Can’t wait for a $1000 toilet paper holder startup, with no less than $100m in venture funding. They can write it in Go or Rust, and use deep learning running on FPGA to detect when you’re low on paper, and order it from Amazon automatically.
Machine learning AI startup, toiletoria, uses block chain to dispenses toilet paper according to the size of your ass which it determines using AI technology installed on your phone and saves you money on toilet paper. Not compatible with Android less than version 5. Must use toiletoria branded toilet paper.
First, if you're going for the razor-blade model, your razors need to be cheap.
Second, if you're the only place where customers can buy blades, your market will be more limited than one where your blades are the best, but you have blade competitors.
They may not have understood their market, either. Most people who go out of their way to get good whole leaf tea enjoy the process, the tea ware, etc. It’s like people who enjoy guns and accessories for guns? This is trying to sell them a gun at 10x markup, without any details on the quality of the shooting, and promising they’ll never have to buy any accessories for it.
It’s priced for very high income tea enthusiasts, with features that strike against everything a normal tea enthusiast enjoys.
For $100 and cheap packets this would fly, targeting people who currently don’t care about that (tea bag users.) But then, the margins would be shit and you’re trying to compete against an already simple and cheap tech.
Their demographic is tea drinkers who are ignored by the coffee industry. We have all these coffee makers that have k-cups, but nothing for tea. And tea bags are 2nd rate, they float above the water depending on the tea, and never brew right. It is for sure directed at a more premium market, people who care about quality. But I wouldn't say that market is vanishing - they got their price a bit wrong. The prices they are selling at now will result in a conplete sell out. The classic teaforia infuser works on any tea..not just the sips containers. Id like to see them come back in style - I dont think this is the end for a great glass on glass tea machine. They did not sacrifice on purity or taste, much respect to Teforia.
Good teabags aren't even that bad. After all they're still basically tea seeped in hot water. You can also buy plenty of inexpensive infusers which aren't necessarily a lot better than teabags but the cost is a bit lower. And you can have basically open inserts you can put in cups. So plenty of ways to make tea quickly and easily with quality that is, for the most part, indistinguishable from tea pots.
It's just called "getting a decent tea bag" and works pretty well.
The flip side is of course brewing with real quality leaves, but it's more expensive and is more effort. They both have their places, unlike this machine.
To make good tea you have to control temperature, pressure, steeping time, and water volume. The teforia microbrewer does what a teabag won't, let alone an inefficient kettle. I purchased 2 Teforia's at the discounted rate. The machine has its place.
You know, if I weren’t a tea enthusiast myself, all that smoke you’re blowing might obfuscate something.
Here’s how I manage to control all those variables without a thousand dollar tea keurig:
1) one time, just once, I measure the volume of my tea cup. This is good for, you know, the life of the cup.
2) I throw an infuser on a scale, and throw teaspoons of tea in until I’ve hit the the right grams/100 ml. I now know how many tap of loose leaf are right for that cup.
3) I enjoy black tea, so boiling is fine. If it’s a day I’m feeling like a green or an oolong, I’ll dump a food thermometer probe into my kettle - it’ll beep at my desired temp.
4) I pour the water in the cup, stick in the infuser, and throw 5 minutes on the timer that comes with every iPhone.
Just so we are clear, the everyday cup of tea looks like this: throw 2 tsp leaves into infuser, boil water, rinse leaves, stick infuser in cup, let sit five minutes.
Oddly, with all the magic of “a timer on my phone,” my daily cup is controlled for temp, pressure (I’m not changing altitudes here), steep time, and water volume. And
All it cost was an 8$ infuser.
But, sure, buy up all the 1000$ kettles you can grab.
I have a Special-T machine I paid 69€ and order tea at 0.30cts each that are very good. Only available in some European countries alas. (Not affiliated, just happy customer !)
I hate to break this to you, but tea is brewed at standard atmospheric pressure: ~ 101.3 kPa. Plus whatever is contributed by the depth of the water column above the tea bag or loose leaves.
