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> Visionary founder with the perfect background... > Disrupting the incredibly horrible experience of inventing a physical product... > Top-tier investors...

by mbesto 11y ago

> 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/CEO, layoff nearly the entire company, and file for bankruptcy? How about, just for one second, that we pretend that all of these characteristics don't necessarily prescribe a successful outcome?

hiou 11y ago
There is an exceptional irony in investing in an exceptionally talented team as they are typically the ones with the smallest downside in failure.
dasil003 11y ago
Nothing prescribes a successful outcome, in a sense anything that looks too perfect on paper tends to implode because of the unrealistic expectations by all the stakeholders, see: Color.
pbreit 11y ago
A world class lack of focus could easily compete with all of those.
leroy_masochist 11y ago
I had the same reaction when I read that passage. By the end of the piece, though, I thought it was pretty clear that the author is trying to make the point that the "right characteristics" aren't what matters; what matters is knowing your customers and running a learning organization that, week after week, gets better and better at serving their needs. From later in the article: >"Quirky never iterated on its products ... instead Quirky re-focused its energy on coffee makers and pet feeders and 50 other things. Lack of product focus had a nasty side-effect. When you look across the Quirky product line, you’re left with one fundamental feeling: confusion." >"Many things can go right for a company but at the end of the day you must do one thing really well: sell a product that delights your customers." With that said, I think he could have set up the "nailed nearly everything" passage to make it clearer that he was in on the joke, saving his readers a few groans in the process.
- puranjay 11y ago
  That's the thing. These are basics. If an exceptional team couldn't figure it out, maybe they weren't exactly an exceptional team...
- bsbechtel 11y ago
  >>sell a product that delights your customers. I think, for Quirky, the key question was who are your customers? Was it the inventors, or the consumers whose problems the inventors were trying to solve?
natch 11y ago
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, but didn't give a shit about doing the last finishing touches to make the stuff usable.
- andyjsong 11y ago
  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 before shoving it down peoples throats. Edit: the fact that their forth bestseller was a silicone yolk separator doesn't really set the barrier to entry high. A plastic water bottle can do the same.[2] They were flying too close to the mirror, not the Sun. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/simple-successful-inventions-quirky-ben-kaufman-2012-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/simple-successful-inventions-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AirVOuTN_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AirVOuTN_M
  - Stratoscope 11y ago
    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.
    - andyjsong 11y ago
      That's awesome that you're enjoying it! I'm just saying, they spent a ton of time/money on vetting ideas, R&D, and manufacturing, just to have it knocked off for $5 to $15 [1]. Why did they make such risks by manufacturing before gauging demand? A simple pre-order or crowdfunding campaign where fix batches were pre-sold and repeated until steady orders came in would make sense. [1] http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Universal-Surge-Protector-4-Outlets_2001758433.html?spm=a2700.7724838.30.48.gb7c8x http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Universal-Surge-Pr...
Arnt 11y ago
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 width of the cable gaps or how smooth the plastic should be.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  It's the difference between "50 so-so products a year!" and "10 brilliant products a year!"
- matt_morgan 11y ago
  I don't know if you read the article, but you just made his point in 5% of the verbiage. Granted, he included evidence/argument, which has a lot of value.
  - Arnt 11y ago
    Of course I read it... and do you to have the impression that his core points were diluted in words until one might miss them?
    - matt_morgan 11y ago
      No, no, I was just plugging that in because in reading the other comments it was clear that lots of other people had NOT read the article, and were missing the point, and I wanted to call attention to your summary.
aytekin 11y ago
> building 50+ hardware products This is the reason. They lacked focus.
mattlutze 11y ago
From the article: > [...] This is not an overstatement: building 50+ hardware products a year as a startup is the modern-day version of gluing feathers to your arms and flying. > It may sound harsh but at nearly every step of the way, the loftiness of Quirky’s ambitions far outpaced the laws of physics. The 6 year journey of the company was a balancing act between an extraordinarily bold vision and a fundamentally broken business model. I'm feeling a disconnect here. It's important for everyone involved in something like this to what to put the positive spin on things. But, how do we say "founder with perfect background", "stacked board", "exceptional team of ____", "top-tier investors", yet have them all part of a company that utterly fails to understand some fundamentals of constructing a healthy business? If a founder has the perfect background, they know roughly how much of the elephant to bite off. A stacked board would know when to redirect the actions and efforts of their operating team wildly throwing themselves at any effort they dreamed up. Exceptional engineers and designers see a flood of independent projects and say "no." It's easy to hindsight a failure, for sure. But maybe we could be more honest with ourselves and talk about a team that and some lessons to learn, and did just that. I feel like we're often asking too much of young startups like this -- everyone has to be a visionary or a rockstar, every engineer needs to come from Stanford or name-a-school, every board stacked with billion dollar tech board members. Maybe we can instead let "we had a team with promise and opportunity" be enough?
jakejake 11y ago
If everything the author says is true, then there should be 50-per-year valid startups that can spin off from Quirky. He mentions an air conditioner, for example, that could have been excellent after a few iterations.
- zyxley 11y ago
  And "flexible power strips with variations to fit every environment" could easily be an entire successful company by itself.

