.
Even outside the luxury market there are numerous other factors, not least of which include: distribution, vitality, marketing etc.
Edit: Also there are at least three Nobel prizes showing how marginal value isn’t what matters in making choices (Nash, Kahneman, Thaler)
Distribution and marketing are good points. Inferior products with better marketing and distribution sometimes win out especially when they partner with monopolistic/oligopolistic channels.
What do you mean by 'vitality'?
Luxury products provide social signal value rather than pure performance.
I agree that imperfect rationality is a major factor in human decision making and perhaps should be included into the model somehow.
I'm not sure how Nash's game theory is related to this. Care to elaborate?
PS. I didn't downvote you and feel that too much downvoting, sometimes unwarranted, occurs on HN lately.
Luxury products provide social signal value rather than pure performance.
Social signaling is often (usually? Outside subsistence cases - there are some good studies showing how this switches over) more important than performance.
Sometimes performance and social signaling are correlated, but they don't have to be.
I'm not sure how Nash's game theory is related to this. Care to elaborate?
A product marketplace is pretty much the perfect example of a non-competitive game. Indeed, the New Yorker used is as one:
The setting could be nuclear negotiations, such as the ones currently taking place between Iran and the great powers. It could be a product market, in which a number of firms compete for business.[1]
This is a relatively mature field, and there are some fairly comprehensive ways of expressing the likelihood of success of a product.
Unfortunately your formula doesn't capture anything like enough of the complexities of a market place.
But hey - it is simple, and you typed it quickly, and it seems like it could be right so nothing else matters, right?
Virality without value advantage tends to be short-lived.
Social signaling is part of the ‘value’ in my model.
The utility of existing competition and their costs are included in the term ‘marginal’.
I am aware that my simple model, occurring in a couple minutes, is incomplete that’s why I asked for refinements. Including factors like distribution & marketing seems very useful. However, capturing imperfect rationality does not seem possible for a simple model.
Do you have references to the ‘fairly comprehensive ways of expressing the likelihood of success of a product’?
I don't know. There must be more factors. How else would you explain the success of companies like Apple, Tesla and Xiaomi. Or for that matter, to a certain extent every luxury product.
Marginal Value, MV(iPhone) ~= MV(crap, and most non-crap, android phones) (granted, this is probably not true for the original iPhone). But except for that one time it is certainly not true. The quality is clearly different, however.
Even more clear is the Tesla case: MV(Roadster) <<< MV(alternatives). It wasn't the best electric car, it wasn't the best car, it wasn't ... however again there was a clear difference in quality.
I would argue most real estate developments are equally examples of this (mostly because laws prevent them on competing on anything other than quality in most inner cities). Trump's whole empire seems an example of it too.
It seems to be entirely possible to achieve success by simply copying a badly executed idea, and doing it better.
I have an Android phone for purely economical reasons, but I tend to hate it, because it's buggy as hell, nothing really works the way it should.
Apple phones are way way overpriced but they're so much better than the competition. It's not true people buy Apple phones only for fashion reasons. The absolute value of an iPhone is vastly superior to the marginal value of any other phone, and the marginal value depends on how much you use your phone.
I don't use my phone very much so I can tolerate an Android phone; but if my personal or professional life depended on it, I would buy an iPhone.
You must have a very very cheap or an especially buggy Android phone.
Having used both Android and iOS I think it's quite clear that both platforms are just as buggy as one another with the recent iOS11 outpacing Android in terms of bugginess by quite a large margin.
When you buy an iPhone you are paying for the build quality and for the marketing, you are not getting an objectively 'better' phone.
You also pay for proprietary operating system. Which is a main differentiating point of iPhones. I have used all types of phones (iOS, Android, Windkws Phone, Symbian). Apple has the best operating system. It has superior UX, is most user friendly and has deep vertical integration with other Apple products.
That’s worth a lot of money to most users. I think more people are willing to pay premium to get the great operating system compared to hardware which might be secondary.
All of that is very subjective (and why do you state this as a 'fact'?).
If you don't use Apple as your main computer you basically have zero integration. Don't even get me started on interoperability (you can't even use the iPhone headphones on a mac??)
That the UX is superior is also highly subjective. There are many things that are either impossible to do or a massive pain to do on an iPhone; I would not consider that good UX (for example try looking at a picture you just took on your camera and apply some filters before posting it to instagram. The only way I have found to do that is to open instagram and open the picture in that app. The notification system is a massive joke. There are dozens of other such examples).
What is worth a lot of money to users is convenience and habituality. Having to change your habits, workflow and frame of mind can be quite taxing for some people.