Yes, tea doesn't require tech, but espresso-machines are not only tech, but a convenience to press a button and get a cup. I drink coffee because of that, not because I enjoy it more than tea.
Unfortunately, tea market seems to be too small to pay for such a convenience. There are some capsule-machines like Nespresso that can brew tea, but they make too small portions.
More popular in households in Asia than western europe/US is a machine that holds your water at tea temp (it looks almost like a water tank.) You can look up Zojirushi on amazon to get some examples.
So you hit a button, water drops into your cup at the correct temperature, and all you have to do is drop in your tea bag / infuser of choice. Considering tea needs to steep, it's about as close as tea is going to come to espresso.
Yes, I know, they call it for some reason "cooler" :)
The first problem is you should stay near them while they are pouring the water, and it takes time, especially if I'm making a tea for two. The second is that making hot water is not the most time-expensive for me, it's mixing teas and additives and putting them into a tea bag. Unfortunately, pre-bagged teas are usually low quality.
I feel like that's very easy to say in hindsight. There is a large market of people that doesn't have a problem with overpaying a lot for very basic products with intangible value-add, and it seems to be hard to know if your product just stays within the bounds of their gullibility or crosses it.
Few days ago I saw a Kickstarter for a water purifier with subscription cartridges[0], and my first thought was: "Oh boy, that's going to be another Juicero". Honestly tough it's very hard to predict, and it could go either way and be a Nespresso/Keurig and not a Juicero/Teforia.
Sorry, I was a touch unclear in my original post. The problem isn't that the product has little or no value-add, it's that for the population of tea enthusiasts, it has actually negative value.
The tea enthusiast community is as much about tea accessories - infusers, cups, mugs, kettles, pots, sharing pitchers, tea pets, gongfu tray, etc. - as it is about the tea itself. For the sort of folks who are happy to drop dollars on tea goods, a machine built around excluding 90% of the fun actively goes against the grain. In addition, for $1000 you can buy several of the really, really nice tea pots that make most tea enthusiasts drool.
Please, don't take my word for it. Check out any popular tea blog. Or the agenda for any industry conference.
The way I see it, tea drinkers are likely to fall into a matrix of degree of tea enthusiasm, degree of tea accessory enthusiasm, and price insensitivity - let's call it a 3x3x3. 0 indicates some small degree of enjoyment or price insensitivity.
Most tea drinkers by numbers are going to be found in Tea[0]Accessory[0]Price[0] - folks who drop a lipton bag in their daily cup. They aren't likely to shift from their 1-cent tastes-like-tuchus tea to a $1000 machine with several-dollars-per-serving tea. If they cared that much they'd either not drink lipton, or if they were that price insensitive they'd at least buy better tea bags.
The second largest group is Tea[1]Accessories[0]Price[0]. These folks shell out for nicer tea bags, with tea comprised of tiny remnants of leaves rather than out-and-out fannings. They like tea; they think of themselves as tea drinkers. They may have a favored tea pot. They may know what whole leaf tea is and buy it on occasion. Their tea still only costs about 20 cents per cup (something like Vahdam) down to 6 cents a cup (PG Tips, the tea that every English hospital sends you home with after giving birth. And... it's surprisingly pleasant.) There is, again, a pretty steep difference between "I throw a better tea bag into my coffee cup for 6 cents rather than a shit bag for 1 cent" and "I will shell out a thousand bucks for a machine that will let me pay starbucks prices for a cup of tea."
