The Instant Pot Failed Because It Was a Good Product
The Instant Pot Failed Because It Was a Good Product
A one-hit wonder is never enough.
So this is one of those articles they wrote to get people to hate read and then the engagement gets people to read their failing website?
This is an older story. The narrative that it failed because it was too good is false. It was a private equity leveraged buyout that doomed it. The company got saddled with like 8x debt with a lot of that money going to dividends for the PE firm.
The product and the brand were strong enough that they've been sold to a different firm in the bankruptcy. If they are competently managed they should be fine.
The lede is buried at the end.
The problem is how the debts got there in the first place—in pursuit of growth for its own sake, of increased output with no clear needs that the new output would address.
What i still don't quite understand with these kind of buyouts is who lends them the money and who gets saddled with the debt? Surely banks know the drill and wouldn't want to borrow and hold debt for a company destined to fail in such a way.
Do banks get repaid before that happens and the only people being owed are small contractors and employees? Does the bank repackage the debt and sell it to someone else? Or are the interest payments high enough to just factor in losing part of the money borrowed with high certainty?
I’m guessing D) All of the above.
My instant pot is amazing. Everyone i know has one. How did they fail??
I have a theory that shitty products fundamentaly out-compete good products today because its way cheaper to market your product as good than to actually develop it well. I call it the craptocracy
I want to see craptocracy trend so hard that it makes it into spellcheckers.
FTFA:
A few years and one pandemic later, the company filed for bankruptcy on Monday,
It's also in a bunch of comments already
The product didn't fail, American business culture failed.
they should have worked this into the title:
"A company needs to grow.
In the past few decades, the idea that every company should be growing, predictably and boundlessly and forever, has leached from the technology industry into much of the rest of American business."
Wtf is this? You can still buy them and other instant pot products on Amazon. Not to mention they still sell well. I have had mine and use it almost daily for 5 years and the seals are still good. Easy to clean, easy to use.
I guess the hypercapitalist definition of failed is that people bought them, and then sales & revenue dropped. Like it would happen with a quality product.
Once everyone had their instant pots that are really reliable and rarely break, instant had to come up with something else to sell and make money. In the pursuit of that, they made a lot of bad choices, including taking on debt, and didn't find the same success they had with instant pot.
The biggest failure here is the number of people who obviously didn't read the article. Why comment if you don't know what you're actually commenting about? Is this the writing equivalent to loving the sound of your own voice?
Edit: I can't believe my latest most controversial take is "maybe don't discuss what an article says unless you read it first". Just can't make this shit up.
Sorry I tried but I'm not making an account to read an article
That's fine but, if you don't read the article, don't comment on it like you did. I'm not suggesting that's what you did, but that's clearly what many people here did.
P.s. use 12ft.io and archive.ph to get around pay walls.
Pay wall after 3 paragraphs
If there's a pay wall and you don't use something like 12ft.io or archive.ph to get around it, just don't comment. There's no requirement to comment and those that do so without knowing what the article is actually about are providing commentary on their imaginations.
Does everybody here have an atlantic subscription or did nobody actually read the paywalled article?
I use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension for Firefox
This is a mirror. The OG was on pushed off GitHub due to DMCA bullshit and now lives on GitFlic
Yep. I've had mine for 6 years and it's still incredible. Luckily compatible sealing rings are still available from 3rd party vendors. Makes great Greek Yogurt, Chicken Soup, and Steel Cut Oats. And of course , it can make so much more.
It sucks that when you make something this good, you're destined to put yourself out of business, meanwhile planned obsolescence works...
I guess I didn't get the memo. Mine gets regular use.
Sadly I lack an account for the Atlantic, but I am going to assume that they were bought out.
They got toys R us'd by corporate bookeeping shenanigans where they take debt from other companies and dump it all into one business which destroys it.
Articles that lie to me like this make me want to punch the author in their momma smoocher.
Thank you most kindly! I have never heard of that website and am bookmarking it for the future!
Iirc they went broke because their first product was a huge hit, so they followed up with a bunch of useless crap that nobody bought.
I can recommend the Sage/breville "fast and slow go 6L" cooker if you cannot or don't want to get the instant pot. I have had mine for 2 years now and its solid build and i have used it a lot. Makes excellent youghurt and risotto among others.
The thing is, these are just a pressure vessel with a timer and a heating element. They are all good unless they are very poorly made.
Also very precise temperature control. The sage one can do sous vide as well and it's also needed for yoghurt.
youghurt
How many spellings of yogurt do people need to make before we have enough?
Go full Lovecraft and spell it "yog-huurt".
As soon as my autocorrect is contaminated with spelling errors I'm doomed. For some reason when spelling a word wrong just twice or thrice it's automatically added to the dictionary which is so stupid. So in reality it's not me spelling it wrong because I'm ignorant, it's because autocorrect does not actually correct me when I need it and it's teaching me back my own mistakes. I have the same issue with the word "very" that I spell "verry" because it got into the dictionary once and I never knew it was wrong until much later and I had alread learned the muscle memory. Who was supposed to teach me anyway at this point. I'm far past school.
How is it a failure to make a product that a bunch of people love? Stop projecting
It’s a failure when despite that the company goes bankrupt and the product stops being made. Consider actually reading the article. It’s the story of terrible business culture inside private equity firms that causes amazing products to keep disappearing. Being an amazing product makes you the target of these scumbags the very first time you stumble as a business. So you can tongue in cheek argue that is what causes you to fail.
perhaps you could read the article, but the jist is that in this economic system the good product was so good that people bought it and then sales dried as nobody needed another, rendernng the company bankrupt.
Sounds like a success to me
In your opinion, how does the concept of projecting fit here? Just that one word could be re-applied reciprocally in a completely different context?
The business folks are projecting on the customers. If the customers have a product that lasts them forever, then this is a success.
Edit: it doesn't matter what happens to the company. The only thing that matters is if the customers were happy. If you focus on the things that matter, this was a triumph. A huge success.