9 ms·

Tea infuser startup Teforia shuts down

35 points by coloneltcb 9y ago

0xbear 9y ago
Can’t wait for a $1000 toilet paper holder startup, with no less than $100m in venture funding. They can write it in Go or Rust, and use deep learning running on FPGA to detect when you’re low on paper, and order it from Amazon automatically.
- gumby 9y ago
  Naah, the future is buttwiping as a service.
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    And it’ll probably be paperless, too.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
      Well, there are already IOT bidets...
      - ActsJuvenile 9y ago
        Tell me more. I am in the market for one.
      - gumby 9y ago
        "Internet of Toilets", I assume?
  - dogma1138 9y ago
    YC21: Puretaint is hiring full stack taint washers.
- pesfandiar 9y ago
  What if toilet paper squares had a sequence of hash codes, you know, blockchain-style?
  - 0xbear 9y ago
    Brilliant innovation! You just boosted the valuation by another billion dollars.
  - ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
    Machine learning AI startup, toiletoria, uses block chain to dispenses toilet paper according to the size of your ass which it determines using AI technology installed on your phone and saves you money on toilet paper. Not compatible with Android less than version 5. Must use toiletoria branded toilet paper.
    - kawera 9y ago
      Using image recognition !
  - Terr_ 9y ago
    Well, someone might pull more than one square at a time, so it may be a good idea to use grey codes. Until they're brown codes.
dreamcompiler 9y ago
First, if you're going for the razor-blade model, your razors need to be cheap. Second, if you're the only place where customers can buy blades, your market will be more limited than one where your blades are the best, but you have blade competitors.
arkades 9y ago
They may not have understood their market, either. Most people who go out of their way to get good whole leaf tea enjoy the process, the tea ware, etc. It’s like people who enjoy guns and accessories for guns? This is trying to sell them a gun at 10x markup, without any details on the quality of the shooting, and promising they’ll never have to buy any accessories for it. It’s priced for very high income tea enthusiasts, with features that strike against everything a normal tea enthusiast enjoys. For $100 and cheap packets this would fly, targeting people who currently don’t care about that (tea bag users.) But then, the margins would be shit and you’re trying to compete against an already simple and cheap tech. What demographic were they hallucinating?
- goldenkey 9y ago
  Their demographic is tea drinkers who are ignored by the coffee industry. We have all these coffee makers that have k-cups, but nothing for tea. And tea bags are 2nd rate, they float above the water depending on the tea, and never brew right. It is for sure directed at a more premium market, people who care about quality. But I wouldn't say that market is vanishing - they got their price a bit wrong. The prices they are selling at now will result in a conplete sell out. The classic teaforia infuser works on any tea..not just the sips containers. Id like to see them come back in style - I dont think this is the end for a great glass on glass tea machine. They did not sacrifice on purity or taste, much respect to Teforia.
  - arkades 9y ago
    ... tea bags are the k-cups for tea. Shitty and fast and convenient. You didn’t actually say anything new - you just sound like you work for Teforia.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Good teabags aren't even that bad. After all they're still basically tea seeped in hot water. You can also buy plenty of inexpensive infusers which aren't necessarily a lot better than teabags but the cost is a bit lower. And you can have basically open inserts you can put in cups. So plenty of ways to make tea quickly and easily with quality that is, for the most part, indistinguishable from tea pots.
goldenkey 9y ago
Everyone here is criticizing Teforia but what about some of what they did right? I just ordered 2 classic infusers, because they built a machine that can accept their teas AND any looseleaf tea you buy, and brews it wonderfully, better than most of us could accomplish without overly babysitting the tea and using pressure devices like the french press. You will honestly not taste tea with as much flavor as the teaforia infuser extracts - thats a huge accomplishment. Their device didnt do any BS K-cup opening through sharp prongs, with a messy garbage bin. You simply scan the tea and dump it in the infuser. Honestly, I think the company may have issued a forclosure but through the sale volume with the discounts they are offering, the investors will be impressed and change their mind about teaforia. Sure, the initial prices were too high but there is a market for what teaforia created. Sometimes we have to stumble and rid ourselves of greed before we let our precious creations become more commoditized, ie cheaper. I forsee a 3rd party market for teaforias becoming pretty large if TeForia shuts down. The sips are cool but the device is really the magic.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  I believe there is a market for this on a small scale, a few employees building them bespoke and on demand. But not a venture backed scale startup.