So, addressable market is pretty tiny. Let's jump over to Price[2]. It exists. For tea enthusiasts most will be found in something like Tea[2]Accessories[2]Price[1]. Tea, it should be noted, is a cheap pass time. Even very fine tea is not generally expensive. Even very fine tea pots will not generally break $200. For these folks, there is pleasure in discovering new tea, buying new teaware, pairing teaware to tea (e.g., the right heat-conserving properties of pot to the leaf), and so on. Commoditizing their tea actively deprives them of pleasure. Removing tea-making accessories from the process deprives them of pleasure. It's like trying to sell k-cups to that guy who makes a big deal about this new single-farm roast from Nicaragua that he found for his pour-over, that he likes to make on his artisanal aeropress rig he backed on kickstarter. And where do they fall on price? I'm pretty price-insensitive on tea; I regularly buy the good stuff. On the higher end (let's not talk about seriously aged pu'erh), for instance, I got this spring's Ai Jiao Rock Oolong Tea of Wu Yi Shan, which ran 9 bucks USD for 50g. That's good for about 18 8-ounce cups - or lets be fair, about two weeks of my big morning cup (though that nice oolong is hardly a daily drinker). That puts me at 64 cents per cup. My daily drinker is an earl grey supreme w/ silver tips from Harney & Sons, which runs 25 cents for my big morning cup.
So which market segment are they looking for? To care about tea, but not enough to care about commoditized tea servings. To not care about accessories. And to not care about a hundred-fold price increase up front and a ten-to-hundred-fold increase per cup. So... tea[1]accessories[0]price[2+]?
I can't say it doesn't exist, but as addressable ...
Thanks for your thorough response! It's always nice to get a glimpse into a topic you usually don't give much thought to, especially when it's from someone that is passionate about it.
I am neither a coffee nor a tea enthusiast and also not an expert on the respective markets, so please excuse any naive assumptions/equations I might be making.
At least in Germany, with a strong middle-class, you do have a substantial coffee[1]accessories[0]price[2] market, with the persona of that market buying a Jura or Saeco full automatic machine (600-2000€) and coffee beans from Tchibo. They value their coffee because they drink a lot of it, but they also don't feel like going the extra mile to prepare it. For them, the coffee machine is also a status symbol they can show off when people come over. They - unlike the coffee enthusiasts with a manual espresso maker and an X step brewing and roasting process - don't really care about the fact that all the fun has been automated away.
I trust you when you say that there currently nothing happening in the tea[1]accessories[0]price[2] market segment. However, I think it might be possible that it might just be untaped due to lack of machines like the Teforia, or that the market could be created via marketing (by also cutting into the coffee market).
I think it's entirely fair to say that such a market could potentially be created, but there's a big difference in how you have to approach creating a market vs. filling a niche that you think a market exists for already. Teforia bet on the latter, rather than trying to convince people with money to spend who like tea (but are not Tea Enthusiasts) that this was something they needed in their life.
If you are a fully automatic tea machine startup from the future and reading this - the problem is not engineering, the problem is marketing. Put your ingenuity and money into it.
I think it's just because tea-drinking is a small market, so there are few people like me, who don't enjoy the process, but enjoy the tea.
There are people like you describe in coffee to, but they are outnumbered by those, who just want some caffeine.
And I think the tea startup should think how to expand the niche, not try to cater to current enthusiast. Of course, this machine was very wrong for this aim.
Everyone here is criticizing Teforia but what about some of what they did right? I just ordered 2 classic infusers, because they built a machine that can accept their teas AND any looseleaf tea you buy, and brews it wonderfully, better than most of us could accomplish without overly babysitting the tea and using pressure devices like the french press. You will honestly not taste tea with as much flavor as the teaforia infuser extracts - thats a huge accomplishment. Their device didnt do any BS K-cup opening through sharp prongs, with a messy garbage bin. You simply scan the tea and dump it in the infuser. Honestly, I think the company may have issued a forclosure but through the sale volume with the discounts they are offering, the investors will be impressed and change their mind about teaforia. Sure, the initial prices were too high but there is a market for what teaforia created. Sometimes we have to stumble and rid ourselves of greed before we let our precious creations become more commoditized, ie cheaper. I forsee a 3rd party market for teaforias becoming pretty large if TeForia shuts down. The sips are cool but the device is really the magic.
It's possible that tea culture is significantly weaker than coffee culture in most of the globe. Unfortunately, changing culture to sell a product is terribly hard - Starbucks did accomplish something similar though. I really would like to see tea, quality tea made using pressured microbrewing like Teaforia does, come into the mainstream. Its a huge travesty that you get a paper teabag at Starbucks meanwhile coffee gets made to such a precision and premium degree.
