productPoor Product-Market FitNotable

Juicero.

Juicero Inc. · Doug Evans · Consumer Hardware

A $400 wifi-connected juice press, undone by a video of two hands doing the same job.

Juicero
Mar 20161 yr 6 moSep 2017
LaunchShutdown

$0

raised

1 yr 6 mo

20162017

Poor Product-Market Fit

Built for a demand that never showed up

$120M raised. Squeezed by hand.

TLDR

Juicero sold a connected countertop press that squeezed proprietary produce packs into juice, backed by roughly $120 million from a marquee investor list and priced at $699 before dropping to $399.

In April 2017 Bloomberg reporters demonstrated that the packs could be squeezed by hand in about the same time, producing about the same amount of juice. The press was, functionally, optional. The company shut down five months later and offered refunds.

The engineering was genuinely impressive — aluminium, custom parts, tight tolerances. It simply solved a step that the packaging had already solved.

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