I had a friend who wanted to start a coin counting by mail business. The customer mails the coins in a flat rate package and then you count them and in exchange the people get a gift card to a local restaurant.
I had a friend who wanted to start a coin counting by mail business. The customer mails the coins in a flat rate package and then you count them and in exchange the people get a gift card to a local restaurant.
Not exactly an idea I heard but the company Juicero. Silicon valley start up that planned basically to be the Keurig of juicing. Their business model was built on selling $400 appliances that only worked with vegetable pouches they produced. A couple months in someone in the media demonstrated that you could just open the pouch and squeeze the juice out with your hand without needing the machine. The business tanked immediately after. The idea of immediate juice isn’t bad but the way they went about it was abysmal.
In 2017, Juicero was the target of widespread criticism after Bloomberg News published a story showing that the company’s produce packs could be squeezed by hand easily and effectively, and that hand-squeezing produced juice that was nearly indistinguishable in quantity and quality from the output of the company’s expensive Press device. The company defended its product and its process, claiming that squeezing packs by hand created undue mess and promoted a poor user experience, and later offered full refunds to any customers dissatisfied with their Press device
Fuckkkk I almost laughed in the rep’s face when they told me what the machine did. Bumped into them at the farmers market and it was insane.
I remember their pitch deck claimed that the machine squeezed with the force of two Teslas. I measure most things in terms of Teslas. The fact that the machine had to be connected to the Internet to work so it could tell whether you were using a real or fake juicero pouches was crazy. A lot of big funds got sucked into this including Google Ventures. When it came out that you could just squeeze it with your hand I just had to laugh.
A Tesla is a measure of magnetic flux density. I doubt that’s related to their claim at all.
As a Gen Zer founder I’m somewhat bitter how the previous generation completely ruined VC/PE funding for us. Plenty of really braindead ideas without clear roadmap to profitability got funding in the 2010s golden era of startups, peddling nothing more than growth myth.
Ha! I remember those! Some great Youtube videos on them.
Not only that, the machine itself was so massively overbuilt they were losing money on every one they sold.