Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Juicero has a lame cousin.

Remember that company the internet mocked into the ground......? Well imagine my surprise when I ran into another company basically doing the same thing at my other conference yesterday. Except they are selling flavored water. At some point later I might reveal the company and upload a picture, but Silicon Valley is a scary place right now. I need a little distance from my conference before doing so.

The machine is basically the size of the Juicero machine. Which is about the size of a medium coffee maker.

Naturally I mocked it in my head, but then set out to figure out their business model.

Me - So, how much does this machine cost?

Them - It depends on how many employees you have.

Me - If I'm going to buy this thing what does it matter how many employees I have?

Them - Oh, you don't own this machine. You rent it.

Then they went on to try to convince me they were going to be the Pepsi Cola of water. Mind you the machine is smaller than a microwave. But they would come out and install this thing and they would maintain it. It apparently hooks up to your water supply and then adds flavoring via a packet to make the water flavored.

It was really hard to tack them down on on a price, but I eventually asked them - okay, say I have a very small company - how much could I expect to rent this thing for? For under 50 employees he said the rental fee was around 300 bucks a month compared to say a company buying bottled water for a grand a month.

At that point I was just confused because that seemed like a lot of overhead for a company to take on considering they were maintaining all the cost after installment including the flavor packets. Which just seemed weird for a machine that was so small. Not even the size of a vending machine.

I just don't understand Silicon Valley right now.

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