.png)
From product launch plans to timing, getting a new product to market is a difficult task. In this article we’ll look at the 6 biggest product failures from the past decade, along with tips on how to launch a product, so you don’t end up on our list in the future.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, whether you’re in tech or consumer goods, when you oversee a product launch you want it to be successful. Everyone is looking for that silver bullet on how to launch a new product.
And for every successful product launch there are ten times the amount of products that either fail during their launch or fizzle out over the first few years.
We've taken a look at some of the biggest product fails in history, and turned the learnings into a guide on how to launch a product successfully. You can find our list of product fails at the end of this article.
Successfully getting a new product to market starts way before the marketing effort, and it continues long after the product launch plan itself has been executed. So, how do you make sure your product launch doesn't fail? We've got a couple of tips for you to help you launch your product, and avoid pouring money into a venture that is doomed to fail before we even start.
Before you launch any product, before you start talking about strategies, communication channels, branding or projected sales you need to answer two questions.
While the questions will inevitably come up when you start thinking about how you’re going to market your product, these questions need to be answered before you develop your product.
Otherwise your product might end up like the Juicero Press, the Wi-Fi connected juicer which had cost more than $100 million to get to market, but could be replaced by squeezing with your hands.
After you’ve defined your audience and pinpointed the exact problems your product is going to solve, the next step is to find out if your target audience is willing to pay to have their problem solved.
While you might be able to validate your product from a product information perspective, there are plenty of problems which exist without needing a fix.
Most of us have heard the story of Coca-Cola's failed product, New Coke. While executives were able to see the problem in a vacuum, Coke wasn't as sweet as Pepsi, but the consumers didn’t see the sweetness of Coca-Cola as something that needed fixing.
An easy way for you to validate the merits of a product idea, is to develop a landing page and promote it through ads. If visitors click “buy now” or “sign me up for the waiting list” you’ve got validation.
When you launch a product there’s bound to be some competition. Even if the product you launch is the first of its kind, there’s a competitor—the status quo. Which means you need to make a list of competitors and explain, in a single sentence, why your product is different, and why your product is better.
The story of Amazon Fire Phone is a great example of what happens when you fail to set your product apart from its competitors. While the phone might have been able to survive startup issues, all Amazon managed to tell the world is that they also had a smartphone.
Every product launch needs a comprehensive, strategic plan of how the product will get to market. But there’s a different approach to this depending on the company that’s launching the product.
For instance, the Juicero Press was the first product of the company, which means their launch plan needed to include strategic branding, identity and brand experience.
When Facebook launched Horizon Worlds, Facebook already had branding and identity. Which means they could skip straight to market evaluation, competitor analysis, SWOT, ROI calculations, expected KPIs and communications planning.
When you launch a product the early adopters are often going to be the hardest customers to come by, especially if you are launching a new product. If you want to ensure a successful product launch you can use pre-order discounts or exclusivity to create buzz around the launch.
This tactic was used in the launch of both Google Glass and the Tesla Cybertruck. Google only offered the first version of their glasses to journalists and consumers who had signed up for their Explorer’s Program.
For consumers wanting to ensure they were among the first owners, Tesla let consumers place a reservation for the Cybertruck on Nov 21, 2019, which required consumers to pay a $100 deposit. And it was apparently a successful strategy. According to a series of Tweets made by Elon Musk Tesla received over 200,000 preorders for the Cybertruck within the first week, without putting any money into marketing and despite the disastrous launch where the armored glass windows cracked on stage. Sadly, any consumers placing a reservation in that first week would end up waiting a full four years before the first Cybertrucks were delivered to consumers in November of 2023.
We’ve talked about how it’s difficult to launch a new product or service, and we’ve talked about the importance of launch plans, knowing your audience and knowing your market. But even if you do everything right, the one thing you need to remember above all else, is to test your product. You need to test it before you launch, and you need to keep testing it after you've launched it too.
And you need to remember a test isn’t the same as trying a product.