Mobile phones and cars are used in public and many people associate their personal identity with them. Here are the key values I believe are provided by each of your example:
iPhone: signifier of good taste, ease of use (relative to Android), being well-off (in developing countries)
Xiaomi: middle class or upper-middle class status (in China), good value for money
I agree that current iPhones and Xiaomi phones do not provide much better features relative to their competition (no-name Android phones in the case of Xiaomi). Their values lie elsewhere.
Tesla Roadster: cutting-edge, environmental sensibility
In fact, by sales volume, Roadster itself was not a success. Tesla only sold 2,450 of them in 30 countries [1]. Model S provides much better value for cost and correspondingly achieved much stronger success.
Luxury products in general tend to be associated with social exposure. Maybe luxury mobs or floor cleaning liquid exist but either they do provide some special features for a niche or their sales volumes are relatively tiny.
>>but the gist is they built something with low utility value. period
Yep. Today we live in times where apparently this is secondary, however, so they gotta make up a ton of crap.
A friend has a pair. They work... fine. The app support is... fine, and kind of novel actually given that rotation on the screen works with snaps shot with spectacles only.
While you're right that if they had built something with "high utility value", they could have succeeded despite these points, for a pure gimmick that anyone would have only bought ought of curiosity, they failed to capitalise on the sales they could have made in the early period of significant media attention they got.
Gimmicks like that (tamagotchi, fidget spinner, yoyo) have a limited shelf life. That's kind of the genius of many Kickstarters... Gimmicks that noone would buy after careful consideration can sell a decent number of units at "peak hype".
Yes, such analysis without data is just BS. I would have liked to see following data:
1. Was snapchat users advertised about this product frequently? If not then its failure in execution right there.
2. What was the conversion rate if they did?
3. Where there any user studies for people who did not convert? What was the distribution of their reasoning? Price, battery life, availability?
4. Was the video/photos uploaded through these glasses carried the advertise for the device itself?
5. What was the influence ratio (friends buying product after one friend bought it)?
The thing is that this idea like most ideas was good but execution probably wasn't. The whole trick behind blockbuster product is to understand failure in execution, fix them and reiterate. Never stop after the failure.
1. Kind of/yes. They had campaigns at certain times.
2. Low
3. idk
4. Yes, they did. It would say "taken with spectacles" and the format kind of advertized/demonstrated the product
5. No one I know besides me bought one.
The problem is no one cares about snapchat that much. The average user isn't taking it so seriously that they want to spend money on hardware like this, let alone charge it, set it up, take it around with them etc. If snapchat charged $0.10 to continue using it half their userbase might just uninstall.
I absolutely agree with you. It’s plain and simple. They failed because they were useless.
Like Silicon Valley builds a lot of products out of a perceived need of their local area, which often doesn’t translate into worldwide product need, Snap built something for the Venice hippster cool-kid crowd. Huge where Snap is located. Tiny globally really.
I got the spectacles and as sunglasses they wre pretty low quality. They only have one size, which doesn’t fit my head well, and the hinges get too loose after just a few days.
So the movie had a huge promotional campaign and nobody noticed or cared? It made $28 million on its opening weekend, 16% of its US gross. This isn't some unknown movie that built up in popularity as word about it spread around.
Sure, you'll get some people to wear it, see whitemenwearinggoogleglass at tumblr, but ignoring fashion in wearables is just inviting competitors to put you out of business.
I also don't think they "failed". I think it was all about positioning the company as "not just a teen social app" to help with the IPO. The pitch is Snap is really a camera/picture/video company that happens to have a popular social media app.
If you look at it from this point of view, everything else is just side effect.
- It failed because it's not fashionable? => No. See bluetooth headset. Also see Crocs. If it's useful, people will use it.
- It failed because it waited 5 months to sell it? => No. See Apple.
- It failed because the excitement died off by the time it shipped? => No. See all kinds of films that succeeded WITHOUT any initial hype (such as the Matrix)
- It failed because it couldn't get any influencers to endorse the product? => No, see Snapchat. Yeah their original app itself.
- It failed because the content couldn't be ported over to other platform without cropping? => No. In fact, if Spectacles would have succeeded, Techcrunch would probably be blabbering about how the key to success is how brilliant its marketing strategy was, so that all the videos uploaded to youtube and instagram had the "signature snapchat crop", which got everyone else curious.
The only arguments I agree with in this article are related to its utility--how it's considered rude to be video taping someone else, and how it was limited to sunglasses format.
The rest is bullshit because they're one of those "MBA case studies" type after-the-fact interpretation, which in most cases are bullshit.
Just go build something useful and you will never have to worry about being "fashionable" or all the gimmicks. In fact as a tech company you should never see yourself as a fashion company. It's a myth created by ignorant media pundits who's never built a product in their life.