
Why Quirky Failed - prostoalex
https://medium.com/bolt-blog/the-real-reason-why-quirky-failed-c362b3a3abd7?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_YFF-CV_7thd-dZ70Nb56eXFBYUosOvLnErGRHdymfITh2DHLBOMX7copUioz_wULBqhkmCh5FW7LjaZ3Pc35F4439Fg&_hsmi=22330702
======
mbesto
> 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?

~~~
leroy_masochist
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
That's the thing. These are basics. If an exceptional team couldn't figure it
out, maybe they weren't exactly an exceptional team...

------
larkinrichards
This is one of those stories where I initially go "wait, quirky failed?" and
then I think of the Quirky Eggminder that I purchased and realize, "yea, that
product really did make me a sad and angry customer."

For those who don't know, the eggminder was a wifi enabled egg carton paired
with a smartphone app that tells you how many eggs you currently have, how old
each egg is, and notifies you when you need more eggs. For a guy who eats eggs
two-to-three days a week and isn't quite sure how many are left in the carton
when he's at the grocery store, it was pretty nice.

Unfortunately, if you've ever put batteries in the refrigerator (think of that
NYTimes review of the Model S), you would know they don't function very well
at low temperatures. The egg minder runs out of batteries within a week, at
which point it becomes a glorified and overpriced egg carton.

One glaring flaw made the product useless. Today I've learned that was true of
most of their products.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
The obvious solution is to start building fridges with power outlets inside
the cooling area.

~~~
function_seven
You're not thinking future-proof enough! Each shelf needs to have NFC coils
embedded throughout. With just outlets, you'll run out as soon as you have an
Eggminder, a Milkminder, and a Sixpackminder

------
S_A_P
I think the sad thing is I never even knew Quirky existed. I'm not hard core
into the invention/maker scene but I've been on this site for almost 6 years
as a participant and never heard of it. I think the article raised some
excellent points though. I think that the ideas that stuck should have been
spun off as their own company to iterate and improve things.

~~~
georgemcbay
Same situation here. Quirky is "right up my alley" and somehow I never heard
of it until it was shutting down.

Don't know if this is a regional issue (I'm in San Diego) or what.

~~~
dangrossman
There was a Quirky mid-aisle display at Wal-Marts for a while. I also see
their organization stuff at Marshalls/HomeGoods on an irregular basis. Quirky
made Wink, the home automation product line, which has a permanent endcap in
most Home Depot and Target stores. As the article mentions, the lack of strong
branding was one of their problems; it's easy to see their various products
throughout a store and not realize they're all from the same company.

[http://i.imgur.com/8lExkKy.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/8lExkKy.jpg)

~~~
ics
I also didn't know anything about them until hearing about the shutdown but
now that you mention it I have seen the "Wink" stuff in Home Depot and
probably elsewhere. However that was negative signaling for me, since Home
Depot is not a name that I _trust_ for tech but just a place I go if there
isn't time to order something. With Nest products however it was because I had
heard of them long before seeing them in Home Depot that my reaction was
neutral-positive for retail stores carrying them. I don't expect my jaded
20-something outlook to represents most shoppers but it would've been cool to
know about.

------
davemel37
With all due respect to the author, Quirky failed because they didnt care
about their community and users. It was a predatory business, like Davison and
other companies that prey on the ignorance of their customers. Quirky failed
because a business that exploits their users cannot succeed long term in an
interconnectred world.

------
sjs382
I posted this in another thread about them
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10217582](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10217582)),
but it bears repeating:

If the customer service experience was anything like what it was pre-pivot,
I'm not surprised they failed. When they were going out of business/pivoting,
I ordered a bunch of their inventory at a large discount. One week after the
"expected arrival date" (and 14 days after my order), surprised that my order
hadn't arrived, I emailed them asking for a tracking number. They told me that
it was waiting for the carrier to pick up the order and that I would get a
tracking number that day. Every two days, repeat the same thing. Promises, no
tracking number. Finally, 5 weeks after the order was completed, I received a
tracking number. Terrible experience, for what amounted to a bunch of (fun)
junk.

------
on_
Why quirky failed, kickstarter. It was an awesome idea, but kickstarter
handles the long tail, shards and distributes the workload, and is universal.
That is why Quirky failed.