The tea culture definitely isn't weaker than coffee culture on the worldwide stage, not to a meaningful extent anyway.
One important difference is that tea never had the kinds of accessibility problems that coffee had. Specifically, the kinds of accessibility problems that technology solves, because you can get a very good cup of tea with just attentive steeping.
With coffee, you more or less need hardware of some kind, so it's a question of how fancy that hardware is. With tea, the base case is either a teabag or loose leaf in a cup/pot.
The main difference is that some of the most popular ways of preparing coffee are only possible to do well with relatively expensive equipment, whereas you can prepare the finest teas with a £10 kettle and mug infuser. You can't compare a product like this to a $1000 espresso machine: it's more like buying a $1000, cloud-connected french press.
IMHO the best devices for tea to date are those little spring-loaded double mesh hemisphere tea infusers. That said, at the reduced price I may have bought a couple of the Teforias, one to pull apart and one for my dad who is a tea fiend, but they apparently only ship within the US.
> brews it wonderfully, better than most of us could accomplish without overly babysitting the tea and using pressure devices like the french press.
You say "overly babysitting", but which part of pushing the "170F" button on the $50 temperature controlled electric kettle with easy single-press presets and then twisting an egg timer is so hard that it needs another $950 and then special multi-dollar packets and, omfg, internet access to a cloud service? I agree with the other commenter. It definitely sounds like you work for Teforia. Also like you aren't thinking honestly about how easy it is to make tea.
I don't work for Teforia. I like their product. I love tea. A kettle doesn't control pressure, nor does it use a small volume of water. ie microbrewing. So with an egg timer you can control steep time and temperature but not much else and not very accurately. The taste is the difference, bitter vs flavorful.
This is what makes middle America laugh at SV... meanwhile, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305086 about funding for breast pump startups (a product actually used by millions that people expect to pay money for, which hasn't improved significantly in decades).
As other commenters say clearly what the breast pump startups need is a blockchain.
"The glass within the infusion globe and carafe are hand blown by a glass artisan, one at a time."
Oh, please.
A product specifically made for dummies with too much money is the Carver Silver Seven amplifier.[1] Bob Carver, who was a very good amplifier designer, offered a challenge in 1987. He would build a low-cost amplifier to exactly match the transfer function of some High End amplifier. The outputs matched; this was tested by running both amplifiers in parallel, hooked up to cancel out. It worked. In blind listening tests, nobody could reliably tell the difference. High End reviewers hated this.
So, partly as a joke. Carver designed the Carver Silver Seven. "Each hand-rubbed, black lacquered chassis rests on four rubbery Simms Vibration Dampers, which in turn rest on polished granite anti-vibration bases." Each amplifier has 19 tubes. Per channel. The power supply is on a separate chassis. Each chassis is almost half a meter deep. There's a four minute delay on power up for careful tube warming.
Audiophiles bought it.
Carver's successors then came out with the Silver Seven 700. This has twenty tubes, weighs 100 pounds, and costs $35,000. Per channel. Presumably someone is buying that.
Meanwhile, clueless overpaid tech millennials will now be without tea, unless someone can quickly get a vc-backed tea app to market.
I last saw one of them gasping that their grandparents used to use teabags.
And i was just kidding about signalling being a right. I think it's far better to avoid the status race, as much as possible. for example, in Amish communities, there's relatively little of that, and they are, according to survey, "as happy as billionaires".
There was some smart researcher(Brochet), who took white white, added red food coloring to it, and did a blind test between that and red wine, for wine "science" students. They couldn't reliably tell the difference.
And than he went and created his own expensive wine brand, successfully.
The word "reality" has no place in this sentence, and "educate" is on shaky ground: However, the reality of our business is that it would take a lot more financing and time to educate the market ...
Ok so a few years ago I bought the most ridiculous tea maker ever, it does everything put the tea in and the water, and it takes the tea out when it’s done and will keep it warm too. It cost $200 and I thought it was kind of over priced but my wife loves tea so i got it for her for Xmas.
