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Silicon Valley’s $400 Juicer May Be Feeling the Squeeze

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sinkfla87

Member
I am in love with this story. It's like someone took the bullshit byproducts of VC funding, crowdfunding, DRM and IoT and just squeezed them into a nutritious puree with enough Vitamin Schadenfreude to sustain me for days, maybe weeks.

I'm going to contact a few people in SV and see if there's a way we can invent a product that will insert the DRM juice bag for you! It will even turn it on and off for you!
 

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
They won't sell it to you without the $400 machine.

edit: Business idea. Buy a machine and charge people 20% markup to drop ship them juice packets.
I was thinking the same thing.
 

Brakke

Banned
The PR on that site doesn't even read as satire. Like, the makers of Juicero would read it while nodding and thinking, "fuck yeah, that's amazing."

The secret best part is the "shop" section of the site, which is clearly boilerplate from the template. Just a bunch of stock illustrations labeled "I'm a product."

More honest and straightforward than any copy produced by actual Juicero.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
I dunno if anybody's brought this up, but their YouTube channel had this gem.

https://youtu.be/fB0Q9HGlW10

I was more struck by this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N51oiMv3IJw

Instructions on how to create your juicing account, log onto the juicing app, and sync the juicer to the Juicero network. I can't believe I just wrote that.

And because they can't make anything easy, it also shows how you recycle the bags. You re-use the shipping box the pouches came in to send them back to Juicero for recycling. You can't actually recycle them yourself.
 

Ade

Member
I'm going to contact a few people in SV and see if there's a way we can invent a product that will insert the DRM juice bag for you! It will even turn it on and off for you!

Im honestly amazed they haven't gone for NFC on the bags so that the Juicer wakes up as you approach it.
 

NekoFever

Member
"hand squeeze hacks"


These people live on another planet

That coupled with the vertical video made me want to buy their juicer just to send it back for a refund.

Silicon Valley speak has turned "hack" into a word that makes me cringe a little, regardless of context now. I read a book recently about a startup heading for an IPO where they were bringing in people who described themselves as "growth hackers" and threw up in my mouth a bit.

I'm convinced there's going to be one hell of a crash in the not too distant future.
 

LordOfChaos

Member
So they put the fruit in a juicer and repackage the juice and the mash back into a bag for you to squeeze?

"The device Evans spent three years laboring to invent is a $400 WiFi-enabled tabletop machine that squeezes juice ... out of a bag of Juicero-brand juice. It squeezes bags of juice. It is a juice press that squeezes the juice ... out of bags of juice. Bags ... with built-in spouts ... that are filled with juice. Juice that comes in bags.

What kind of juice are you drinking? Oh, it’s bagfruit juice. Fresh-squeezed! "

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/i-just-love-this-juicero-story-so-much-1794459898
 

Ripenen

Member
Im honestly amazed they haven't gone for NFC on the bags so that the Juicer wakes up as you approach it.

Gotta save something for v2. That's also why they made the thing so heavy. Leaked renders from China show the next version will be 8% thinner and have no bezel on the screen.
 

Dalek

Member
This story is insanely funny.


Doug_Evans_HQv2.0.jpg
 

Akuun

Looking for meaning in GAF
They're having to offer people refunds....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-39664483

Chief executive Jeff Dunn said the criticism overlooked the "experience" of the machine.

He claimed the "hacking" of the pouches did not produce the same quality of juice. saying the machine was calibrated to deal with different ingredients differently.

He claimed the "hacking" of the pouches
Hacking the pouches.

HACKING THE POUCHES

MY HANDS WERE MAGIC HACKING MACHINES THIS WHOLE TIME
 

Ade

Member
Next up sex bot makers accuse people of taking matters into their own hands and hacking the sexual experience.
 
I went to Parsons for product design and the school was absolutely rife with this type of thinking and many professors were happy to reinforce it. Don't solve problems, make news ones you can sell people sexy solutions too. I remember turning blue in the face trying to explain how a classmates entire product concept was flawed because it defied the laws of physics, but all they could talk about was how it looked like it could be in an Apple store. Industrial design is awesome, but there are some really toxic trends and this juicer is a perfect manifestation of it. I take a tremendous amount of delight at seeing this blow up in their face and hopefully a bunch of VC wankers losing their money. Also, juicing in general is a waste imo. Fruits and vegetables are amazing, just eat the whole damn thing.
 

Nordicus

Member
Im honestly amazed they haven't gone for NFC on the bags so that the Juicer wakes up as you approach it.
nOzWJe7.png


Let me put it this way, Mr. Ade. The Juicero 9000 series is the most reliable juicer ever made. No 9000 juicer has ever made a mistake or distorted information. We are all, by any practical definition of the words, foolproof and incapable of error.
 

itwasTuesday

He wasn't alone.
So if your WiFi is down you can't make juice. If one day past expiration date you can't make juice.

Knowing​ what farms the fruits & veggies came from by scanning the QR code sounds novel.
 

Stop It

Perfectly able to grasp the inherent value of the fishing game.
Why not just eat fruit?
But how would you know if it was fresh if you didn't have a QR code to tell your machine that it is.

Also fruit is hard, we do all the work for you with JUICERO tm.

