A premium brand that got significantly worse but didn't drop the price? Seems obvious that this is going to be a story about private equity or a similar acquisition, and indeed it is.
https://www.worseonpurpose.com/ has a giant list of these, with a tracker that breaks down hundreds of once-premium brands and the exact changes that the companies that acquire the brands make to make the things cheaper and worse, capitalizing on the good name of the company until they wear it down completely.
- Launch amazing brand with tight/negative margins to drive heavy consumer adoption
- Sell brand to megacorp/PE for hundreds of millions or billions.
- Brand gets "optimized for cost" so buyer gets an ROI.
- By the time the public has soured on the brand, the buyout has paid for itself plus profit.
The solution would be to launch these products with high margin built in, but then everybody scoffs at the cost and you die in the womb.
The unicorn solution is that you actually invent a way of producing the high value thing for very cheap, cheaper than everybody else, so you can compete on price while still having top-shelf inputs. But man, that problem is about 5 orders of magnitude more difficult to solve than simply coming up with a product people will like.
a lot of these products have been around for too long for it to fit the model you're proposing
The best solution for everyone is to come up with a quality product that people like, price it fairly, and then don't enshittify it. Win-win!
I'm not sure if you are kidding or not, it would be a funny sarcastic remark in the right circles, but if serious, this exact line of thinking is exactly why things like indie-go-go and kick starter are just absolute meat grinders of starry-eyed individuals.
Not "everyone" -- if you're the owner of a successful ice cream brand who spent a decade grinding in the ice cream game, cashing out the brand equity and getting to live on a yacht might feel better.
fwiw, as a giant list might be ok, but writing is ai edited
> worseonpurpose
A lot of irony in that name with all the written AI slop.
And you must ask yourself, is the ability to sell your company to another company a benefit or should there be considerably stronger hurdles for this kind of thing?
The modern SV corporate model is:
- PRODUCT: The corporation
- RESOURCE: The users of the corporate software/hardware (which is actually resource feed)
- CUSTOMER: Investors/VC/PE/Megacorp
> And you must ask yourself, is the ability to sell your company to another company a benefit or should there be considerably stronger hurdles for this kind of thing?
Distribution is a huge problem for small companies. So you almost have to sell to a bigger firm to get beyond a certain size.
why would ask myself that, i have nothing to do with the owners or buyers.