Shut down 2017 · over $120m raised
Juicero
A connected juice press that raised more than $120m from well-regarded investors, and was undone by a demonstration that the juice packs could be squeezed by hand.
What happened
Juicero sold an internet-connected press that squeezed proprietary produce packs into juice. It raised more than $120m from a notably strong investor list.
In 2017 Bloomberg reported that the packs could be squeezed by hand, producing juice about as quickly as the machine did. The demonstration was brief, easily repeated by anyone who owned the product, and fatal.
The company shut down shortly afterwards. It has since become the standard shorthand for a well-engineered answer to a question nobody was asking.
The engineering was genuinely impressive, which is part of the point. This was not incompetence — it was a very good execution of a premise that had not been tested against the simplest available alternative.
Visible at the time
What an investor could have seen
These are things that were observable before the collapse, not hindsight dressed as foresight. Some failures genuinely could not be seen coming; where that is the case, this section says so rather than inventing a warning.
- No comparison of the product against the simplest possible alternative.
- A premium hardware price justified by engineering sophistication rather than by outcome for the user.
- A recurring-revenue model dependent on a proprietary consumable the customer had no other reason to buy.
- Investor enthusiasm concentrated on the machine rather than on evidence that customers wanted it.
For your own diligence
What to do differently
- Always ask what the customer does today instead — and include "does it by hand" and "does nothing" in the list of alternatives. This is the single question that would have surfaced the problem before the round, and it costs nothing to ask.
- Use the product yourself where it is physically possible. Ten minutes with the actual object is worth more than any amount of deck-reading, and in this case it would have been decisive.
- Be careful of hardware whose value depends on a proprietary consumable. That model works when the consumable is genuinely hard to substitute, and fails immediately when it is not.
- Sophistication is not a moat. A product can be difficult to build and trivial to do without.
Checked, not remembered
Sources
Legal outcomes on these pages move — convictions are appealed, sentences reduced, pardons and commutations granted. Every status here is stated with the date it was accurate to, and every figure is traceable to the reporting linked below.