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Comment by rfreiberger | Hacker News Reader

One of the big wake up calls I had during that time was a friend telling me about Webvan. At the time I was younger and not investing so the conservation was mostly around how great the food was, cheaper than up scale stores and they delivered. The echo that reflected much of the dot com era was as he mentioned "how do they make money doing this". The wild part is the wages they paid was higher than other delivery drivers, I worked in a warehouse at the time and frequently heard of seasoned UPS and FedEx drivers leaving to drive for the company.

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Funny that webvan is always cited as an example of a startup that could never work, but really just an early example of do something that doesn't scale and just keep doing it until you somehow make money. But VCs weren't yet ready for the unicorn burn.

Juicero was the mirror product, then: An overpriced orange juice machine, with little packets that you can only buy on subscription, but can’t suspend while on holidays, with a QR code to prevent you from consuming after your holidays. It is also down if it can’t reach the Wifi. It showed that you can overcharge and make everything become a cloud subscription, because money was unlimited on the consumer side this time.

Surprisingly, it didn’t work outside of the Bay area. Some entrepreneurs have difficulty seeing the world’s situation beyond their local horizon.

Their advertising video felt like something straight out of the TV show "Silicon Valley":

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X1oHp-VvhDE

While I can see luxury food delivery kind-of working (wealthy workers in the office ordering lunch, wealthy home workers ordering lunch, fitness nuts who want calories and good food without cooking), Juicero was just plain ridiculous.

Competition from local supermarket is too strong. I can get freshly squeezed juice from the store machine anytime I want for cheap.

Plus juice is kind of a crappy high sugar project that’s bad for you?

Relatedly, I have no idea how “Joe and The Juice” stores remain in business. They’re in super valuable real estate in cities across the country and as far as I can tell never have anyone in them.

Do they? How long have the same ones been around 5 or 10 years yet?

On other their products likely have such margin it might be possible with enough sales. The components aren't too expensive, there isn't massive number of labour and equipment isn't that big of investment either likely...

Isn't it like a Starbucks? Overpay for some juice and sit in the cafe and use their internet for a bit?

Reasonable deal for a lot of people, given that you're only overpaying on a thing that costs a tenner.

I keep hearing this, but I don‘t really think fresh orange juice, for instance, is as bad as sth like sunny delight or soda. I do not have a source though.

> Competition from local supermarket is too strong.

Honest question: Do startup millionaires still go shopping themselves? I imagine when you are between the area where you have a gardner for time-to-time tasks and don’t have “un majordome” yet to serve you at any time, there’s an entire higher-class-market-but-not-elites who would be interested in Juicero?

You, and everyone that responded to you, have no idea what Juicero was. It wasn’t orange juice at all, or any type of fruit juice. It was green juice. The founder made millions selling his chain of green juice stores on the east coast so he short had a history of success.

I have a friend that worked there so I even tried the product. I thought the idea was vastly overpriced, but it definitely had the chance of working. Lots of people are into green juice vs fruit juice and they were trying to create a new market.

> It wasn’t orange juice at all, or any type of fruit juice. It was green juice.

This is a distinction without a difference. It doesn't matter what the juice is called. It doesn't change the fact that it's idiotic to pay hundreds of dollars for a machine that just squeezes bags of fruits and vegetables, and needs an Internet connection to ensure you're locked in to only squeezing the company's pricy bags.

What it shows is people who criticize the company don’t actually know anything about it. If you’re going to criticize actually take the time to understand instead of throwing rocks thinking you’re so smart because you read a headline.

Those criticisms are all valid. The "juice is sugary and terrible for you" criticism is much less valid, since the premise was to juice vegetables.

"Green juice" is fruits and vegetables, FYI. Look at their marketing material. The bags listed the ingredients on the front and they included things like apple and pineapple.

The problem wasn’t the real world part it was the internet. I was there at the time, it was clear there was some value in all the delivery services and so on the issue was that it was so painful and tedious to dial in with a modem and wait for photos to download and navigate the catalog on a 56k (or 128c or whatever) connection, often losing your cart and having to start over.

And that was for those of us that were literary in digital stuff and comfortable with the internet. A lot of people just hadn’t gotten around to using it much yet.

It just wasn’t time yet. And there wasn’t any massive network effect or lock-in to capture like there was with something like a social network.

Being too early is the same thing as being wrong.

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