Last week Bloomberg published an article exposing how easy it is to “hack” Juicero’s produce packs by squeezing them with your hands, deeming the $699 (now $399) WiFi-connected juice press completely unnecessary. Nearly overnight, Juicero has become the posterchild for Silicon Valley excess.

Juicero raised nearly $120M from well-known investors before shipping a single unit. The team spent over two years building an incredibly complex product and the ecosystem to support it. Aside from the flagship juice press, Juicero built relationships with farmers, co-packing/food-processing facilities, complex custom packaging, beautifully designed mobile/web applications, and a subscription delivery service. But they did all this work without the basic proof that this business made sense to consumers.

Constraints during the earliest stages of a hardware company’s life force founders to carefully allocate resources to find creative solutions. I hope this post serves as a lesson to other hardware startups that spending tens of millions of dollars on product development prior to shipping a single unit is a goal that’s not worth striving for.

The Teardown

Juicero’s Press is an incredibly complicated piece of engineering. Of the hundreds of consumer products I’ve taken apart over the years, this is easily among the top 5% on the complexity scale. To understand what’s going on inside the press let’s peel back the beautifully molded, glossy white and orange plastic: