Now this is a coffee equipment hardware company founded in 2000 and 11 as of the fourth of December 2018 they don't really exist anymore.

They put out a statement on the website saying the company had come to a pretty hard stop and there would be no further support for distributors or end users in terms of both parts and software updates.

Now this is a pretty sad state of affairs for their customers and obviously for those involved in the company.

Now I want to talk about some stuff, but I don't want to feel like I'm kicking a company when it's down.

That isn't really the intention here, but I think they're raise a couple of topics that I think are worthy off a little bit of discussion.

Most of this video is really just my opinion on your welcome to disagree with that.

And there were two things really that I wanted to talk about, and the 1st 1 was crowdfunding, actually because of Adam and she had raised, I think, $230,000 between Kickstarter and Indiegogo for a new French press type product they called Flask.

Those backers have spent their money and they will get nothing.

And I think it is a good reminder to people that crowd funding, you know, Kickstarter is not a shop.

That's their own words.

Crowdfunding is gambling.

Gambling's okay, you were the odds, and you decide if it's worth it, is that discount on that product is being able to get it before other people at a cheaper price worth the risk of getting nothing a tall and that risk will very company to company.

And unfortunately, we don't really give people the tools to assess how likely it is that this hardware product will come to market.

And I think many people vastly underestimate how difficult hardware is.

But it's a gamble, and it sucks when it doesn't pay off and you lose your money.

But that does happen in gambling.

I know I've used Indigo in the past, but that was really more for a kind of pre sale type event rather than a traditional crowdfund in that regard, and actually a lot of companies do it that way, and it's actually a lot less risky But it's understanding which ones are risking which ones aren't that difficult now.

There is also equity crowdfunding.

That is definitely a thing, and that's a little bit separate.

And I I have definitely a lot more problems with that.

I think companies have very easy to raise a lot of money and incredibly high valuations that don't set up their investors for great returns down the line.

Should there be any returns on?

I would just caution anyone to be incredibly skeptical around any coffee business equity crowd funds because I think unless you are used to understanding and reading about the financials of coffee businesses, I think they can look like great businesses from the outside.

And this has been a long, long standing problem of coffee generally, that cafes look very appealing on dhe.

Now they look appealing to people in a different kind of way.

So I would just, you know, with both sorts of crowd, finally understand that it is gambling and it's always worth raising that and remembering that for what it is, I'm not saying that the people who backed it did something wrong.

I think it's really sad that they don't get that money back and they don't get any products.

I think that really sucks, and I'm sorry for them.

I did not think that this would have happened.

Looking at that crowd funding.

This is a little bit of a surprise to me now.

The second topic I want to talk about was really product market fit.

You know, I think we tend to use innovation quite often quite incorrectly, in coffee.

We tend to describe new and novel things as innovative, and for me, innovation is really about solving a problem in a meaningful way.

That's useful now.

This isn't about this one particular company.

I think we see a lot of this in coffee equipment.

I don't think there are cafe owners out there in the world whose problem is that their coffee is only 95% of what it could be, and they need some more control, and they need some Maur variables to play with to get a better cup of coffee.

I look at a lot of these brewers that are out there and I don't really understand what problems they are solving for cafe owners, and I think the market is starting to reflect that now on the crowd funding page for Alfa Divinci, they identified three problems that they were trying to solve in the 1st 1 was that the market right now is incredibly competitive.

That is true.

People need some help competing in a very competitive market.

But I don't necessarily think the solution is to spend an awful lot of money on a theatrical device.

And you see theater pop up again and again and again.

I like theater.

I like to go to the theater.

I tend to see things once, maybe twice, and after that their impact lessons pretty rapidly.

I certainly would not go and see the same thing five times a week, every week on going.

There is nothing compelling about that kind of theater, so really, it's just a temporary advantage.

And if you're tryingto compete in a marketplace through temporary advantage, you need very, very deep pockets because you're gonna need another new thing pretty quickly.

After the old one wears off, I look at cafes and look att, the problems they face, and I see things like coffee making is too slow.

Coffee making is too inconsistent now.

These are not cool problems to fix, but they're very, very big riel, meaningful problems that have a direct impact on people's success in a competitive market.

On I look a ton of the kind of convoluted coffee equipment that we see in the world, and I just don't see how it solves those riel meaningful problems.

And this is not to pick on Alfa Domenici, particularly now.

Lots of these companies tend to win design award.

They tend to be embraced initially by the community because we love to play with coffee and it meets our needs for fun.

But it doesn't necessarily meet the needs of business owners, and that's why I think what we haven't seen.

These kind of devices take off in the way that things like batch brewers have.

I think there's still plenty of room for innovation.

I still want coffee to be better, but consistently better.

I'll always come back to that time and time and time again.

I needed to be consistently better.

I need to be quicker.

I need to value my customers time.

I need to look after them and deliver them everything they want in a way that they really enjoy and theater can be a moment of that.

But it isn't a compelling long term proposition to retain a customer, and these are just my thoughts.

This is just what it made me think about.

And I don't like the idea that this video could come across as me kind of piling in on a company that failed.

I think the nature of their failure must really hurt them.

I suspect it was a situation where they were either about to receive some investment or potentially be acquired.

When that didn't happen, there was just nothing left on.

That's where you end up with this very, very, very hard stop instead of a gentle sunset that you would hope for, where they kind of gracefully degrade their service over time.

So I am.

I am sorry to see off a demon, she girl.

I think they were finding their products in an interesting direction.

But all I would say is that it is a good opportunity to think about both crowdfunding and product market fit when it comes to incredibly expensive new, innovative pieces of equipment in the coffee industry.

But this is just my opinion.

It's okay if you disagree, it's Okay.

If you think I'm wrong, I'd love to hear ports and comments down below, as always.

Thank you so much.

Watching on hope You have a great day.