
Ask HN: Why is soylent worth $100M dollars? - giaour
Their product is essentially slimfast without added flavoring and they&#x27;ve demonstrated themselves deficient in procurement and supply chain management by constantly delaying shipments.<p>Why is that company valued so highly? What makes them different from any other meal replacement shake vendor?
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IanDrake
>they've proven themselves unable to meet customer demand in a timely fashion

Well, that's a good thing, certainly better than the opposite.

>What makes them different from any other meal replacement shake vendor?

IMO, a focus on being a food replacement rather than a meal replacement.

A food replacement needs to have all your nutrition in one product. They don't
care about taste.

Slimfast, as you suggested as a comparison, isn't meant as a 2,100 calorie/day
food replacement. You'd have to drink ten 11oz cans to get that many calories
and that would throw off the entire ratio of fat, carbs, protein, and
nutrients per day.

In any case, soylent seems to have the right product/market fit.

~~~
bbcbasic
> Well, that's a good thing, certainly better than the opposite.

Corollary: Companies that can actually fulfill orders should have low
valuations.

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toomuchtodo
Same reason Tesla is valued so highly, even though they're not profitable yet.
Expectations.

Also, their product is nutritionally completely. It's not slimfast. I'm sure
you've compared the nutritional information, right? Of course you have.

~~~
giaour
Of course. But all of the other nutritionally complete meal replacements on
the market (and there are quite a few) didn't have a recognizable brand name.

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angersock
Right, but none of the other ones were marketed to the super elite startup
coders who are crushing it so hard that they literally don't have time to eat.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Coders who have a crazy amount of disposable income compared to your typical
consumer.

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fragmede
Just answering "marketing" is a bit glib, but it's a large part of it. Read
NutraFit's marketing on e page you linked - it's all about muscle building
whey-powder protein. If I don't care to set foot in a gym, that doesn't appeal
to me. Soylent identified an underserved market and is catering to them.

Underarmor had a similar revelation - selling what previously amounted to
women's underwear, to men - and they've made a killing doing so.

GoPro is yet another example of this at work.

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debacle
Because interest rates are at a record low and will be there for the
foreseeable future. Any startup with even a hint of success is still getting
funded.

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smt88
Valuations have much more to do with social issues (faith in founders, quality
of lead investor, size of recent exits) than it does the product.

The product could be terrible, but if all those things are in place, investors
could be fighting each other to get a piece of the deal.

You can fix a product in the future, with enough money. You can't fix a
founding team, and you can't go back in time to join a deal that you missed
out on.

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joshtronic
Shot in the dark here, but perhaps it's the fact that consumer demand is (and
has been) so high. Unsure how many orders they have backlogged at this point,
but they took money for each of those orders. For all we know, they could have
30m$ in back orders making that valuation pretty reasonable

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hashtag
I ordered early summer and only got my order a couple weeks ago so I'd
estimate backlog to be roughly 6-7 months

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SEJeff
One word: Marketing

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suchow
Soylent has a bigger vision. Here's a recent statement of it by its founder,
Rob Rhinehart. Start 5 paragraphs in.

[http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1192](http://robrhinehart.com/?p=1192)

~~~
giaour
So, marketing.

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MalcolmDiggs
Precisely because of this kind of thread. It's the rare meal-replacement shake
that gets both detractors and proponents posting and talking about it all over
the place. It's getting exposure and hype in channels that slimfast could only
dream about. It's a marketer's wet dream.

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deadfall
Current Customers Sales + Potential Customer Demand = Value?

