In a published blog post on their website, the Shaken Team writes:
Last week we shipped the final Shaken box: this is the end of our startup.
That’s the hardest thing we’ve ever had to write.
Despite trying everything, we couldn’t quite make it through a tricky cash-flow period to get to the scale we needed. This is the end of the road for us and that breaks our heart.
We wanted to write this to explain why, and to thank you.
As David said:
We went from not knowing what we were doing to becoming “a leading voice in the world of cocktails” because the best way to become an expert is to do something nobody has ever done before. We all became experts in our field. We all pioneered a new way of doing booze. We all defied convention and did it the hard way.
But that was not enough.
Without new investment, we couldn’t scale fast enough to make the business successful. The upsetting irony is that we were starting to see industry-leading retention numbers, more and more spirit brands sign up exclusively, and many other indicators that we were at the tipping point. No business has an innate right to succeed, but we gave it everything.
The hilarity of some of their sentences in their goodbye post is probably why they failed.
I couldn’t stop laughing at this line “we couldn’t quite make it through a tricky cash-flow period to get to the scale we needed”. Yes… the tricky, Oh we have to have a company that actually makes money in order to survive.
Their next sentence “We went from not knowing what we were doing to becoming “a leading voice in the world of cocktails””. A leading voice you say… surely that means a respectable blog or website has written about you? The link then takes you to thespiritsbusiness.com, which looks like the biggest pay for pr fluff ever. Not one comment on the blog post, no shares of the blog post. Hell if you read this blog post, you’ll see it’s just an advertisement. The only person that said you were “a leading voice” was a manager who you were in a partnership with at William Grant & Sons. That doesn’t count if someone who is profiting off of your company thinks you’re “A leading voice”.
Sadly I can guess why you failed, you failed at marketing your company and actually getting any proper PR, and you failed at the whole, ya know… making money thing. Not just the ‘tricky cash-flow period’ .