  - goldenkey 9y ago
    It's possible that tea culture is significantly weaker than coffee culture in most of the globe. Unfortunately, changing culture to sell a product is terribly hard - Starbucks did accomplish something similar though. I really would like to see tea, quality tea made using pressured microbrewing like Teaforia does, come into the mainstream. Its a huge travesty that you get a paper teabag at Starbucks meanwhile coffee gets made to such a precision and premium degree.
    - munchbunny 9y ago
      The tea culture definitely isn't weaker than coffee culture on the worldwide stage, not to a meaningful extent anyway. One important difference is that tea never had the kinds of accessibility problems that coffee had. Specifically, the kinds of accessibility problems that technology solves, because you can get a very good cup of tea with just attentive steeping. With coffee, you more or less need hardware of some kind, so it's a question of how fancy that hardware is. With tea, the base case is either a teabag or loose leaf in a cup/pot.
kaitai 9y ago
This is what makes middle America laugh at SV... meanwhile, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305086 about funding for breast pump startups (a product actually used by millions that people expect to pay money for, which hasn't improved significantly in decades). As other commenters say clearly what the breast pump startups need is a blockchain.
Animats 9y ago
"The glass within the infusion globe and carafe are hand blown by a glass artisan, one at a time." Oh, please. A product specifically made for dummies with too much money is the Carver Silver Seven amplifier.[1] Bob Carver, who was a very good amplifier designer, offered a challenge in 1987. He would build a low-cost amplifier to exactly match the transfer function of some High End amplifier. The outputs matched; this was tested by running both amplifiers in parallel, hooked up to cancel out. It worked. In blind listening tests, nobody could reliably tell the difference. High End reviewers hated this. So, partly as a joke. Carver designed the Carver Silver Seven. "Each hand-rubbed, black lacquered chassis rests on four rubbery Simms Vibration Dampers, which in turn rest on polished granite anti-vibration bases." Each amplifier has 19 tubes. Per channel. The power supply is on a separate chassis. Each chassis is almost half a meter deep. There's a four minute delay on power up for careful tube warming. Audiophiles bought it. Carver's successors then came out with the Silver Seven 700. This has twenty tubes, weighs 100 pounds, and costs $35,000. Per channel. Presumably someone is buying that. [1] https://hometheaterreview.com/carver-silver-seven-mono-vacuum-tube-power-amplifier-reviewed/ https://hometheaterreview.com/carver-silver-seven-mono-vacuu... [2] http://www.bobcarvercorp.com/silverseven700 http://www.bobcarvercorp.com/silverseven700
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dontlikeitupem 9y ago
  Meanwhile, clueless overpaid tech millennials will now be without tea, unless someone can quickly get a vc-backed tea app to market. I last saw one of them gasping that their grandparents used to use teabags.
- heeen2 9y ago
  At that point it seems more like a functional piece of contemporary art, commenting on the absurdness and all.
  - petra 9y ago
    Signaling is an important human need. Everybody deserves it.
kazinator 9y ago
The word "reality" has no place in this sentence, and "educate" is on shaky ground: However, the reality of our business is that it would take a lot more financing and time to educate the market ...
fleitz 9y ago
Ok so a few years ago I bought the most ridiculous tea maker ever, it does everything put the tea in and the water, and it takes the tea out when it’s done and will keep it warm too. It cost $200 and I thought it was kind of over priced but my wife loves tea so i got it for her for Xmas. Even does this thing where it dips the tea in and out ask it brews / infuses / whatever tea lingo is $1000 to make tea and I have to buy the tea from the company? No way Jose.
kup0 9y ago
Good riddance to over-engineered niche luxury products like this that ask you to spend hundreds of dollars to achieve the same results you can achieve for a few dollars. The loss on the human side (jobs, etc) is sad, but I certainly don't shed a tear when this stuff doesn't succeed. The Juicero was essentially an expensive pair of hands. The only thing the Teforia MAYBE offers, if I'm incredibly generous about it, is the pressurized steeping, but there is no way that it makes enough of a taste difference to be worth it over traditional western or gongfu brewing. I'm also not convinced that it's actually better, and anecdotal experiences from Teforia buyers don't really help because when you pay $1000 for your tea infuser, of course you're going to "think" it's better. I bet blind taste tests would come out quite differently. Let's even say the result does actually taste better, even under blind testing. There is no way it tastes hundreds of dollars better. Why would someone spend that much on a slight taste improvement? It only makes sense for people with incredibly high budgets/income. Tea enthusiasts already control all the variables (temperature, time, etc) and can and do make great tea using gaiwans and teapots. The Teaforia solves a non-existent problem.