by mbesto 11y ago

hiou 11y ago

There is an exceptional irony in investing in an exceptionally talented team as they are typically the ones with the smallest downside in failure.

dasil003 11y ago

Nothing prescribes a successful outcome, in a sense anything that looks too perfect on paper tends to implode because of the unrealistic expectations by all the stakeholders, see: Color.

pbreit 11y ago

A world class lack of focus could easily compete with all of those.

leroy_masochist 11y ago

I had the same reaction when I read that passage. By the end of the piece, though, I thought it was pretty clear that the author is trying to make the point that the "right characteristics" aren't what matters; what matters is knowing your customers and running a learning organization that, week after week, gets better and better at serving their needs. From later in the article: >"Quirky never iterated on its products ... instead Quirky re-focused its energy on coffee makers and pet feeders and 50 other things. Lack of product focus had a nasty side-effect. When you look across the Quirky product line, you’re left with one fundamental feeling: confusion." >"Many things can go right for a company but at the end of the day you must do one thing really well: sell a product that delights your customers." With that said, I think he could have set up the "nailed nearly everything" passage to make it clearer that he was in on the joke, saving his readers a few groans in the process.

puranjay 11y ago
That's the thing. These are basics. If an exceptional team couldn't figure it out, maybe they weren't exactly an exceptional team...
bsbechtel 11y ago
>>sell a product that delights your customers. I think, for Quirky, the key question was who are your customers? Was it the inventors, or the consumers whose problems the inventors were trying to solve?

natch 11y ago

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, but didn't give a shit about doing the last finishing touches to make the stuff usable.

andyjsong 11y ago
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 before shoving it down peoples throats. Edit: the fact that their forth bestseller was a silicone yolk separator doesn't really set the barrier to entry high. A plastic water bottle can do the same.[2] They were flying too close to the mirror, not the Sun. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/simple-successful-inventions-quirky-ben-kaufman-2012-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/simple-successful-inventions-... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AirVOuTN_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AirVOuTN_M
- Stratoscope 11y ago
  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.
  - andyjsong 11y ago
    That's awesome that you're enjoying it! I'm just saying, they spent a ton of time/money on vetting ideas, R&D, and manufacturing, just to have it knocked off for $5 to $15 [1]. Why did they make such risks by manufacturing before gauging demand? A simple pre-order or crowdfunding campaign where fix batches were pre-sold and repeated until steady orders came in would make sense. [1] http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Universal-Surge-Protector-4-Outlets_2001758433.html?spm=a2700.7724838.30.48.gb7c8x http://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Universal-Surge-Pr...

Arnt 11y ago

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 width of the cable gaps or how smooth the plastic should be.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
It's the difference between "50 so-so products a year!" and "10 brilliant products a year!"
matt_morgan 11y ago
I don't know if you read the article, but you just made his point in 5% of the verbiage. Granted, he included evidence/argument, which has a lot of value.
- Arnt 11y ago
  Of course I read it... and do you to have the impression that his core points were diluted in words until one might miss them?
  - matt_morgan 11y ago
    No, no, I was just plugging that in because in reading the other comments it was clear that lots of other people had NOT read the article, and were missing the point, and I wanted to call attention to your summary.

aytekin 11y ago

> building 50+ hardware products This is the reason. They lacked focus.

mattlutze 11y ago

From the article: > [...] This is not an overstatement: building 50+ hardware products a year as a startup is the modern-day version of gluing feathers to your arms and flying. > It may sound harsh but at nearly every step of the way, the loftiness of Quirky’s ambitions far outpaced the laws of physics. The 6 year journey of the company was a balancing act between an extraordinarily bold vision and a fundamentally broken business model. I'm feeling a disconnect here. It's important for everyone involved in something like this to what to put the positive spin on things. But, how do we say "founder with perfect background", "stacked board", "exceptional team of ____", "top-tier investors", yet have them all part of a company that utterly fails to understand some fundamentals of constructing a healthy business? If a founder has the perfect background, they know roughly how much of the elephant to bite off. A stacked board would know when to redirect the actions and efforts of their operating team wildly throwing themselves at any effort they dreamed up. Exceptional engineers and designers see a flood of independent projects and say "no." It's easy to hindsight a failure, for sure. But maybe we could be more honest with ourselves and talk about a team that and some lessons to learn, and did just that. I feel like we're often asking too much of young startups like this -- everyone has to be a visionary or a rockstar, every engineer needs to come from Stanford or name-a-school, every board stacked with billion dollar tech board members. Maybe we can instead let "we had a team with promise and opportunity" be enough?

jakejake 11y ago

If everything the author says is true, then there should be 50-per-year valid startups that can spin off from Quirky. He mentions an air conditioner, for example, that could have been excellent after a few iterations.

zyxley 11y ago
And "flexible power strips with variations to fit every environment" could easily be an entire successful company by itself.