Why Quirky Failed

Post by Stratoscope » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 7:26 AM UTC

andyjsong wrote: post #48

natch wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shitty products. I had a Quirky Wink Spotter and it was just shy of usable. How they failed (for over a year!) to issue a software update that fixed the problem of getting hundreds of push notifications every time the thing moved, I will never understand. Coalescing was not in their vocabulary. This was not an exceptional team of engineers, by any stretch. It was apathetic people who knew how to cobble stuff together…

Seriously, let's be honest, who wants to buy pieces of plastic that are minute improvements over existing products? Their best seller was a multi-jointed power strip. [1] The rest were half baked ideas from inventors that have no desire to scale their business. They were pumping out products that were decided in an echo chamber of inventors, not consumers. It's a great idea, but not enough premarket research was done…

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 7:41 AM UTC

Stratoscope wrote: post #52

andyjsong wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, let's be honest, who wants to buy pieces of plastic that are minute improvements over existing products? Their best seller was a multi-jointed power strip. [1] The rest were half baked ideas from inventors that have no desire to scale their business. They were pumping out products that were decided in an echo chamber of inventors, not consumers. It's a great idea, but not enough premarket research was done…

I have one of those power strips. It's really great! I usually keep it in a simple tight circle. Right now it has a couple of MacBook Pro AC adapters, another AC adapter for a network switch, and a few regular AC plugs. It's super easy to arrange it to fit all kinds of power plugs without them getting in the way of each other.

Post by LoSboccacc » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:11 AM UTC

logn wrote: post #38

larkinrichards wrote: post #27

This is one of those stories where I initially go "wait, quirky failed?" and then I think of the Quirky Eggminder that I purchased and realize, "yea, that product really did make me a sad and angry customer." For those who don't know, the eggminder was a wifi enabled egg carton paired with a smartphone app that tells you how many eggs you currently have, how old each egg is, and notifies you when you need more eggs.…

Then you're gonna love the product which is a wifi enabled battery monitor paired with a smartphone app that tells you the current charge of a battery. Actually the fridge lightbulb might have been a better place to source power. But given a product description like eggminder, I would assume the company would fail anyhow. While there may be some people who need eggminder v2.0, there aren't very many of them. Eventual…

Post by crocal » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:33 AM UTC

dasil003 wrote: post #32

username223 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can this have been a thing? First, eggs don't need to be refrigerated; they keep at least a week at room temperature. Second, they can be bought in lots of 6, 12, 18, and 36 in most supermarkets; choose based on your rate of consumption. Third, they're dirt cheap, typically less than 25 cents apiece. We're talking Vessyl levels of pointlessness here.

Are you European? The reason I ask is because the US and the EU take opposite approaches to the issue of egg safety. In the EU eggs are not allowed to be washed before sale, that means the eggs retain their natural anti-bacterial coating from when they are laid, so they are naturally microbe resistant and that's why European eggs are not refrigerated in the store. In the US they mandate that eggs must be washed befor…

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:53 AM UTC

Arnt wrote: post #51

mbesto wrote: post #16

> Visionary founder with the perfect background... > Disrupting the incredibly horrible experience of inventing a physical product... > Top-tier investors... > Board of directors stacked... > Crazy high community engagement... > ...an exceptional team of engineers, designers, marketers... > So if everything was so good, how did the company spend $180M of investors’ money, sell very little product, replace the founder…

Exceptional engineers? There's a Quirky cable guide on the desk in front of me, and if the engineers who worked on that were exceptional, then I posit that they didn't get enough time to work on the product. It's a fine concept, no question. But a few more iterations would have helped it. I get an impression that Quirky wanted to push out things quickly, not spend a lot of company hours obsessing over the precise wid…