35 points by coloneltcb 9y ago

Can’t wait for a $1000 toilet paper holder startup, with no less than $100m in venture funding. They can write it in Go or Rust, and use deep learning running on FPGA to detect when you’re low on paper, and order it from Amazon automatically.

gumby 9y ago
Naah, the future is buttwiping as a service.
- 0xbear 9y ago
  And it’ll probably be paperless, too.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
    Well, there are already IOT bidets...
    - ActsJuvenile 9y ago
      Tell me more. I am in the market for one.
    - gumby 9y ago
      "Internet of Toilets", I assume?
- dogma1138 9y ago
  YC21: Puretaint is hiring full stack taint washers.
pesfandiar 9y ago
What if toilet paper squares had a sequence of hash codes, you know, blockchain-style?
- 0xbear 9y ago
  Brilliant innovation! You just boosted the valuation by another billion dollars.
- ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
  Machine learning AI startup, toiletoria, uses block chain to dispenses toilet paper according to the size of your ass which it determines using AI technology installed on your phone and saves you money on toilet paper. Not compatible with Android less than version 5. Must use toiletoria branded toilet paper.
  - kawera 9y ago
    Using image recognition !
- Terr_ 9y ago
  Well, someone might pull more than one square at a time, so it may be a good idea to use grey codes. Until they're brown codes.

dreamcompiler 9y ago

First, if you're going for the razor-blade model, your razors need to be cheap. Second, if you're the only place where customers can buy blades, your market will be more limited than one where your blades are the best, but you have blade competitors.

arkades 9y ago

They may not have understood their market, either. Most people who go out of their way to get good whole leaf tea enjoy the process, the tea ware, etc. It’s like people who enjoy guns and accessories for guns? This is trying to sell them a gun at 10x markup, without any details on the quality of the shooting, and promising they’ll never have to buy any accessories for it. It’s priced for very high income tea enthusiasts, with features that strike against everything a normal tea enthusiast enjoys. For $100 and cheap packets this would fly, targeting people who currently don’t care about that (tea bag users.) But then, the margins would be shit and you’re trying to compete against an already simple and cheap tech. What demographic were they hallucinating?

goldenkey 9y ago
Their demographic is tea drinkers who are ignored by the coffee industry. We have all these coffee makers that have k-cups, but nothing for tea. And tea bags are 2nd rate, they float above the water depending on the tea, and never brew right. It is for sure directed at a more premium market, people who care about quality. But I wouldn't say that market is vanishing - they got their price a bit wrong. The prices they are selling at now will result in a conplete sell out. The classic teaforia infuser works on any tea..not just the sips containers. Id like to see them come back in style - I dont think this is the end for a great glass on glass tea machine. They did not sacrifice on purity or taste, much respect to Teforia.
- arkades 9y ago
  ... tea bags are the k-cups for tea. Shitty and fast and convenient. You didn’t actually say anything new - you just sound like you work for Teforia.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Good teabags aren't even that bad. After all they're still basically tea seeped in hot water. You can also buy plenty of inexpensive infusers which aren't necessarily a lot better than teabags but the cost is a bit lower. And you can have basically open inserts you can put in cups. So plenty of ways to make tea quickly and easily with quality that is, for the most part, indistinguishable from tea pots.

goldenkey 9y ago

Everyone here is criticizing Teforia but what about some of what they did right? I just ordered 2 classic infusers, because they built a machine that can accept their teas AND any looseleaf tea you buy, and brews it wonderfully, better than most of us could accomplish without overly babysitting the tea and using pressure devices like the french press. You will honestly not taste tea with as much flavor as the teaforia infuser extracts - thats a huge accomplishment. Their device didnt do any BS K-cup opening through sharp prongs, with a messy garbage bin. You simply scan the tea and dump it in the infuser. Honestly, I think the company may have issued a forclosure but through the sale volume with the discounts they are offering, the investors will be impressed and change their mind about teaforia. Sure, the initial prices were too high but there is a market for what teaforia created. Sometimes we have to stumble and rid ourselves of greed before we let our precious creations become more commoditized, ie cheaper. I forsee a 3rd party market for teaforias becoming pretty large if TeForia shuts down. The sips are cool but the device is really the magic.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
I believe there is a market for this on a small scale, a few employees building them bespoke and on demand. But not a venture backed scale startup.
- goldenkey 9y ago
  It's possible that tea culture is significantly weaker than coffee culture in most of the globe. Unfortunately, changing culture to sell a product is terribly hard - Starbucks did accomplish something similar though. I really would like to see tea, quality tea made using pressured microbrewing like Teaforia does, come into the mainstream. Its a huge travesty that you get a paper teabag at Starbucks meanwhile coffee gets made to such a precision and premium degree.
  - munchbunny 9y ago
    The tea culture definitely isn't weaker than coffee culture on the worldwide stage, not to a meaningful extent anyway. One important difference is that tea never had the kinds of accessibility problems that coffee had. Specifically, the kinds of accessibility problems that technology solves, because you can get a very good cup of tea with just attentive steeping. With coffee, you more or less need hardware of some kind, so it's a question of how fancy that hardware is. With tea, the base case is either a teabag or loose leaf in a cup/pot.

