Does anyone want to spend $179 on an IoT device that holds 16 ounces of water and connects to your phone to tell you that you just drank 16 ounces of water?
No?
Imagine my surprise.
It’s the kind of thing an idiot would invent to sell to other idiots. And that’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that even if it worked perfectly, it still wouldn’t work. Because the problem it solves doesn’t exist, and the behavior it tries to change already comes free with adulthood.
This is the graveyard most “smart” consumer startups end up in: products that confuse novelty with necessity.
Let’s take a quick tour.
The Hapifork: The Nagging Utensil
A Bluetooth-enabled fork designed to help you lose weight by tracking how fast you eat.
The pitch: If you eat too fast, the fork vibrates and lights up to shame you into slowing down.
The reality: Dinner became an operant conditioning experiment. You also had to charge your fork. Most people realized they could just… eat slower. For free.
Kuvée: The Keurig for Wine
A Wi-Fi-connected “smart bottle” with proprietary wine cartridges and a touchscreen.
The pitch: Keeps wine fresh for 30 days. Rate wines. Order more with a tap.
The reality: It solved a problem corks solved centuries ago. You couldn’t use your own wine. When the company died, the bottles became expensive paperweights because the cartridges stopped existing.
Smalt: The Smart Salt Shaker
A Bluetooth salt shaker that also doubled as a mood light and a speaker.
The pitch: Dispense the perfect amount of salt via your phone.
The reality: No one wants to unlock their phone, open an app, and pair a device just to salt eggs. It was also widely mocked for looking less like a kitchen gadget and more like… something you’d hide from guests.
The Uro Club: The Portable Urinal
A hollow golf club with a reservoir.
The pitch: Discreetly relieve yourself on the course.
The reality: You had to drape a towel over your waist and pretend to check your club while peeing into it. It looked exactly as suspicious as it sounds.
Quirky Egg Minder: The Smart Egg Tray
A Wi-Fi egg tray that told you how many eggs you had left.
The pitch: You’ll never wonder “do I need eggs?” at the store again.
The reality: Eggs come in a carton. You open the carton. The device was buggy, and if the Wi-Fi went down, you were just a person staring at eggs, confused.
All of these products made the same mistake: they pretended to be serious solutions.
Which brings us to the Selfie Toaster.
Why the Selfie Toaster Was Actually Better
The Selfie Toaster was a toaster that burned your face onto bread.
That’s it. No health optimization. No habit formation. No “journey.” Just toast with your dumb face on it.
It launched on Kickstarter in 2014.
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Goal: ~£15,000
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Raised: ~£215,000+
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Backers: thousands
Why did it work?
Because it was honest.
It never claimed to change your life. It never pretended to fix a real problem. It didn’t shame you, optimize you, or lock you into a proprietary ecosystem. It was a joke, and it knew it.
The demo images did 90% of the selling. You saw it once and thought, “That’s hilarious.” And that was the entire value proposition.
Commercially?
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Great as a stunt
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Terrible as a business
Margins were thin. Manufacturing was harder than expected. People used it once or twice and moved on. There was no second act, no platform, no moat. When the joke expired, so did the company.
And that’s fine.
Because unlike the others, the Selfie Toaster delivered exactly what it promised.
The Real Lesson
Most dumb startups fail not because they’re dumb—but because they lie about what they are.
They wrap novelty in buzzwords.
They confuse “connected” with “useful.”
They mistake friction for innovation.
A dumb product that knows it’s dumb is better than a dumb product pretending to be smart.
The Selfie Toaster made perfectly adequate toast covered in turd jam—and no one was confused about that.
Today, it’s gone. Toast. Finished.
Just like the IoT water bottle.
Just like the smart fork.
Just like the egg tray that needed Wi-Fi to count to twelve.
In the right market cycle, someone will fund all of them.
And then brag about it on LinkedIn.
The trick—for founders and investors alike—is learning to smell the difference between gold and shiny fertilizer before you plug it in and download the app.