~~~
calbear81
I think the Kickstarter model also massively de-risked the process by
introducing a pre-order model that gave you a sense of the potential revenue
ahead of time before you went an invested $100k on tooling.

~~~
davemel37
Quirky also derisked the process and took preorders.

~~~
calbear81
Did they have any pre-order threshold for when a product would go into
production?

~~~
notahacker
Or a pre-order threshold below which they conclude the product has below
average market potential and isn't worth investing any more time and money on
actually getting it to market?

------
markbnj
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?

~~~
firebones
Yet all the people their lofty ambitions convinced to invest, be on the board
and advise also missed this problem with the fundamental goals.

~~~
markbnj
Yeah perhaps he is just indulging in the benefits of hindsight.

------
ryandamm
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 extended college party
rather than a company.

Sure, Kaufman started and sold Mophie. Not sure that puts him in 'visionary
founder' territory, and raising $180m doesn't prove anything beyond your
ability to raise money. That's a useful skill but clearly not enough.

Now, I don't know Kaufman personally, and only interacted with him at TED, so
it's possible he's actually a visionary. And all startups come with
uncertainty and risk; maybe this wasn't an execution problem, maybe the entire
idea was never going to work, and it took someone trying it to find out.
Because let's be honest, nothing guarantees a startup is going to work. That's
sort of the essence of startups.

We see those ingredients adding up to a win all the time because of
survivorship bias. So maybe it's good we see Quirky fail and talk about it, to
remind ourselves that there are no guarantees when you're doing something
brand new.

~~~
loganu
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.

------
mikikian
For those interested, here's their sale motion (
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5k5SQee7k5pT0hrMTNqVC0ybFU...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5k5SQee7k5pT0hrMTNqVC0ybFU/view?usp=sharing)
).

09/22/2015 | #17 | Motion to Approve (Debtors' Motion for Entry of (i) an
Order (A) Approving Bidding Procedures and Bid Protections in Connection with
the Sale of Certain Assets Related to the Wink Business, (B) Approving
Procedures for Assumption and Assignment of Executory Contracts, (C) Approving
the Form and Manner of Notice, and (D) Scheduling an Auction and a Sale
Hearing, and (ii) an Order Authorizing and Approving the Sale of Certain
Assets Related to the Wink Business)filed by Jeffrey L. Cohen on behalf of
Quirky, Inc.. (Cohen, Jeffrey) (Entered: 09/22/2015)

------
flashman
> Quirky’s product line looks like a random page in Skymall

Ha, this mirrors a comment from an original HN discussion of Quirky:

> It reminds me of those catalogs in the seat-backs of airplanes that I end up
> reading when I get bored. Lots of stuff -- but nothing really struck me as
> being all that valuable or novel. Kitsch.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1609917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1609917)

------
empressplay
The idea of crowd-sourced invention is cool, but they should have kept their
products going with crowd-sourced iteration, rather than just abandoning them
for the next thing. Or, maybe they could have sold their earlier products off
to third parties to continue developing once they'd established product-market
fit. I definitely think there's something there, it just needs to be executed
better.

------
Killah911
This may sound like a very shallow comment, but what happens to the Wink
stuff? I just bought one of the GE Wink light kits & the Wink hub is a
"Quirky" product. It's already been a little buggy, but I figured it'd improve
over time. Does GE pick up development/support work going forward?

~~~
dangrossman
Wink Inc is up for sale separately from the rest of the Quirky business. There
are already offers on the table, and their press releases thus far have said
they don't anticipate any interruption to that part of the business -- the
team's still in place, maintaining the services and working on improvements.
There are so many "Works with Wink" products on the shelves -- not just GE,
but Cree, Leviton, Lutron, Chamberlain, etc -- that I'm sure that brand will
land a home with a future.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I'd be surprised if Google, Apple, or Microsoft didn't pick Wink up.

