LonelyIt doesn’t matter whether you’re a billion-dollar corporation or a solo founder. If people are not choosing what you are selling, it can end up here - in the graveyard of good products, ideas, and strategies that didn’t make it.
Select a headstone to read its story.
In the early 1980s, A&W decided to take on McDonald’s famous Quarter Pounder. Being late to the game, they needed a way to stand out.
Their strategy? Offer a bigger burger for the exact same price.
They wanted to make the comparison clear, so the naming choice seemed obvious. What’s bigger than a quarter? A third.
So they proudly launched the Third-Pound Burger, backed by a TV and radio campaign called “Third is the Word.” And that’s exactly where the confusion started.
It just wasn’t selling.
And the owner of A&W at the time, Alfred Taubman, couldn’t understand why. To him, it was obviously better. So he brought in a market research firm to figure it out.
It turned out when hungry customers were trying to choose a meal, they weren’t doing math in their heads.
When they compared “one-third” to “one-quarter,” they just looked at the numbers 3 and 4.
And because 3 is smaller than 4, people assumed that the Third-Pound Burger was smaller.
It might sound funny to you, but more than half of the people that the market research team interviewed asked why they should pay the same for a third of a pound as they did for a quarter - they genuinely thought it was smaller.
Instead of seeing it as a bargain, customers felt like A&W was the worse deal - the same price with less meat.
Overall, it was a good product. You got more burger for the same amount of money. And in head-to-head taste tests, many customers even said they preferred it to the Quarter Pounder.
And yet, it failed. Customers wouldn’t choose it because it didn’t account for how people actually perceive fractions in the moment.
Back in the early 2010s, Contour built an action cam that was better to use on a helmet than just about anything on the market.
At the time, anyone who used an action cam feared the worst: You finish the performance of your life, reach up to your helmet, only to realize the camera was never recording.
The problem was built into the product. Once the camera is strapped to your helmet, you can’t see it, so there’s no easy way to tell if it’s recording.
Contour’s answer to this was a big sliding switch on top of the camera. Slide it forward and it powered on and started recording. Slide it back and it stopped. You could do it with ski gloves on, without looking - you could feel a click that would let you know the camera was rolling.
And the good design didn’t stop there...
Instead of a bulky box that stuck out from your helmet, Contour built a sleek tube-like camera that contoured (get it?) along the side of your helmet. By hugging the helmet instead of sticking out, it was less likely to snag on tree branches or scrape low ceilings.
And features like a built-in laser helped you to keep your shot level.
Other models let you use your phone as a viewfinder, and built-in GPS could stamp your speed, elevation and route onto the footage, which put it at the bleeding edge of action camera tech at the time.
This focus on making features that suited users’ needs helped Contour to sell $27 million worth of cameras in 2011. They were shaping up to be a serious rival to the market leader, GoPro.
But while Contour was exceptional at coming up with features, they were not very good at explaining them to the average person.
Their advertising was full of phrases like “one-button recording”, “GPS data integration” and “270-degree rotating lens”. Every claim was true, but it was all specs.
And this was the disconnect.
Because it turned out that people were not choosing to buy action cams for their usability. They were buying them to relive their experience, to show their friends, to prove how fast they went.
And despite all Contour’s advantages, they didn’t show up in the video. Someone watching the clip couldn’t tell how easy the camera had been to switch on. So the footage looked like everyone else’s - except everyone else’s had a name that people already knew: GoPro.
By the time the customer reached the shelf, they already wanted a GoPro. And a list of better specs was not strong enough to make them reconsider.
Contour’s co-founder, Marc Barros, stated that they tried to win by building a better product, assuming whoever made creating action video easier would win. But customers actually cared about what the footage let them become - a great product and good retail distribution just weren’t enough.
Contour couldn’t sell enough to cover its debts and abruptly closed down its operations in 2013. (It was seriously abrupt: employees arrived at the company to find the doors locked and were told they no longer worked for the company.)
On the mountain, with your gloves on, seconds before you dropped in, Contour was the better camera. But customers wouldn’t choose it because Contour focused on the engineering rather than the thrill of seeing yourself star in your own footage.
Note: Clarke Capital bought the assets in 2013 and brought the brand back into business in 2014, before merging it with iON Camera in 2015.
When Tidal relaunched in 2015 to take on Spotify, it had a killer feature: crystal-clear, CD-quality sound.
At the time, music streaming apps like Spotify compressed their audio files to save on data, which stripped away a lot of the depth.
If you had a good pair of headphones, you could hear the difference.
On Tidal, you could feel the weight of the bass, the echo of the recording studio and hidden background vocals that Spotify’s compression washed out.
But that’s not the message the world heard. Tidal built its launch around something completely different...
Fair pay for musicians.
Tidal announced this at a massive press conference in New York, where 16 artists lined up to sign a declaration that they deserved a bigger slice of the streaming pie.
And on that stage? The biggest names in the music industry.
I’m talking about the likes of Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Rihanna, Kanye West, Madonna...
Artists worth hundreds of millions to billions of dollars (just google Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s net worth).
When you think of struggling artists needing greater pay, do you think of these people? Probably not. And neither did customers.
They saw a stage packed with the wealthiest celebrities on earth asking regular people to pay $19.99 a month for the premium-quality sound tier - double what Spotify charged.
Other musicians noticed too. Within weeks, Ben Gibbard, Death Cab for Cutie’s lead singer, said Tidal had blown it by parading millionaires and billionaires on stage to complain about not getting paid. And he predicted it would fail.
And even when Tidal did try and talk about its defining difference, the better sound, the message failed to land.
They spoke about “lossless FLAC formats” and “high bitrates”, which the average streaming customer didn’t understand.
In terms of sound quality, Tidal was the better product.
And yet, it never took off. The app briefly entered the top 20 on the US iPhone chart, then dropped out of the top 700 within two weeks, and the CEO was gone within a month.
It was a good streaming service. But customers didn’t choose it because it focused on who was getting paid, rather than what benefits the listener would get.
Note: Technically, Tidal didn’t die. In 2021, Jack Dorsey’s Square paid $297 million for a majority stake, in a deal that even Dorsey admitted looked odd for a payments company. It didn’t help that Dorsey and Jay-Z are friends. Shareholders sued, arguing the deal was a favor to prop up a friend’s failing business. The judge threw the case out, but called it “by all accounts, a terrible business decision.” Since then, Tidal has been through round after round of layoffs, including its entire product management and product marketing teams. The brand is still alive. But this vision of Tidal failed.
In 2012, Nintendo launched the Wii U as a follow-up to their wildly popular Wii. And as Nintendo likes to do each generation, they introduced an interesting new feature...
A controller with a built-in screen.
At the time, playing a home console meant you took over the living room. Parents wanting to watch the TV? Not happening until you finished your gaming session.
But the Wii U’s new controller was basically a tablet. You could immediately transfer the game from the TV to the controller’s screen.
If someone else walked in and wanted to watch a movie, you didn’t have to stop playing Mario Kart.
And to top it all off, this was Nintendo’s very first high-definition console, making their games look better than ever on large-screen TVs.
So there was a lot to talk about.
But Nintendo’s message made the value really confusing.
First, they named it the “Wii U”, which sounded like an upgrade to their older console, which was simply named the “Wii”.
In a world where new tech is differentiated by a larger number (PlayStation 5, iPhone 17), the addition of the letter “U” didn’t signal “New console.”
And to add to the confusion, the ads shown at launch focused almost entirely on the tablet controller, while barely showing the console itself.
To the customer, the product looked like it was a wildly expensive $300 accessory for the existing Wii they already had in their closet.
Overall, it was a good product. You got a visual upgrade and a fun new way to play with a really strong line-up of games. And we know that because Nintendo re-released many of these games on their follow-up console, the Switch, where they sold absurdly well. (Mario Kart 8 sold 8.5 million copies on the Wii U. The Switch version sold 68 million.)
And yet, it failed. Customers wouldn’t choose it because it accidentally made a brand-new console look like an expensive controller for the old one.
Note: Nintendo learned their lesson with their follow-up console, choosing an entirely new name and a reveal trailer that spent three minutes clearly showing what the console was and what it could do.
In 2018, Apple released a $349 speaker called the HomePod (1st Generation).
For its size, it produced exceptionally clean sound, even with the volume turned way up. And at lower volumes, the sound remained clearer than most other speakers at this price point.
And it even solved a problem that consumer audio had struggled with for years: where you put the speaker.
Normally, when you place a speaker in a tight spot like a shelf or next to a wall, you risk it producing excess bass as the sound bounces off it and layers on top of what’s coming at you.
And if you put it out in the open, the speaker can sound thinner, as there’s less for the sound to bounce off.
The HomePod had a clever trick to overcome this. It used its microphone to listen to its own sound bouncing around the room. Then, it would adjust itself.
It didn’t matter if you placed the HomePod on a shelf, on the kitchen counter or under a desk. You could be confident that you were hearing your music in the best possible way.
Easy enough to understand, right?
Apple confusingly decided to describe it as “automatic spatial awareness”.
And that pattern continued through the launch messaging, which was full of engineering words like “beam-forming tweeters” and “high-excursion woofer”. Sure, it sounded cool, but people didn’t understand what it meant for their music.
But part of the problem with selling a high-end speaker is that sound has to be experienced in person. You can’t just hear it through an ad on your own speakers.
The other part is that all the cool stuff in a speaker is on the inside. On the outside, it’s pretty boring to look at.
Apple worked around this by focusing on something that was easy to show...
Siri, Apple’s voice assistant.
The launch ad opened with “Hey Siri”, and press releases spent as much time on Siri as they did discussing the sound.
But this meant that reviewers compared the HomePod to other smart speakers with voice assistants.
And this is where it all went wrong.
Because that was a category that Amazon and Google had already defined, with better voice assistants (Siri was arguably the third best of the three) and considerably cheaper speakers - at the time, you could pick one up for about $50.
And that made the $349 price tag feel like Apple was overcharging.
To be fair, the HomePod had real limitations too: Siri would only play Apple Music, and you couldn’t pair it over Bluetooth. Those didn’t help, but Apple had built a good high-end speaker.
It should have been compared to other high-end consumer audio brands like Sonos and Bose, not the Amazon Echo or Google Home. And with Apple’s rabid fanbase behind it, it could have gained enough traction to stick around.
And yet, the HomePod failed. And it was quietly discontinued three years later. Customers wouldn’t choose it because it made a premium speaker look like an overpriced voice assistant.
Note: Apple seems to agree. They would go on to bring this product back as the HomePod (2nd Generation) two years later. But this time, the primary focus was the sound.