There’s a saying among engineers who design tools that are used in construction, “does it break if we use it as a hammer?” And there’s a lesson in that. Anything on a construction site, that’s mildly heavy, will at one time or another be used in place of a hammer.
So, you need to test the product until it breaks, and you need to test what happens when a user doesn’t follow the instructions. This means that everyone needs to test the product. Both designers, marketers, finance employees, potential customers, old customers, friends, and family.
In the book The New Launch Plan, authors Joan Schneider and Julie Hall state that less than 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed first-year sales of $50 million.
Setting a benchmark for a highly successful product launch is easy. Although smaller brands might set their goal a lot lower, the universal goal for a successful product launch is $50 million in sales in the first year.
But there are many ways to constitute a failure. It can fail because there’s no market for it resulting in the product being pulled within the first year, it can get bad publicity and be cancelled before even hitting the shelves, or interest can fizzle out over a few years before being pulled from the shelves.
On this list we’ve got product failures that fall into each of these categories.
Since September 2007, when Apple introduced the iPhone, we’ve seen multiple other companies try, and fail, to get into the smartphone market.
When most of us think about failed attempts to compete with Apple on their smartphones, our minds automatically jump to the weird, funeral procession that was part of the Windows phone launch.
Windows was both years too late by the time it arrived in 2010—Apple and Android phones had already been around for years—and the fact that Windows ultimately did shelf the product, the Windows phone system did have an almost 10 year run before being taken off the market in 2020.
But that doesn’t really qualify to be listed in the biggest product fails in history.
Amazon’s attempt at breaking into the smartphone market, on the other hand. Talk about a product failure.
The Amazon Fire Phone which hit the shelves in July 2014 came with unlimited cloud storage for photos and a free year of Amazon Prime, which included free two-day shipping, access to streaming and the Kindle Library.
Even so, the phone was only for sale for a little over a year before being cancelled in September 2015. This one-year foray into being a smartphone brand reportedly ended up costing Amazon more than $170 million largely due to unsold inventory after the Amazon Fire Phone failed to grab the attention of consumers.
Remember how we set the benchmark for a highly successful at $50 million in sales within the first year?
Losing three times that amount within the same timespan seems to be a reasonable qualifier to being on the list of the biggest product failures in history.
In 2012 Google unveiled the Google Glass. Like taken straight out of science fiction it was described as a wearable device which aimed to revolutionize how we interact with technology. The first public appearance of the device was a live demo at the 2012 Google I/O where Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, wore it on stage while on a Google Hangout video call with skydivers also wearing prototypes of the device.
The demo seemed a success, and Google Glass even made the Time 2012 list of the Best Inventions of the Year, it was worn by King Charles III (although at the time he was “just” Prince), the Simpsons dedicated an entire episode to it, and in 2013 it even received a 12-page spread in Vogue’s coveted September Issue.
So how did “the final frontier” of tech innovations end up on the list of the biggest product failures in history?
While the built in camera was challenged due to privacy concerns probably contributed to the failure of Google Glass, the unfashionable design would probably have foiled most attempts at using the device for covert video.
But the main reason why Google Glass failed probably comes down to two things. An inability to deliver on promises, an insane price tag, and a lack of product-market fit.
The prototype that was released—to journalists and sold to those who had preordered Glass for a whopping $1500—was filled with bugs, and Geek Beat even called it the worst product of all time.
Most people already know the story of how “New Coke” failed, but unlike previous examples, the reason Coca Cola’s attempt at launching “New Coke” has landed on this list of the biggest product fails in history, isn’t due to financial losses. It is instead the sheer public outrage caused by the launch of the new cola flavour (and the discontinuation of “Old Coke”).
Coca-Cola entered the market in 1886, and after World War II, it held 60% of the market share for all cola sales. But by the time the company was closing in on its 100th anniversary this had all changed.
