Startup Autopsy: Juicero's $120 Million Squeeze

Righto. Feel that? Sun's got a bit of bite in it today. Good day for sittin' in the shade of a gum tree and watchin' the world go by. Out here, you learn to read the sign. The smallest things tell you the biggest stories. A bent blade of grass, a bit of turned-over soil… tells you who’s been past, what they were doing, and where they were headed. So, Juicero raised one hundred and twenty million dollars for a machine that did the exact same thing as your two hands. Last week we had a squiz at the big smoke-cloud left by Quibi burning through its cash, but this one… this one is a different kind of creature altogether. It’s not just about wasting money; it’s about forgetting what your own hands are for.

Righto — keep low and follow me boot for boot. Let's track this thing from the start. The first sign you see is the waterhole. A big, shiny one. Had names like Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins carved on the rocks around it. They poured a hundred and twenty million dollars into this thing. That’s a deep billabong, mate. Draws a lot of attention. And sittin' right in the middle of it was this fella, Doug Evans. He wasn't just makin' juice. Oh no. He was on a quest for "juicing perfection." Likened himself to Steve Jobs. Now, I've seen a bowerbird build a pretty fancy nest to impress a sheila, but this was something else. The next track is the machine itself.

The Juicero Press. Started at seven hundred dollars, then dropped to four hundred when folks weren't biting. It was a big, handsome-lookin' thing. Wi-Fi connected, of course. Because your juice needs to be on the internet, apparently. And it only worked with their special little bags of fruit and veggie pulp. You'd buy the bags, stick one in the machine, and this beautiful, expensive bit of gear would squeeze it for you. It had four tonnes of force, they said. Enough to lift two Teslas. Four tonnes. To squeeze a bag of mush. It's like hirin' a full-on road train to move a single billy can. Just… a bit much. But here’s the track that leads you right over the cliff.

A couple of clever folks who’d bought the thing… they got curious. What happens if you just… take the bag out of the equation? What if you just squeeze it? With your hands? And what they found, and what Bloomberg then showed to eight hundred thousand people, was that you could squeeze that little bag of juice out, by hand, even faster than the four-hundred-dollar, Wi-Fi-connected, two-Tesla-lifting machine could. The whole thing was a ghost. The machine did NOTHING. The one job it had, it wasn't even needed for. And that’s the part that gets you. It wasn't a bad machine. By all accounts, it was an engineering marvel. It was just a marvel at solving a problem that did not exist.

They spent all that time and all that money building the world's most complicated gate, and never checked if there was a fence. You see it out here, sometimes. A young joey, full of beans, leaps straight up in the air for no reason at all. It’s funny. But a whole company doing it? A hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar company? That’s not funny. That’s a failure to look at the ground beneath your feet. They were so busy listening to the venture capitalists and the founder's grand vision of being the "Steve Jobs of juice" that they forgot to ask the most basic question: does anyone actually NEED this? The answer, written in big, clear letters for anyone who cared to look, was NO.

So here's the lesson this track teaches us. It’s not about the money. It’s not about the hype. It’s not about callin’ yourself the next Steve Jobs. That’s all just noise. It’s about product-market fit. That’s a fancy way of saying: are you helping someone with a real problem? Or are you just squeezing an empty bag and calling it innovation? Before you build the four-tonne press, make sure people can't just use their hands. Beautiful country, this. Looks after you if you look after it. Same goes for your customers. Alright. Leave it how you found it. Off you go.