Silicon Valley is famous for inventing problems to fix them but this is amazing. Making a problem solvable without their products is new. Anyone forking out for this system deserves their wallets hoovered, and the ridicule of their peers.
 

dionysus

Yaldog
What this company actually does is sell you juice in a bag. Everything else they do is to try to drive up the price and justify a subscription model.

Their goal is overpriced juice sold through subscription model. Well, if this ever got popular, they would be undercut by cheaper suppliers and that VC presentation they made that said margins would be $4 a juice bag would fail. So they take a page from Keurig Green Mountain (who also call themselves a tech company), and try to impose DRM on the consumable product. In Green Mountain's defense, they actually made a wildly successful product that did fulfill a need for convenience before they tried to put DRM on the coffee. Juicero is just skipping the actually need for the product and the wildly successful part and going straight to the DRM so they can con VCs into giving them money with buzzwords.

So how do you get DRM on your subscription food. You make it require an internet connected QR code reader that fakes it as a cold press. Now an actual cold press that could get juice out of carrots and spinach that fit in the home would probably need a 480V power supply and cost thousands of dollars. But don't let that bother you, fake the press but putting mash in your juice bags but don't actually extract anything from the mash. Just have a machine that squeezes the pre-pressed juice out of the bag.

Now assume that humanity is dumb and no one will ever just cut open the bag and find juice in there.
 

Nordicus

Member
What?

Haven't you tried to cut a loaf of bread with a door stopper before?

You haven't lived a full life if not.
Look, there's just such a better home alternative to doorstop cutters.

You go to your bathroom and open the shower drain, then pick the pubes and hair from there and tie the hairs into a wire. You use that pubewire to cut the bread, and it's more efficient when the pubes are still wet.

Didn't your mother ever tell you about this? It's very environmentally friendly.
 
What?

Haven't you tried to cut a loaf of bread with a door stopper before?

You haven't lived a full life if not.

It's obviously a wedge of Parmigiano Reggiano. This person is trying to create a loaf of croque monsieur the American way, all spit and elbows.
 
What this company actually does is sell you juice in a bag. Everything else they do is to try to drive up the price and justify a subscription model.

Their goal is overpriced juice sold through subscription model. Well, if this ever got popular, they would be undercut by cheaper suppliers and that VC presentation they made that said margins would be $4 a juice bag would fail. So they take a page from Keurig Green Mountain (who also call themselves a tech company), and try to impose DRM on the consumable product. In Green Mountain's defense, they actually made a wildly successful product that did fulfill a need for convenience before they tried to put DRM on the coffee. Juicero is just skipping the actually need for the product and the wildly successful part and going straight to the DRM so they can con VCs into giving them money with buzzwords.

So how do you get DRM on your subscription food. You make it require an internet connected QR code reader that fakes it as a cold press. Now an actual cold press that could get juice out of carrots and spinach that fit in the home would probably need a 480V power supply and cost thousands of dollars. But don't let that bother you, fake the press but putting mash in your juice bags but don't actually extract anything from the mash. Just have a machine that squeezes the pre-pressed juice out of the bag.

Now assume that humanity is dumb and no one will ever just cut open the bag and find juice in there.

Ding ding ding. I work in the industry. VCs love buzz words and are really don't do a ton of diligence (at least not the manner that investors in more mature companies do). A lot of VCs made a lot of money on FB and other concepts and are now swimming in cash. They are all infected with FOMO (fear of missing out) and are willing to throw money at anything because its easier to lose money on an investment if a number of other large players did the same thing. Its why a lot of these startups have massive valuations with no revenue model or ability to generate profits. The VCs are throwing money at a wall and riding valuations up without having a plan for an exit.

There is a ton of money invested in unicorns with no realization event on the horizion. Its why a lot of these unicorns stay private. Strategic buyers don't want to buy the businesses because their opinion on the value is way different than what the investors basis is and more traditional PE firms aren't going to invest on a hope and a prayer that they can find someone stupider than them to sell the business too later. Thus the only exit for a lot of VC investments is an IPO. The public markets are fickle and means you actually have to open your books and mark your valuations to what the shares trade at.

Thus, the VCs have money invested in companies at incredibly high valuations with no potential for realization.
 
This is one of the dumbest products I've ever seen. Just eat an apple or something, the skin and everything else about it is good for you.
 
I went to Parsons for product design and the school was absolutely rife with this type of thinking and many professors were happy to reinforce it. Don't solve problems, make news ones you can sell people sexy solutions too. I remember turning blue in the face trying to explain how a classmates entire product concept was flawed because it defied the laws of physics, but all they could talk about was how it looked like it could be in an Apple store. Industrial design is awesome, but there are some really toxic trends and this juicer is a perfect manifestation of it. I take a tremendous amount of delight at seeing this blow up in their face and hopefully a bunch of VC wankers losing their money. Also, juicing in general is a waste imo. Fruits and vegetables are amazing, just eat the whole damn thing.

As someone who grew up with horrific eating habits and have slowly been fixing them juicing was really important to me not becoming an obese dying sack of human trash once my athletic career was over.

That said a regular blender and then a regular overpriced but not insanely so juicer were good enough.
 
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