By 1883 Coca-Cola’s market share had dropped all the way down to 24% as a result of Pepsi-Cola, which had begun to outsell Coke in supermarkets. In fact, Coca-Cola only managed to maintain its lead through vending machines and partnerships with fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s.
As a response, Coca-Cola’s senior executives launched a secret project to create a new flavor of Coke which could compete with Pepsi. The resulting drink, which was a high sugar variant of Diet Coke, tested better than both regular Coke and Pepsi in test tests, surveys, and in focus groups. One bottling company even threatened to sue Coca-Cola if the “New Coke” flavour wasn’t released.
Then CEO of Coca-Cola Company, Roberto Goizueta, believed that the approach should be “New Coke or no Coke”.
So, on April 23rd 1985, “New Coke” launched while “Old Coke” was discontinued.
And while initially Coca-Cola’s sales went up, the company started receiving calls and letters from consumers who expressed their anger and disappointment. The Coca-Cola 1-800-GET-COKE hotline received more than 1500 calls per day following the change, and a psychiatrist hired by Coke to listen to the calls told executives that the complainers sounded like they were discussing the death of a family member in the way they talked about New Coke.
In the following months US consumers even began trying to obtain original Coca-Cola from overseas, where New Coke had yet to be introduced.
This, coupled with Pepsi exploiting the situation in their marketing, made Coke executives fear that social peer pressure would affect their bottom line.
So, in July 1985, a mere 79 days after the release of New Coke, Coca-Cola executives held a press conference and announced the return of the original Coca-Cola formula.
Still, it’s difficult to describe the launch of New Coke as a complete failure. While the product itself didn’t achieve the success Coca-Cola executives had thought it would, New Coke (which was renamed Coke II) stayed in production until 2002, and the “Old Coke” had the word “Classic” on its label as late as 2009.
This product failure turned success was probably best described by former Coca-Cola executive Sergio Zyman, who summed it up by saying:
“Yes, it infuriated the public, cost us a ton of money and lasted for only 77 days before we reintroduced Coca-Cola Classic. Still, New Coke was a success because it revitalized the brand and reattached the public to Coke.”
The Cybertruck was initially announced in 2019 with a release in 2021 and a starting price of $40,000. The release date was first delayed to 2022 and later 2023. And in late November 2023, when Cybertrucks were finally distributed to buyers, the price had increased to a bit over $60,000.
But production delays and price increases weren’t the first hint at a product launch failure in the making.
Famously, during the unveiling of the Cybertruck, at a dedicated event held in November 2019, Elon Musk invited Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s chief designer, onto the stage to demonstrate the durability of the car’s armored windows. The demonstration involved a steel ball being thrown at the window. This, unsurprisingly to some, resulted in the window breaking.
Fast forward to December 1, 2023, the day after Tesla started shipping Cybertrucks to customers, Musk and Holzhausen successfully repeated the window experiment, notably with a non-metal ball and a Holzhausen who may have held back a bit.
And it didn’t get any better. Musk had initially predicted 250,000 annual Cybertruck sales, but Tesla missed that goal by 84% managing to sell just under 40,000 in the first full year of sales.
But Cybertruck and Tesla’s problems don't stop with the poor sales figures. With eight recalls in 13 months due to everything from critical software issues to parts falling off and accelerator pedals getting stuck to the floor when pushed to high speeds, the Cybertruck has started to sound like a case study into how not to launch a product.
Remember The Metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2021? The thing he promised definitely wasn’t just a rebrand of Facebook, even though the company was rebranded “Meta” around the same time.
Many businesses pivoted their focus to follow meta into the future of virtual and augmented reality.
But users weren’t impressed with the first glimpses of what the metaverse would look like—and rightfully so. At first glance it looked like a slightly more advanced virtual reality rendition of mid-90s platforms like The Palace, CyberTown, and the Danish chatroom Højhuset, where users built avatars and walked around in a digital environment to chat with each other.
The jokes about Mark Zuckerberg’s own avatar were many and, as one user pointed out, may have contributed to the major updates to the graphics on the platform in late 2022.
