If you have to say that to defend your position, then clearly it wasn't conventional wisdom. Find me newspaper articles that are calling domain names useless and a bubble.
You could say that same about Soylent as it's simply a Pediasure/Ensure marketed towards hipster 20-somethings. People love drawing the conclusion that superior marketing/design equates to better products.
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.
>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.
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.
I agree Blue Apron is equally ridiculous and I totally agree that Juicero marketed to the wrong crowd.
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
As a former blue apron customer I don't think it was ridiculous. I churned when my wife was out of the country. There are still recipes that they sent that I still cook. Now as a business I don't think they will be able to compete with a hybrid solution that amazon/Whole Foods will be able to devise. But I see Juicero as completely different.
For Odwalla/Naked juice:
Do you pay 8 dollars per bottle, need to wait for it to arrive in the mail, pay $400 for the juice press to make it, and get locked into a single product for all of your "fruit juice needs"?
You don't need to convince me that juicero was stupid and unnecessary, just saying there's an analogue to gp's example in that there are already fairly expensive ($4/bottle) juices out there showing that there's a market for juice. There are also much more ridiculously priced juices, including, yes, $8 juices. I'm not the target market for those, but they exist at cafes and some other grab and go type places and have for a bit, so there must be at least a small market for overpriced juice.
I'm not sure it's analogous though. It'd be analogous if juicero were selling just another juice bottle ready to drink but maybe mailed to you instead of sold in stores.
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.
Reminds me of an old tweet I made several years ago:
"The internet will do to society, what highways did to the landscape"
We see cheap fast food establishments scattered everywhere with bright signs while healthy whole food is being quietly digested by individuals and families amongst themselves after patient cooking (researching).
Bitcoin is only scarce for late adopters, by design early adopters of BTC software generated thousands of "coins" per week for running a mining-computation node of a normal 2-3GHz CPU.
BTC's network protocol service is not unique, and thus not scarce in the least. I.E. other protocols/network designs/token-ledgers offer the same service as BTC in addition to fixing the vulnerability to BTC's hashing algorithm which has led to the ASIC attacks on the Bitcoin network which just lead to centralization by the hardware producers.
As per the design of the Bitcoin software, payouts were made to users running standard home PCs with simple ~3Ghz processors, and as a result, the software minted thousands of BTC tokens to their accounts for the rather trivial processor cycles. As per the design of the bitcoin protocol, running the bitcoin software now on the same computer, would mint a fraction of a coin. Bitcoin was designed to favor the people who created it, and the few early users who ran the software.
The assumption that the bitcoin service is unique, rare, or scarce is just not the case. The historical records of these ponzi payouts are public record. Hundreds of alt coins with active 'networks' are running on the public Internet right now, offering the same service as the BTC network, and often improved upon features like scrypt, ZKP, or the EVM.
The divestment of digital beanie babies as I passed the hot potato of a 2.4-transaction-per-second digital message system with a horrible dev team and censor happy community currently in a civil war, to rubes who exchanged actual universally accepted fiat paper was enough to console me for a years to come.
Maybe we are all destined for the moon, as the legends go. Because a distributed database message system and expansive misinformation campaign has convinced people as much. Or maybe bubbles are temporary?
I agree with you. Bitcoin was a cool prototype with many oversights and inadequacies that got bolted to a runaway hype train. Some later cryptocurrencies have made modest improvements, but I don't think cryptocurrency will really be able to break through until a) the difficulty mechanism is fixed and b) reliable transaction confirmation is practically instantaneous.
I got into bitcoin in early 2010 right before it started to show up in mainstream news. CPU mining was already dead but I could GPU mine on my desktop and generate about 1 BTC/day. I ran this for the novelty for a few days and then turned it off. Not quite enough to get a skeptic's consolation for "years to come", but it was fun anyway. :P
Soundcloud is a digital discovery platform mostly. And a centralized free library that artists can release music on. It solves many problems for small-time artists and underground listeners.
Bandcamp found a similar market for physical music collectors and somehow monetized it well. SoundCloud is much more accessible though in terms of UX/UI.
Seems they should try to push for album/track monetization by artists. (Purchases made on SoundCloud / SoundCloud takes 1% fee etc)
