Why Quirky Failed

Post by loganu » Fri, Sep 25, 2015, 8:45 PM UTC

ryandamm wrote: post #70

I met Ben Kaufman at TED, when he was working on Kluster. It didn't impress me then and Quirky never really impressed me either. Kluster itself was, well, a cluster* at TED. They didn't really have a good idea or execution, and his team was... well, more interested in taking in the sights than slamming to get the project done (with one exception, but that guy was going to be leaving the company). It felt like an exte…

I saw Ben (I think it was Ben) speak at the Solidworks conference in San Diego, about 4 years ago. I was familiar with Quirky before his big talk, (I'm an industrial designer) but walking away from the talk I was thinking, "This is fucking brilliant. They set up a system to get free ideas, gauge interest, receive feedback, iterate a product, and have a batch of initial customers ready to buy something once its developed. They're outsourcing a decent amount of work to the customers, and the customers are happy to get small royalty checks."

They told the story of the kid that led that power strip's development through Quirky, and how it paid for his college - but it was easy to see that most customers or contributors or Quirks or whatever they called them would not be making big money by choosing a new product's name or color or whatever.

As everyone else has pointed out, they got halfway to successful with a bunch of products. Their connected products had people excited about them, and many could have turned into legitimate businesses or product lines. But when you're making a new product every week,( 50+ a year) from concept thru development to production, your focus and execution will stray.

Post by rm445 » Sat, Sep 26, 2015, 10:51 AM UTC

markbnj wrote: post #25

I don't understand how you can say this... >> Quirky nailed nearly everything and then say this... >> It may sound harsh but at nearly every step of the way, the loftiness of Quirky’s ambitions far outpaced the laws of physics. So they nailed nearly everything, but the fundamental goals they set were impractical and unattainable?

Well it was going to have to be something like that, wasn't it? If they were such a stellar team, they're much less likely to fail to convince anyone to fund them, or make some dreadful legal or accounting mistake that got them shut down, or get bogged down technically and never release a product.

If you aren't going to fail for prosaic reasons, you're either going to succeed or find that your initial ambitions were impractical and unattainable.

Re: Why Quirky Failed

Re: Why Quirky Failed