Juicero: the $400 juicer that couldn't make juice | Sidebean

0:00Flowing ad-bunch it on metrics that look great, till the CFO sees them, that's Bullspend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't. Cut the Bullspend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign term secretions apply. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. College football is back. So, Hilton called on me the superstition concierge

1:00to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 555 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for this day. This video was brought to you by us, Slidebean. Make beautiful slide presentations in no time. Get one free month by signing up at slidebean.com slash YouTube. Can 60 seconds and a unicorn that managed to raise $120 million? If you ask Doug Evans founder of Juice Arrow, he will say yes. On April 19, 2017, Bloomberg posted a video titled Do You Need a $400 Juicer? It showed in just one minute that you could obtain the same results by squeezing the juice bags with the juicer ultra-technological juicer with your own hands. Five months later, the charm of the company ended up fermenting

2:03and there was no alternative but to recognize what was obvious. The Cold Press Juice startup came to an end. But did this iMac of juicers have a future? The investment and attention that attracted such firms as Google Ventures, Cliner, Perkins, Coffield, and Buyers, and even the Campbell Soup Company made it seem so, but the story turned out different. So in this episode, we're going to cover the birth of a new idea, the launch of this innovative company, the fall, its attempts to stay alive, and finally, the cost of death. So this is startup forensics, Juice Arrow. All right, so where did this great idea come from? Doug Evans told Medium that at age 30, he loved life, until something stopped him dry. Death. In 1994, his mother died of cancer, and then his father of heart disease. Later on, type 2 diabetes came to the life of his brother,

3:05as well as atrial-free relation, hypertension, and two strokes. Evans seemed genetically predisposed to die young, and decided that it was time to adopt a healthier lifestyle. This is when he met his future partner, Denise Mary. She introduced him to veganism. Soon, Evans adopted this raw and vegan diet. It was Mary who told him about the benefits of cold-pressed juice, a procedure that eliminates the juice of the fibrous body of fruits and vegetables in order to retain most nutrients in it. And thanks to that, Doug Evans invested part of his resources to create organic avenue, the first cold-pressed juice store in New York. Although they started with this idea in 2002, and at that time, the cold-pressed juices were novel, similar companies proliferated over time, whose market presence began to add pressure to Evans' business. Organic avenue was sold in 2012, passing through the hands of its financial investors, and then it disappeared. This, of course, represented a problem, but at the same time an epiphany for Evans, who was missing the cold-pressed juice. He wanted a juicer to do it, but not just any juicer.

4:06He wanted it to be easy to clean and use. And this was how 12 prototypes and 1200 days later, Juicero, the $700 juicer, appeared. An extravagant juicer. Juicero launched on March 31, 2016, and in addition to its high price, it offered small bags loaded with chopped fruits and vegetables that, in the best style of an ink cartridge, were placed in advice and then pressed with the force capable of lifting two Teslas, according to Evans. But it didn't aspire to be an appliance in the home, because besides standing out for its large size, about 16 inches, and its design, it also aspired to become a technological platform ready to take advantage of the internet of things. The device incorporated a chip to connect to the network and a QR code reader. A juicer with an internet connection? Yes. Juicero connected to the home Wi-Fi, and even had a mobile app. So you'll wonder, what for? So each of the juicero bags came with a unique QR code, which allowed the customers to know where the fruits and vegetables they would drink next came from, as well as other details about the date of packaging. With the app, the person couldn't know,

5:07in addition to the content of the packages, the health benefits of the mixture they were about to consume. It would also allow the machine to refuse to process the bags, whose expiration date had already passed. It was also useful in case there was an emergency, forcing the company to withdraw the product from the market. This would make it easier to locate the bags and prevent them from being consumed. Remember that Doug Evans's philosophy was to consume, fresh and raw products, and that is why Juicero bags did not have a shelf life beyond eight days. So the price for each bag was between five and eight dollars. Also, the packages were only sold if you owned a juicer. In addition, to ensure that no other manufacturer created similar bags and tried to take advantage of their invention, Juicero made sure that the machine would only squeeze bags that had a QR code of their property. A strategy that businesses inside it categorized as a smart move by the startup to avoid what curic owners were going through. Curic, of course, created this machine to make domestic consumption drinks such as coffee, but over time, they have experienced the theft of profits by other companies that copied and manufactured capsules like their own.