Even does this thing where it dips the tea in and out ask it brews / infuses / whatever tea lingo is
$1000 to make tea and I have to buy the tea from the company? No way Jose.
Good riddance to over-engineered niche luxury products like this that ask you to spend hundreds of dollars to achieve the same results you can achieve for a few dollars.
The loss on the human side (jobs, etc) is sad, but I certainly don't shed a tear when this stuff doesn't succeed.
The Juicero was essentially an expensive pair of hands. The only thing the Teforia MAYBE offers, if I'm incredibly generous about it, is the pressurized steeping, but there is no way that it makes enough of a taste difference to be worth it over traditional western or gongfu brewing. I'm also not convinced that it's actually better, and anecdotal experiences from Teforia buyers don't really help because when you pay $1000 for your tea infuser, of course you're going to "think" it's better. I bet blind taste tests would come out quite differently.
Let's even say the result does actually taste better, even under blind testing. There is no way it tastes hundreds of dollars better. Why would someone spend that much on a slight taste improvement? It only makes sense for people with incredibly high budgets/income. Tea enthusiasts already control all the variables (temperature, time, etc) and can and do make great tea using gaiwans and teapots. The Teaforia solves a non-existent problem.
66 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 91.7 ms ] threadIt’s priced for very high income tea enthusiasts, with features that strike against everything a normal tea enthusiast enjoys.
For $100 and cheap packets this would fly, targeting people who currently don’t care about that (tea bag users.) But then, the margins would be shit and you’re trying to compete against an already simple and cheap tech.
What demographic were they hallucinating?
You didn’t actually say anything new - you just sound like you work for Teforia.
The flip side is of course brewing with real quality leaves, but it's more expensive and is more effort. They both have their places, unlike this machine.
Here’s how I manage to control all those variables without a thousand dollar tea keurig: 1) one time, just once, I measure the volume of my tea cup. This is good for, you know, the life of the cup. 2) I throw an infuser on a scale, and throw teaspoons of tea in until I’ve hit the the right grams/100 ml. I now know how many tap of loose leaf are right for that cup.
3) I enjoy black tea, so boiling is fine. If it’s a day I’m feeling like a green or an oolong, I’ll dump a food thermometer probe into my kettle - it’ll beep at my desired temp.
4) I pour the water in the cup, stick in the infuser, and throw 5 minutes on the timer that comes with every iPhone.
Just so we are clear, the everyday cup of tea looks like this: throw 2 tsp leaves into infuser, boil water, rinse leaves, stick infuser in cup, let sit five minutes.
Oddly, with all the magic of “a timer on my phone,” my daily cup is controlled for temp, pressure (I’m not changing altitudes here), steep time, and water volume. And All it cost was an 8$ infuser.
But, sure, buy up all the 1000$ kettles you can grab.
www.special-t.com
Unfortunately, tea market seems to be too small to pay for such a convenience. There are some capsule-machines like Nespresso that can brew tea, but they make too small portions.
So you hit a button, water drops into your cup at the correct temperature, and all you have to do is drop in your tea bag / infuser of choice. Considering tea needs to steep, it's about as close as tea is going to come to espresso.
The first problem is you should stay near them while they are pouring the water, and it takes time, especially if I'm making a tea for two. The second is that making hot water is not the most time-expensive for me, it's mixing teas and additives and putting them into a tea bag. Unfortunately, pre-bagged teas are usually low quality.
Few days ago I saw a Kickstarter for a water purifier with subscription cartridges[0], and my first thought was: "Oh boy, that's going to be another Juicero". Honestly tough it's very hard to predict, and it could go either way and be a Nespresso/Keurig and not a Juicero/Teforia.
[0]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mitte-water/mitte-creat...
The tea enthusiast community is as much about tea accessories - infusers, cups, mugs, kettles, pots, sharing pitchers, tea pets, gongfu tray, etc. - as it is about the tea itself. For the sort of folks who are happy to drop dollars on tea goods, a machine built around excluding 90% of the fun actively goes against the grain. In addition, for $1000 you can buy several of the really, really nice tea pots that make most tea enthusiasts drool.
