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.
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.
competently managed lol
maybe a few years of it to pump up the value, before it's dumped again.
Private equity destroying another productive company.
The founders knew what they were doing. This was their way of cashing out some of the company while continuing to run it. All of the private equity tricks are designed to avoid paying taxes in the process.
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."
I don't understand this. What is wrong with a stable company that maintains its size?
The thing wrong with a stable company is that it doesn't afford those at the top uncontrollable, disproportionate influence and profit.
American business culture disdains stable companies that maintain their size.
American business culture advocates for and promotes unlimited expansion and profit increase above all else, which is obviously unsustainable and distracts from creating good products or social benefit If you put a moment of thought into it, and benefits the one or few at the top while exploiting everybody else.
When that venture inevitably fails, the winners at the top get to exploit their ill-gotten profit to influence culture at large, radicalize the exploited and propagate the exploitative system.
The winners are shuffled around, and continue making obscene profit from each successive top position at the expense of their society, simultaneously creating and breaking laws to further their selfish, unsustainable gain.
My instant pot is amazing. Everyone i know has one. How did they fail??
When everyone already has one, no one needs to buy it anymore
I saw plenty of opportunities for enshitification and designed obsolescence.
There was an APP! So of course the natural order of things is to move more and more functionality from the physical control panel to the app. Then periodically let the app die by obsolescence. Force people to buy new phones to keep up, but then one day the new app no longer talks to old pressure cookers. Make the next version connect to the cloud for programs, and share with the IP maker everything you do. Sell that data to Amazon and Google who want to know what food you’re buying.
Then make the programs subscription based, so users have to pay a monthly fee to operate their cooker. Justify it by adding more and more programs. If someone does not pay their subscription, shut them down. Make the IP the biggest brick in the house.
I was actually disturbed that there was a Google Playstore app. Sure, it was optional, but I did not like the fact that my purchase in part financed the creation of an exclusive closed-source app exclusively available to Google and Apple patrons. It should have been an f-droid app.
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
Because it is made redundant by literally everything else that is already in your kitchen. You can't name one thing this appliance does that a pressure cooker, stove/oven and crock pot don't already do.
It also doesn't replace any of those other devices so unless you're a college dorm resident it's just another massive thing on your counter for basically no value or reason
Just because you didn't see value in the product doesn't mean others don't. It saved space for me because I don't need a slow cooker, rice cooker, pressure cooker, yogurt maker etc. They're all gone and replaced with a one stop shop of "if it's wet it goes in the IP".
It simplified processes and made them amazingly repeatable too. Stocks are a breeze: set, forget, comeback when it beeps. I don't nurse temperatures, times and don't stress things boiling over, boiling dry, getting too hot or not hot enough.
Sterilisation for brewing: come back when it beeps. Yogurt making: come back when it beeps. Dough fermenting: come back when it beeps. Soup: come back when it beeps. My fiancée wouldnt touch pressure cooking because she's anxious it will explode, now she comes back when it beeps.
It doesn't do anything as well as any dedicated device true enough, but it's good enough to not buy those things and just use the IP. I'd have to eat a lot of rice to get a rice cooker as well as an IP.
I'm glad you have all that in your kitchen.
Permanently Deleted
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.
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...
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
Worked for no problem, over Tor in fact. Usually Tor gets the most hostile treatment.
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.
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?
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!
Thanks for posting the link. MVP of the comments.
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.
I guess I didn't get the memo. Mine gets regular use.
For some strange reason Tor users are able to reach this otherwise paywalled article, so I will post the text below for all those who are unable to reach it:
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
The Instant Pot is, by all indications, a perfectly good machine—maybe even a great one. The IP, as the device is known to its many devotees, is a kitchen gadget in the most straightforward sense of the term: It’s a classic labor-saver, promising to turn ingredients into family meals while you clean up, tend to your kids, and do all of the other things you could be doing instead of keeping an eye on the stove. Once you get the hang of the electric pressure cooker, it seems to basically deliver on that promise, chugging along gamely through years’ worth of weeknight dinners of pork green chili or chicken tikka masala. Since its debut in 2010, the Instant Pot has sold in the millions and spent years as a must-have kitchen sensation.
Sure enough, in 2019, when the private-equity firm Cornell Capital bought the gadget’s maker, Instant Brands, and merged it with another kitchenware maker, the combined company was reportedly valued at more than $2 billion. A few years and one pandemic later, the company filed for bankruptcy on Monday, weighed down by more than $500 million in debt after years of supply-chain chaos and limited success expanding the Instant brand into other categories of household gadgetry. Perhaps counterintuitively, that the Instant Pot remains a useful, widely appreciated gadget is not unrelated to the faltering of its parent company. In fact, it’s central to understanding exactly what went wrong.