6:07One step to the side. Initially, Doug Evans compared his user with the first unit of the Tesla Roadster. The car was expensive, but over time, price decreased. The founder of Juicero was convinced that the $700 juicer cost was justified because he claimed that innovation should be borne somewhere and that the juicer could first reach people with more resources and then get cheaper. And he was right. Over time, the price had to decrease, but it was caused by the slow sales of the device. Although Juicero was his dream, Doug Evans was invited by the company's board of directors to step aside and allow former Coca-Cola president Jeff Dunn to become the new CEO that's October 2016. Months after his arrival at the company in January 2017, one of Dunn's first decisions was to reduce the price of the device which went from $700 to $400. But how did Juicero convince 16 investors to bet on their company and raise $120 million? In Juicero, hardware and software engineers, food scientists, designers, and farmers worked hand in hand. The company demanded a fresh product,

7:09so it approached farms and had three department stores in the Bay area, where just over 70 employees worked. But let's be clear, if Doug Evans had offered investors just bags of ready-to-make cold-press juice, he wouldn't have raised so much capital. Juicero's technological promise to take advantage are your ad campaigns lighting up the dashboard? But not the pipeline. That's bullspend, and marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions. My boss asked for results, so I opened my dashboard for the only positive sounding metric I had. Impressions. Cut the bullspend. See revenue? Not just reach. LinkedIn delivers the highest return on ad spend of major ad networks. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $25 credit go to LinkedIn.com slash campaign turn sick edition supply. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome? That's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article

8:10you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up require compatibility and availability vary 18 plus. Call us footballers back. So, Hilton called to me the superstition concierge to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching bandwink up call it 555-55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. Of the Internet of Things, was what made him so attractive to Silicon Valley investors. My cardin of art is venture. One of Juicero's investment firms commented in March 2016 that features such as quality and hardware design made him interested in Juicero. Some critics disagreed with Hardin and rather claimed that the device was similar to ET

9:11putting a sheet over his head. However, Doug Evans himself saw his as a feat similar to that achieved by Steve Jobs. While Apple's co-founder and former CEO took a central computer and turned it into a personal computer, Evans aspired to convert his juicer from that central computer to a personal juice press. Artis Ventures was also captivated by the possibility that inventory tracking data obtained by Juicero's juicers would be useful in the future to help organic farmers predict demand and plant accordingly. David Cray, a GV partner, formerly Google Ventures, told a drum that has been without a doubt one of the most complicated companies he had financed. It's software, it's consumer electronics, their products and packaging, expiration date. After the launch of the device, many questions whether it was necessary to buy Juicero and made the attempt to squeeze the bags with their hands to obtain a similar result. The obvious question. However, when Bloomberg News published a video of Human vs. Machine, that's when the company's expiration date accelerated.

10:11As it showed that with your hands, you could squeeze the juice just as quickly. The juice are now seemed useless, but still the company CEO came out to its defense. Jeff Dunn said in a publication in Medium that when he saw the headlines in the press that they talked about hacking these Juicero bags, he thought about how to show that the value of Juicero was much more than a glass of cold-press juice. The former director of Coca-Cola, who traded soft drinks for fruits and vegetables, listed the three benefits of the juicer. Food security, your system would allow you to remotely disable product packages in case they had been removed from the market. Balance, the product offered a balanced combination of flavor and nutrition due to the consistent pressing offered by the juicer. And decision-making, the data generated by the juicer helped to manage a very tight supply chain. As it must be remembered that the product was raw and had a limited shelf life of eight days. Customers, of course, began to feel cheated and claimed their money back. Juicero promised to reimburse them for what they had spent. In June of that year, the company had to lay off 25% of its personnel,

11:12which at the time was around 238 workers. They were losing $4 million a month. And then by September 2017, they were history. And a very shameful one at that. The company published a statement on their official blog. We are confident that in order to really have the long-term impact that we want to have, we must focus on finding a buyer with an existing national fresh food supply chain that can carry on the Juicero mission. That was a fundamental aspect which they had to think about since the beginning of the company. So what went wrong? Many things. One of them is that even though the device was very well designed, it was as Boltz partner Ben Einstein catalogued to expensive for its demographic objective. In addition, it could not get very far. Since it had spent $120 million over two years to build a complex supply chain that barely had a presence in California and required as it showed later and alliance with the company with a national and more solid supply chain. So what to do to avoid a disaster, similar to Juicero? First, build a product that actually does something

12:14but then focus on the problem and not the solution. The best founders of companies are those that focus on the problem they want to solve while the solution is taken care of later. Those who do it in reverse don't tend to succeed. Be cautious with the maker mode. When you create something, you always have to decide to add more and more things to make your product the best. So be sure to address the point of consumer pain. Also, don't be redundant and unnecessarily expensive when considering a new product idea, ask yourself that there's a simple and less expensive solution to the problem that you're solving. Premium products are cool, but that premium needs to come from somewhere. Find your value. The value of Juicero was not in the juice but in being a device connected to the internet. And that's why the investor decided to enter and invest in the company. If the charm of your startup isn't technology, try to be noticed. This episode is brought to you by Born in Roma fragrances by Valentino Beauty, the iconic fragrance duo.

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