Please, don't take my word for it. Check out any popular tea blog. Or the agenda for any industry conference.
The way I see it, tea drinkers are likely to fall into a matrix of degree of tea enthusiasm, degree of tea accessory enthusiasm, and price insensitivity - let's call it a 3x3x3. 0 indicates some small degree of enjoyment or price insensitivity.
Most tea drinkers by numbers are going to be found in Tea[0]Accessory[0]Price[0] - folks who drop a lipton bag in their daily cup. They aren't likely to shift from their 1-cent tastes-like-tuchus tea to a $1000 machine with several-dollars-per-serving tea. If they cared that much they'd either not drink lipton, or if they were that price insensitive they'd at least buy better tea bags.
The second largest group is Tea[1]Accessories[0]Price[0]. These folks shell out for nicer tea bags, with tea comprised of tiny remnants of leaves rather than out-and-out fannings. They like tea; they think of themselves as tea drinkers. They may have a favored tea pot. They may know what whole leaf tea is and buy it on occasion. Their tea still only costs about 20 cents per cup (something like Vahdam) down to 6 cents a cup (PG Tips, the tea that every English hospital sends you home with after giving birth. And... it's surprisingly pleasant.) There is, again, a pretty steep difference between "I throw a better tea bag into my coffee cup for 6 cents rather than a shit bag for 1 cent" and "I will shell out a thousand bucks for a machine that will let me pay starbucks prices for a cup of tea."
So, addressable market is pretty tiny. Let's jump over to Price[2]. It exists. For tea enthusiasts most will be found in something like Tea[2]Accessories[2]Price[1]. Tea, it should be noted, is a cheap pass time. Even very fine tea is not generally expensive. Even very fine tea pots will not generally break $200. For these folks, there is pleasure in discovering new tea, buying new teaware, pairing teaware to tea (e.g., the right heat-conserving properties of pot to the leaf), and so on. Commoditizing their tea actively deprives them of pleasure. Removing tea-making accessories from the process deprives them of pleasure. It's like trying to sell k-cups to that guy who makes a big deal about this new single-farm roast from Nicaragua that he found for his pour-over, that he likes to make on his artisanal aeropress rig he backed on kickstarter. And where do they fall on price? I'm pretty price-insensitive on tea; I regularly buy the good stuff. On the higher end (let's not talk about seriously aged pu'erh), for instance, I got this spring's Ai Jiao Rock Oolong Tea of Wu Yi Shan, which ran 9 bucks USD for 50g. That's good for about 18 8-ounce cups - or lets be fair, about two weeks of my big morning cup (though that nice oolong is hardly a daily drinker). That puts me at 64 cents per cup. My daily drinker is an earl grey supreme w/ silver tips from Harney & Sons, which runs 25 cents for my big morning cup.
So which market segment are they looking for? To care about tea, but not enough to care about commoditized tea servings. To not care about accessories. And to not care about a hundred-fold price increase up front and a ten-to-hundred-fold increase per cup. So... tea[1]accessories[0]price[2+]?
I can't say it doesn't exist, but as addressable ...
I am neither a coffee nor a tea enthusiast and also not an expert on the respective markets, so please excuse any naive assumptions/equations I might be making.
At least in Germany, with a strong middle-class, you do have a substantial coffee[1]accessories[0]price[2] market, with the persona of that market buying a Jura or Saeco full automatic machine (600-2000€) and coffee beans from Tchibo. They value their coffee because they drink a lot of it, but they also don't feel like going the extra mile to prepare it. For them, the coffee machine is also a status symbol they can show off when people come over. They - unlike the coffee enthusiasts with a manual espresso maker and an X step brewing and roasting process - don't really care about the fact that all the fun has been automated away.
