This product seems to simplify the entire process of home growing, which is a bit more involved than squeezing juice out of fruit. As long as it's priced and marketed appropriately, I don't see a reason why it shouldn't exist. Whether there's a market for it is another question, though.
That being said, every level of simplification grants a hobby a new audience. I think the objection here is the attempt to create a Juicero model, where you get a fancy machine that requires (maybe DRM'd? not sure) media pods in perpetuity if you want to keep using it.
(edit: doesn't appear to be vendor locked media, but the machine is $299... I spent less on that for my pressure canner, mason jars, fruiting chamber, and food dehydrator put together. sort of puts into question who this is for.)
It's a bit more involved than that, no? I'm not familiar myself, but don't you need to take into account things like temperature and humidity as well? If their mushroom blocks can tell the box the ideal conditions for each particular strain, and those can be maintained to produce a better end product, that already seems like a win over doing all of that manually.
> the machine is $299
Yeah, that's a bit much. They have to factor in mobile app development somewhere, right? :)
Again, I'm not saying that this particular product will succeed. But I think there might be a segment of the market that wants to get into home growing, but doesn't want to mess around with the DIY aspects of it.
During the fruiting phase, things are pretty easy. Once the substrate is colonized you sort of just take the lid off of your fruiting chamber, mist it with a sprayer, and wave the lid at it to blow the excess CO2 out. Once a day. That's what this $299 box does for you.
The part that's akin to baking bread is the initial media preparation and inoculation. You need to measure your media, hydrate it, put it in a hot thing (bread:oven::mycoculture media:pressure canner) for the requisite number of minutes. My first mycoculture attempts were far more successful than my first attempts at breadmaking.
https://fatmoonmushrooms.com/pages/oyster-grow-kit-instructi...
It's pretty easy. I learned it at a workshop for local mushroom hunting group.
Also Jucero was even worse than you think. It squeezed juice out of little plastic packets.
There are already many companies which will sell you pre-inoculated bricks which are delivered to you in a cardboard box which you use as the fruiting chamber. The only difference here is that this company made the fruiting chamber out of plastic instead of cardboard.
The pre colonized blocks they are offering could be placed in a Tupperware and would probably work as well.
This is a cool way to display that, though.
And by the way, absolutely none of this is too complicated for your average person. There are tons of literally step-by-step guides online for free.
Eh, it can be difficult. The most difficult part is sterilization and inoculations/transfers. This doesn't help with that. You can literally hook up a mister to a timer to get the same effect (I know, I've done it as a newbie).
But I agree that people will buy it, as they do many things that aren't truly necessary (doesn't bother me).
On hacker news it is considered gate keeping to invent ever simpler ways of doing things that are more accessible and are proven to work. In a parallel world someone figures out how to just throw spores in a bucket with rice with no thinking, no preparation and someone on HN will call that person out for gatekeeping because it is not using a fancy shaped box that uses microcontrollers and internet of things and all sorts of other pointless extras that have nothing to do with mushrooms but detract from learning how to grow them.
I would not pay $200 for this, but if you can make it look nice and make the process idiot-proof, I think there's a market for it.
The amount of active time needed to successfully grow a few flushes of cubes is a few hours total (prep work, misting, harvesting).
The rest of the time you are just observing it.