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Comment by polartx | Hacker News Reader

----Round 1---- $13m raised 20k units shipped ~$650 per unit

----Round 2---- $15m needed 36k units remaining ~$420 per unit

Obviously I'm not factoring in initial manufacturing costs.

Having 13 million to invest in manufacturing at scale, brought costs per unit sold down 35%, which is good. But I don't know many people that would buy a cooler for $500.

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The Kickstarter charged $165 or $185 per cooler.

What I don't understand is why this was so exciting in the first place. It looks like a normal cooler with a few cheap accessories (ice crusher, blender, light, usb charger, bluetooth speaker) and it's not even very big. Why were people so damn excited about it that they were willing to put up $165 for this Sharper Image wannabe.

Their website doesn't even talk about how good it is at being a cooler. How long does ice stay frozen in the hot sun? Can you keep your meat from going back over a long weekend at the campsite? Not that there is enough room in this thing for a camping trip. It's apparently focused on the beers on the beach crowd. How the hell did this shatter Kickstarter funding records?

Yeah, I'm apparently not the audience. Yeti seems to be doing well selling what are, to me, somewhat ridiculously expensive coolers but at least those are optimized for actually keeping stuff cold. The accessories on this thing are either gimmicks that I can see using once or twice because they're coo1--Make a frozen margarita at the beach!--or they're easily replicated with an inexpensive standalone speaker or whatever. (Indeed, there are also hand-cranked and battery-powered blenders for camping.)

ADDED: >Sharper Image wannabe

I had to laugh. This is EXACTLY the sort of thing that one would expect to see in a Sharper Image catalog.

Yeah, it is ridiculous. Even if the CC sold for exactly as advertised, and did exactly as advertised... it still isn't a good buy.

So you use the blender for a while... and then it breaks (through no fault of the cooler itself, say the dog chewed on it).

Now what? Send the whole thing back? Ditto for all the other crap tacked onto it. After a couple things break on it, then it turns into a large piece of junk.

And these things never work as well as dedicated devices.

Furthermore, there's a lot to be said for a cooler that can get wet or covered in sand, be hosed off, etc. while electronics are kept protected. If I really wanted something like this for the beach, tailgating, or a boat, I'd just buy whatever size/price point cooler met my needs (assuming I didn't already own one), pick up an appropriate waterproof/water resistant bag, and fill it with a battery-powered blender and whatever other accessories and eating/drinking implements I wanted.

We have a Yeti that we got for family road trips. It keeps stuff well refrigerated for long periods of time. I dunno how much wasted lunch meat we will need to save to make up for the ridiculous price ;)

> It's apparently focused on the beers on the beach crowd. How the hell did this shatter Kickstarter funding records?

I guess you're underestimating the size of the "beers on the beach" crowd.

I think there is also a big "Want to be part of the hype" crowd. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but I think many Kickstarter backers are impulse shoppers.

This thing is so stupid. Each time I read about it it boggles my mind. Its "The Homer" of coolers. Looks like one of those crappy multifunctional things they would sell on tv with even more crap tacked onto it. And then theres the price... I don't get it.

Grepper, speaking during a live-streamed web conference, also said the company is seeking an additional $15 million, a third of which would be used to fill 36,000 outstanding orders from backers.

I did have to laugh though at that cute info-graphic of where all the money went, tucked in the bottom right corner has a little asterisk -- "* not to scale".

Engel, Yeti and others make expensive coolers. Some can reach $500... but most people try to buy them on sale. Also, the market isn't massive as they are used mostly for recreational activities which are expensive endeavours to begin with.

I know plenty of fishermen that have spent more than $500 on coolers which do absolutely nothing more than keep cold things cold. People are willing to pay money for the tools that meet their needs.

It's not clear to me that this cooler is actually good at keeping things cold. Their kickstarter page doesn't seem to want to talk about it.

I'd thought maybe this thing had its own tiny built-in compressor and that's why it was so exciting, but it appears to be a boring old regular cooler with a bunch of cheap junk bolted on.

Give me a $500 per unit budget and I can pretty much guarantee you that I could put together a nice kit of higher quality components with plenty of money left over for profit.

Have you considered starting a Kickstarter?

Not really. If I did, it would be to market and gauge interest in something that I largely knew how to do already and didn't involve a big capital outlay.

ADD: In this case, my point is that with an hour of research and shopping I could source existing retail products that (for me) would be a better bundle. Of course, this wouldn't be cool.

It is. I have always been perplexed by the start. For the need, the cost and ultimately the trust required that it would even deliver. Let alone the quality!

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