I trust you when you say that there currently nothing happening in the tea[1]accessories[0]price[2] market segment. However, I think it might be possible that it might just be untaped due to lack of machines like the Teforia, or that the market could be created via marketing (by also cutting into the coffee market).
There are people like you describe in coffee to, but they are outnumbered by those, who just want some caffeine.
And I think the tea startup should think how to expand the niche, not try to cater to current enthusiast. Of course, this machine was very wrong for this aim.
Only if strapped to winged pigs, I'm afraid.
One important difference is that tea never had the kinds of accessibility problems that coffee had. Specifically, the kinds of accessibility problems that technology solves, because you can get a very good cup of tea with just attentive steeping.
With coffee, you more or less need hardware of some kind, so it's a question of how fancy that hardware is. With tea, the base case is either a teabag or loose leaf in a cup/pot.
Not to say tea is hard to make but if you want that extra bit of flavor, the pressure driven microbrew really makes a difference.
You say "overly babysitting", but which part of pushing the "170F" button on the $50 temperature controlled electric kettle with easy single-press presets and then twisting an egg timer is so hard that it needs another $950 and then special multi-dollar packets and, omfg, internet access to a cloud service? I agree with the other commenter. It definitely sounds like you work for Teforia. Also like you aren't thinking honestly about how easy it is to make tea.
I don't know maybe you're just terrible at making tea the usual way but it doesn't have to be that way.
As other commenters say clearly what the breast pump startups need is a blockchain.
Oh, please.
A product specifically made for dummies with too much money is the Carver Silver Seven amplifier.[1] Bob Carver, who was a very good amplifier designer, offered a challenge in 1987. He would build a low-cost amplifier to exactly match the transfer function of some High End amplifier. The outputs matched; this was tested by running both amplifiers in parallel, hooked up to cancel out. It worked. In blind listening tests, nobody could reliably tell the difference. High End reviewers hated this.
So, partly as a joke. Carver designed the Carver Silver Seven. "Each hand-rubbed, black lacquered chassis rests on four rubbery Simms Vibration Dampers, which in turn rest on polished granite anti-vibration bases." Each amplifier has 19 tubes. Per channel. The power supply is on a separate chassis. Each chassis is almost half a meter deep. There's a four minute delay on power up for careful tube warming.
Audiophiles bought it.
Carver's successors then came out with the Silver Seven 700. This has twenty tubes, weighs 100 pounds, and costs $35,000. Per channel. Presumably someone is buying that.
[1] https://hometheaterreview.com/carver-silver-seven-mono-vacuu... [2] http://www.bobcarvercorp.com/silverseven700
And i was just kidding about signalling being a right. I think it's far better to avoid the status race, as much as possible. for example, in Amish communities, there's relatively little of that, and they are, according to survey, "as happy as billionaires".
Something similar happened with wine too.
There was some smart researcher(Brochet), who took white white, added red food coloring to it, and did a blind test between that and red wine, for wine "science" students. They couldn't reliably tell the difference.
And than he went and created his own expensive wine brand, successfully.
Even does this thing where it dips the tea in and out ask it brews / infuses / whatever tea lingo is
$1000 to make tea and I have to buy the tea from the company? No way Jose.
The loss on the human side (jobs, etc) is sad, but I certainly don't shed a tear when this stuff doesn't succeed.
The Juicero was essentially an expensive pair of hands. The only thing the Teforia MAYBE offers, if I'm incredibly generous about it, is the pressurized steeping, but there is no way that it makes enough of a taste difference to be worth it over traditional western or gongfu brewing. I'm also not convinced that it's actually better, and anecdotal experiences from Teforia buyers don't really help because when you pay $1000 for your tea infuser, of course you're going to "think" it's better. I bet blind taste tests would come out quite differently.
Let's even say the result does actually taste better, even under blind testing. There is no way it tastes hundreds of dollars better. Why would someone spend that much on a slight taste improvement? It only makes sense for people with incredibly high budgets/income. Tea enthusiasts already control all the variables (temperature, time, etc) and can and do make great tea using gaiwans and teapots. The Teaforia solves a non-existent problem.