Over the course of 2021, Meta lost over $10 billion on its metaverse development, and between starting development in 2019 and 2025, Meta reportedly poured $45 billion into developing their Metaverse.
And as if a huge financial loss wasn’t enough, the platform was also criticized as a result of the many accounts of sexual harassment on the platform. So it didn’t come as a surprise when Meta decided to switch their focus from the metaverse to generative AI in 2023.
Among the (many) lessons we can learn from the product failure of the Metaverse, the two most important lessons have to do with the importance of understanding demand creation and product-market fit.
If the idea of a virtual-reality metaverse seems like it was taken straight out of science fiction, it’s because it was. Both the name and the concept was taken from the 1992 science fiction novel “Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson. In the novel the metaverse is the internet reimagined as a single, universal, immersive world accessed through VR and AR technology.
But Zuckerberg’s metaverse didn’t solve any immediate problem—Zoom worked great for long distance meetings, and gaming wasn’t stagnant—and it didn’t provide any benefit beyond a somewhat outdated looking avatar.
When you’re sending a product to market, the first thing you need to ask is “whose pain are we solving?” And if you can’t answer, then you might be looking at a failed product launch.
If you think Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse is the best example of a silicon valley company creating a product nobody asked for, you might need to think again.
In 2016 Juicero Inc, a Silicon Valley startup, set out to disrupt the world of juice. Between October 2013 and January 2015 the juice startup had managed to raise $120 million from investors like Kleiner Perkins, Google Ventures, Thrive Capital and Vast Ventures. And in 2016 they launched their Wi-Fi connected juicer, which made use of single-serving packets of pre-chopped fruits and vegetables to create delicious juice.
There was only one problem; you didn’t actually need the juicer to squeeze juice from the juice bags. Which may be why the $35 weekly subscription to receive the bags was only available to those who had already purchased the machine.
The revelation from the Bloomberg article, of course, caused a lot of ridicule, and it didn’t help when product designer and venture capitalist Ben Einstein took apart the machine—which retailed for $399 only after the price was reduced from the initial $699.
In his assessment he called the Juicero press “an incredibly complicated piece of engineering.” and went on to say that “Of the hundreds of consumer products I’ve taken apart over the years, this is easily among the top 5% on the complexity scale.”
In September of 2017, just shy of a year after Jeff Dunn took over as CEO from founder Doug Evans, nine months after cutting the price down from $700, and six months after the Bloomberg article, Juicero Inc shut down its operations.
Six months later a Twitter user shared that they had found a second hand Juicero Press in a Goodwill with a $40 price tag. But by that time the $40 price wasn’t a steal as, ironically, the juice press could not function without the proprietary pouches, which were no longer in production.
Leaving out the technical aspects, which Einstein described in detail in his article, and the ironic twist that the Wi-Fi functionality and subscription fruit model had turned between 2000 and 3000 Juicero Presses that were sold worldwide into very expensive paper weights, there’s a lesson in the failure of the Juicero Press that most businesses need to hear.
The real downfall of Juicero wasn’t necessarily the subscription model, but the lack of early testing. Most hardware startups will focus on getting a product to market early, so they can test their assumptions, before creating new iterations.
Juicero, however, spent more than two years and $120 million dollars building a perfectly engineered machine and a complex supply chain, which was ultimately too expensive for their target market, and didn’t actually solve any problem.
In his article Ben Einstein suggests a world where Juicero only raised $10 million, which would have forced them to design with constraints, which could have resulted in a less fancy Juicero Press, which could have been sold at a fraction of the cost.
Or, as an alternative to Ben Einstein's suggestion, what would have happened if Juicero had realized the superfluousness of their machines, and had doubled down on their hand-squeezable juice pouches instead?
With $120 million they could have launched a large-scale juice operation, including a manufacturing facility, and a strong distribution network. Who knows, with the right positioning and a strong marketing campaign they might’ve managed to disrupt the world of juice.
.webp)