The Instant Pot certainly didn’t invent at-home pressure cooking, but it did introduce the concept to lots of Americans, and it did so in a plug-in, set-it-and-forget-it format that wasn’t as intimidating (or as explosion prone) as using a stovetop pressure cooker. If you weren’t sure how much you’d use the pressure-cooking feature, that was fine—the IP billed itself as a “multi-cooker,” and it also slow-cooked, steamed, sautéed, cooked rice, and made yogurt. At the height of its popularity, in the 2010s, you could get a basic model on Amazon for less than $100, so giving it a shot wasn’t much of a risk, even if you ended up using it only occasionally. As the device became more popular, it seemed to generate endless word-of-mouth praise for its ability to generate one-pot dinners, and Facebook groups, websites, and cookbooks sprouted up to teach new users how to get the most out of their machine.
All of this amounted to the kind of public-relations coup that companies are constantly trying and failing to buy for their own new launches. Those failures are not infrequently a result of the products themselves; at this point, it’s very difficult to come up with a novel idea for a consumer good that addresses some kind of real and reasonably common issue. The average American just doesn’t have that many problems left that can plausibly be solved at the level of inexpensive gadgetry. The Instant Pot flourished because the company found a tiny bit of white space in a crowded market, and it sold a machine that did a serviceable job at helping out a particular type of very common home cook: someone who cooks regularly for more than one or two people, more out of necessity than because they find the process creative or relaxing. There was no slick branding exercise foundational to the Instant Pot’s success. The device was the brand. It still is.
Therein lies the problem, or at least one of the problems. A device developed primarily to address a particular food-prep inefficiency has a natural ceiling to its potential market, and when one catches on as quickly and widely as the Instant Pot, it can meet that market ceiling in pretty short order. Arguably, it can exceed it—people who wouldn’t have otherwise seen themselves as Instant Pot owners buy into the hype. Predictably, after a decade of lightning-fast sales in the United States, things seem to be cooling off. Instant Brands does not release detailed sales figures, but from 2020 to 2022, sales of multi-cookers as a product category dropped by half, according to the market-research firm NPD Group. Instant Pots dominate the category. Very few people seem to need or want a second IP within five years of buying a first one. Why would they?
From the point of view of the consumer, this makes the Instant Pot a dream product: It does what it says, and it doesn’t cost you much or any additional money after that first purchase. It doesn’t appear to have any planned obsolescence built into it, which would prompt you to replace it at a regular clip. But from the point of view of owners and investors trying to maximize value, that makes the Instant Pot a problem. A company can’t just tootle along in perpetuity, debuting new products according to the actual pace of its good ideas, and otherwise manufacturing and selling a few versions of a durable, beloved device and its accessories, updated every few years with new features. 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. Recently, it’s become clear that those expectations are probably not sustainable even for companies that have produced era-defining software products. They’re certainly not sustainable when placed on the shoulders of the humble Instant Pot, which, despite being an object with a digital display and a wall plug, was never technologically innovative so much as it was a clever, useful packaging of existing components. This was not at all unclear during the product’s heyday, but private-equity interests tried to moneyball it anyway, as they are wont to do.
When Cornell Capital acquired Instant Brands, in 2019, it merged the company with Correlle Brands, which it already owned and which makes a few lines of kitchenware, including Pyrex. It then began steering the brand into new markets with new products—it tried Instant-branded air fryers, blenders, air filters. None of the new product lines really worked out, because lots of other companies already do a fine job manufacturing and selling those things, and no one really had a reason to choose the Instant Brands version over competitors from Ninja or Vitamix or Honeywell, which specialize in those kinds of products in the way that Instant Brands does the multi-cooker. There was a lot of money, at least while interest rates were low, but there was no second good idea. Of course there wasn’t. Success on the Instant Pot scale is very seldom repeatable. It’s vanishingly rare for it to happen to a consumer-products company even once. But the pressures and expectations of private equity mean that that sort of astronomical success can still result in failure.
The Instant Pot, for its part, is not dead. Cornell Capital has brought in a restructuring crew, and the brand’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing allows it to continue doing business while it seeks relief from its debts. 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. Even if the Instant Pot were the greatest kitchen gadget of all time, it wouldn’t be enough to overcome that faulty financial logic.
How is it a failure to make a product that a bunch of people love? Stop projecting
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
Can't read the article. It doesn't load. Perhaps you or OP could post the article in the comments?
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.
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.
I, for one, did not love it. Horrible UI. Difficult to clean. Hot plastics steaming plasticizers into the air and food. 👎
I don’t get how plastics can reach the food. Didn’t yours have a stainless steel innerpot with a metal cover on the food side?