kaitai 9y ago

This is what makes middle America laugh at SV... meanwhile, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305086 about funding for breast pump startups (a product actually used by millions that people expect to pay money for, which hasn't improved significantly in decades). As other commenters say clearly what the breast pump startups need is a blockchain.

Animats 9y ago

"The glass within the infusion globe and carafe are hand blown by a glass artisan, one at a time." Oh, please. A product specifically made for dummies with too much money is the Carver Silver Seven amplifier.[1] Bob Carver, who was a very good amplifier designer, offered a challenge in 1987. He would build a low-cost amplifier to exactly match the transfer function of some High End amplifier. The outputs matched; this was tested by running both amplifiers in parallel, hooked up to cancel out. It worked. In blind listening tests, nobody could reliably tell the difference. High End reviewers hated this. So, partly as a joke. Carver designed the Carver Silver Seven. "Each hand-rubbed, black lacquered chassis rests on four rubbery Simms Vibration Dampers, which in turn rest on polished granite anti-vibration bases." Each amplifier has 19 tubes. Per channel. The power supply is on a separate chassis. Each chassis is almost half a meter deep. There's a four minute delay on power up for careful tube warming. Audiophiles bought it. Carver's successors then came out with the Silver Seven 700. This has twenty tubes, weighs 100 pounds, and costs $35,000. Per channel. Presumably someone is buying that. [1] https://hometheaterreview.com/carver-silver-seven-mono-vacuum-tube-power-amplifier-reviewed/ https://hometheaterreview.com/carver-silver-seven-mono-vacuu... [2] http://www.bobcarvercorp.com/silverseven700 http://www.bobcarvercorp.com/silverseven700

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
dontlikeitupem 9y ago
Meanwhile, clueless overpaid tech millennials will now be without tea, unless someone can quickly get a vc-backed tea app to market. I last saw one of them gasping that their grandparents used to use teabags.
heeen2 9y ago
At that point it seems more like a functional piece of contemporary art, commenting on the absurdness and all.
- petra 9y ago
  Signaling is an important human need. Everybody deserves it.

kazinator 9y ago

The word "reality" has no place in this sentence, and "educate" is on shaky ground: However, the reality of our business is that it would take a lot more financing and time to educate the market ...

fleitz 9y ago

Ok so a few years ago I bought the most ridiculous tea maker ever, it does everything put the tea in and the water, and it takes the tea out when it’s done and will keep it warm too. It cost $200 and I thought it was kind of over priced but my wife loves tea so i got it for her for Xmas. Even does this thing where it dips the tea in and out ask it brews / infuses / whatever tea lingo is $1000 to make tea and I have to buy the tea from the company? No way Jose.

kup0 9y ago

Good riddance to over-engineered niche luxury products like this that ask you to spend hundreds of dollars to achieve the same results you can achieve for a few dollars. The loss on the human side (jobs, etc) is sad, but I certainly don't shed a tear when this stuff doesn't succeed. The Juicero was essentially an expensive pair of hands. The only thing the Teforia MAYBE offers, if I'm incredibly generous about it, is the pressurized steeping, but there is no way that it makes enough of a taste difference to be worth it over traditional western or gongfu brewing. I'm also not convinced that it's actually better, and anecdotal experiences from Teforia buyers don't really help because when you pay $1000 for your tea infuser, of course you're going to "think" it's better. I bet blind taste tests would come out quite differently. Let's even say the result does actually taste better, even under blind testing. There is no way it tastes hundreds of dollars better. Why would someone spend that much on a slight taste improvement? It only makes sense for people with incredibly high budgets/income. Tea enthusiasts already control all the variables (temperature, time, etc) and can and do make great tea using gaiwans and teapots. The Teaforia solves a non-existent problem.