~~~
taylorwc
Google picked up Revolv via Nest[0], so I'd be surprised if they were bidding.
Apple seems like a long shot to me, given their existing projects with TV and
Homekit and the fact that they don't seem interested in making home automation
devices. Microsoft could be interesting--they seem to lack substance in this
space.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/24/7061557/nest-acquires-
rev...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/24/7061557/nest-acquires-revolv-in-a-
bid-to-control-your-entire-smart-home)

------
KaiserPro
'burns through mountain of cash without real business” or some other such
garbage'

The writer then goes on to say that they have no real business, they are just
cranking out half baked products that are never improved.

There is nothing special about quirky shutting down, it happens to many
businesses. If they are bad, or poorly executed they run out of cash and shut
down.

The main take away from this is do one thing, and do it well, you can't make
up for mediocrity by bundling it together with other mediocre products.

------
Eric_WVGG
I agree very much with this article. Kaufman is a very cool, stand-up guy;
everyone I met at Quirky was smart and nimble and on board with the vision.
The products ranged from naïf (hence "Quirky") to straight up brilliant. It
makes sense to me that they simply took on too much, and should have focused
and iterated on their better products.

~~~
davemel37
Better products wouldnt have helped. Customers dont know something is better
until after they buy. They certainly had a branding issue by focusing on their
products instead of on their users.

If they asked themselves before making every decision, "how will this help our
users invent better products and bring them to market, they may have survived.
Instead they asked themselves, " what can we do to make more money."

Their core product was their community, they never seemed to get that!

------
fuzzieozzie
How much of their $$$ did they spend on Wink and related stuff? I'd love to
see the economics of that one product. I'll bet it was a major driver of their
problems! I experienced poor software, many support related calls required and
then a recall because of a broken software update process!

------
6stringmerc
Super helpful article as I think through some of my own inventions and
pursuits.

A friend had mentioned Quirky to me as a potential avenue, and I looked into
it about 6 months ago. It looked...cute...kind of like an Etsy and one of
those infomercials on TV for the Inventors Helpline or whatever it was. The
first impression wasn't straight out excitement, and the second impression
surely didn't help.

Personally I didn't like the terms of how they wanted to do business. It
reminded me a lot of record contracts and rights management, who gets a cut of
what, and while I completely understand it's a valid business model, it's not
my preferred modus operandi. As in, I prefer independence, even if it means
sacrifices in expedience, funding, or even simple encouragement. Quirky
offered an avenue that could be helpful to a certain population, of which I
was a member, but I still didn't sign up.

Regarding iteration - or more to the point - lack thereof - I almost can't
believe it. Every single music project I create and work on goes through
versions. Usually I start with drums (even if I have a melody in mind I need
the tempo to work with), then add a bassline or keys, then a guitar, then more
as needed. While I'd absolutely love to create a piece of hardware that
functions perfectly in Version 1.0, I'm too skeptical / influenced by Murphy's
Laws that things will take some experimentation. Knowing "nothing is foolproof
because fools are so ingenious" helps, but user feedback should be a real
priority!

------
pavornyoh
Another question, apart from the money it raised how much profit did the make
annually? Is there a place to get these numbers? Also, shouldn't the
quarterly/annual sales numbers be telling them things where not going well?
Were the books cooked or just an oversight? There are just so many questions.
It is nice to raise money but that is just not enough...

------
perlgeek
> It usually reads something like “venture backed company burns through
> mountain of cash without real business” or some other such garbage.

...

> The 6 year journey of the company was a balancing act between an
> extraordinarily bold vision and a fundamentally broken business model.

Wait, didn't you say earlier that "without real business" was garbage?

------
shulex
Anyone knows what happens with the money users earned as "influence"? My guess
it is gone but could find no references about this no where..

------
pavornyoh
This is very sad they failed.

