Juicero founder defends machine

Keurig is huge. It's a money machine. Why not spin that into another market? Maybe you'll land an easy flip: build it, prove it, and get acquired by the company behind Keurig or some other food product/service mega-corp. Cha-ching.

This is reasoning by analogy rather than from first principles.

Most people reason mostly by analogy and so therefore most investors reason mostly by analogy. Reasoning by analogy is why these kinds of bad "X but for Y" or "like X but Y" ideas get funded. They look like other successful ideas by simple pattern recognition. Add in a team with good credentials (secondary indicators) and a founder who sends solid alpha-primate signals (matters little unless sales are in-person) and what's not to like?

To see why "Keurig for Juice" is a bad idea, we have to look at it from a first principles point of view.

Fruit is perishable, and the taste of juice is highly dependent upon the freshness of the source fruit. As a result a juicing machine is really only going to be competitive with pre-packaged juice if the fruit is fresh. Fresh fruit juicers already exist, but they're not super-profitable since there is no recurring revenue angle. You can buy fresh fruit at any supermarket or farmers' market, and indeed doing so is likely going to give you fresher fruit than getting it from a specialized vendor.

Fruit is also heavy. It's mostly water. That means shipping it around is expensive, especially when you factor in the need to preserve it at a low temperature (dry ice? thermoses?). That means competing with supermarkets and other experts in food shipping (or local farmers, etc.) is going to be very hard and shipping costs will eat your margins.

All that means a Keurig for Juice has to be expensive. That means it has to be a premium product. Premium customers for a juice machine are only going to be interested in it if the juice it produces is very good and very fresh. That in turn amplifies all the problems above in a vicious cycle. In the end you're left with the very top of the premium market, and that market is more likely to buy their premium juice from a restaurant or, at the very top, have their in-home maid/nanny/whatever make them fresh squeezed juice from locally grown fruit.

Coffee is different. Coffee is somewhat perishable but nowhere near as perishable as fruit, and it's far easier to package and preserve. It preserves for a long time at room temperature. It can sit on store shelves. It's also small and light and easy to ship.

Keurig works because it makes sense from first principles. It's easy to package coffee in a cartridge and it's fairly easy to build a machine to brew it. The result is something more convenient than drip coffee and customers like that, and the cost of doing this is not prohibitively high for either supplier or customer.

Fruit fails for the aforementioned reasons. Keurig for fruit makes no sense.

Reason from first principles, not by analogy.

Reason from first principles, not by analogy.

Reason from first principles, not by analogy.

so...relevant to investors and the few thousand (is it even that many?) owners of the product.

International press coverage in BBC, Bloomberg, Forbes, TechCrunch, etc. seems vastly out of proportion of the importance of this story.

the media response to this has been so rapid and so extreme that it makes me think conspiratorial thoughts, like someone has a vested interest in their demise and pulled some levers to create this media shitstorm.

Also sent him flying over a cliff to his death, so kind of a mixed bag.

"There such thing as bad publicity" - this is what I learned, too.

Compared to this company, is so sad to see other projects not taking off because they fail at the funding stage (for one of the many reasons they might not control).

Day and Night Teslas. Always be playing offense!

Not so much of overengineering, but of a failure to properly segment the market and find product-market-fit. Remember, they're putting some serious markup on those pouches (like any "capsule"-style product e.g. Keurig/Nespresso), so they could probably sell the pouches and app (for those features like reminding people to drink before it goes bad) by themselves and make a decent enough profit that way to serve as a foundation for future growth.

The $400 machine could then be marketed as the premium, upmarket option - allowing you to freeze the pouches, allowing you to get pouches with fruit and vegetables that are harder to squeeze by hand, etc.

Now, the pouches are probably too expensive anyway, and the $400 for an upsell is also probably too expensive anyway, and Jeff Dunn probably raised too much, too quickly (forcing those kinds of high prices), but... that's a different matter.

Thank you! I'm surprised out of all the articles I read, none of them actually showed what's inside.

Produced by Juicero though.

Seems legit enough, but it's still a classic information problem.

Nothing is inherently wrong with kid rock. I think the source of that quote was arguing that a lot of bandwidth is being given to a story about a luxury appliance whereas other stories are likely more deserving of that bandwidth.

he seems like a bit of a jackass, but I've never met him, so I don't really know. mostly though is the question of why Kid Rock should get invited to white house to meet personally with the president. It's just an obvious and absurd case of political tribalism.