I bought myself one in September. I love to cook and cook 70% of meals. Almost everything is from scratch and takes over an hour. I now use this Instant Pot 3 or 4 days a week. I owned a non-electric pressure cooker my whole life and find this makes it so convenient to just get good tasting food done quickly and with much less prep work.
Also this is about Tech Startup inventor making such a strong impact on appliances. No advertising just Amazon and Internet Word of Mouth.
Edit: Also it is virtually sold out across the internet. Bought one for my parents and it was only found by stopping in at stores and looking for the last one not inventories.
And sending units to reviewers is paid advertising. I'd like to hear more about that. Was that his plan from the beginning? Make the same device everyone else does at the same price but get blog reviews?
> In 2010, after several months of sluggish sales in and around Ontario, Mr. Wang listed the Instant Pot on Amazon, where a community of food writers eventually took notice. Vegetarians and paleo dieters, in particular, were drawn to the device’s pressure-cooking function, which shaved hours off the time needed to cook pots of beans or large cuts of meat.
> Sensing viral potential, Instant Pot sent test units to about 200 influential chefs, cooking instructors and food bloggers. Reviews and recipes appeared online, and sales began to climb.
I really don't know what you are talking about. It spells out exactly what they did, and why they did it.
It also talks about taking advantage of "Fulfilled by Amazon" back in 2010, still early in the program, and credits Amazon with over 90% of it's sales at one point.
Overall, it's an interesting story about a product that succeeded largely through viral marketing but I'd have liked more detail than you're likely to get from a general interest article.
I gather from some of the articles linked (http://refineandfocus.com/when-brand-communities-become-cult... and https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/from-ottawa-to-world-domina...) that unlike other past influencer marketed products, Instant Pot largely utilized Internet space: big platform social media word-of-mouth to achieve their affects. Given that Internet social media space is growing, I would expect more of these type of marketing stories in the future.
Some of it's probably the product for sure. If I remember right, rice cookers like the Zojirushi models had pretty much everything Instant Pot has, except the pressure cooking part. But that's a pretty big "except", given the dodgy past of traditional stove-top pressure cookers.
Influencer marketing is a big deal in many product categories these days. The details vary by B2B or B2C, product/service area, etc. But reviews by people who may not be full-time writers and reviewers can be very important, especially for product categories that don't have a lot of trusted expert review sources.
With money and goods often changing hands there can be a whiff of payola about the whole process. But most people who have a trusted following really are giving honest opinions. You may be able to get me to write a review if you send me something I'm interested and qualified to have an opinion on. I'm not going to be positive just because because I got some freebie though.
I still like the stove top 8 qt model for when we have company for dinner and I am making a roast, (I always try to eat a roast all the time so good excuse).
How did those blogs settle on the Instant Pot when better known brands had functionally the same units at the same price (which the author seems not to know)? Why is it continually more successful than pre-existing brands from much larger companies? Crock Pot sells a unit for half the price. Almost all brands of electric pressure cooker have between 4 and 4.5 stars on Amazon because they're all about the same and admittedly a good product.
That's the story and it gives it short shrift. Not how Instant Pot invented something that actually existed for decades. Or how they don't explode, a problem solved before I was born.
If they started at 1 sale the first year they would be at 64 sales. No matter where they started they doubling every year for 6 years is 64x (2^6) sales.
64x sales over 6 years is great if you're an investor, but it isn't news.
Inability to buy one means they are having trouble with production.
You can bet it is doing more than 2x this year with great sales copy in the NYT.
Makes me want to cancel my NYT subscription.
I think you should just do it. This is an article about a kitchen appliance and how the guy gave away 200 units and used Amazon Fulfillment to grow his company.
> Inability to buy one means they are having trouble with production.
Yes they can't make enough of them even though they are doubling production every year.
Good point. I actually unsubscribed previously because of their "native advertising" policy (and then resubscribed in the last year or so).
> Yes they can't make enough of them even though they are doubling production every year.
The point I was trying to make in the first post was that doubling sales/production/anything else every year for six years doesn't mean a whole lot without seeing year 1.
1) If they doubled production every year for 5 years maybe they should have had extra capacity for year 6.
2) If year 1 they sold 1 unit then this year they sold on the order of 64 (obviously minimal). If year 1 they sold 100 units then this year they sold on the order of 6400. From a production standpoint that is not a difficult task.
I was just disappointed that NYT ran what is essentially a corporate PR puff piece as a "news" article.