Journey
Doing a challenge to knock off 30 mock product interviews in a day. I guess it would be fun – would make me think on the feet and really drill down on a good structure for the answer.
Insight
Apple is discontinuing the original Apple Homepod and will go all in on Homepod Mini.
Homepod owners are very sad hearing this. They seem to have loved that big high-quality speaker even though it came with a very mediocre virtual assistant.
So what went wrong?
I believe it was marketing.
With Homepod, Apple focused on its weaknesses rather than its strengths. The company put a lot of emphasis on Siri and Apple Music – when the market considers Google Assistant/Alexa and Spotify as more superior services.
So what was it’s strength?
Audio Quality.
Apple Homepod was the best speaker you could get at its price point ($349).
If you just wanted to get a good virtual assistant, you could grab a cheap Amazon or Google smart speaker. Whereas if you wanted a really high-end speaker, you would have to go in the four to the five-figure range.
There was no middle ground.
The original Homepod fit perfectly in this niche category. However, maybe the marketing was bad, maybe there weren’t many people in that niche or maybe both, but the speaker sales didn’t look good.
Also, Apple was late in the game where Amazon was already crushing it. Amazon had captured the majority of the smart speaker market with its cheap devices and multi-channel marketing. So Apple’s $349 Homepod was directly competing with the apparently better $40 Echo Dot.
In the end, Apple witnessed that the $99 Homepod Mini was a huge success from the very start and might have concluded that it’s time to say goodbye to its predecessor.
New Product Idea
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What do you think? Ping me any comments or feedback.
Top Tool
cleanCART by @Clean_io: I always use Honey at checkouts and love it when I could get an extra 10% off on that cart. But the way Honey’s business model is setup, there’s definitely someone who isn’t happy with this convenience. This was always coming.
Top Read
“Soundtrack the World” by @packyM: The music industry is going through some midlife crisis as everyone is trying to figure out a sustainable source of revenue for artists. This piece is pretty eye-opening in terms of an innovative and successful business model for the music industry.
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Prashant Bagga 