Cigarettes have all the right metrics for a startup: great user engagement, network effects, negligible per-user costs, sticky and hard to leave.<p>The big invention here is a one-liner: s/smoking/vaping/g.
It’s interesting how the messaging has shifted over the past ~4 years from vaping being a way to quit nicotine addiction, to vaping being a way to stop smoking cigarettes. I’ve often heard the former from people, but the latter from companies.<p>With the low nicotine liquids coming out, I bet they are low enough that you can’t smoothly transition from higher nicotine content to lower nicotine content. I’m sure they won’t sell a smooth gradient of nicotine levels that help people quit, instead it will just be marketed as “diet vaping” and will be a huge marketing effort that will pain then in a much more positive light without any real loss of lock-in.
Does Juul do any advertising? One of the biggest problems I see in the historical tobacco industry was how subversive the advertising was. I wonder if Juul goes down a similar path.
Something to keep in mind is that the tobacco industry has a ton of money, a demonstrated willingness to play dirty if needed, and a deeply vested interest in undermining companies like Juul.<p>I'm not saying that the The Verge or Rachel Becker have any intention of defending the tobacco industry from disruptive startups, not am I suggesting that vaping in general or Juul in specific aren't be problematic.<p>What I <i>am</i> saying is that there's an immense amount of money and effort is being deployed to ensure that people will defend the tobacco industry and will attack vaping, and it's always worth being extra cautious. "Where there's smoke, there's fire" is rarely a useful heuristic, but it's extra useless when you know there's a guy with a smoke machine around the corner. :)
Spourious claims about the chemical makeup of vapor? Check.<p>Misinformed statements about what science found about the dangers of vaping vs cigarettes? Check.<p>Citations of studies with no peer review, that likely don't say what the article claims? Check.<p>Wrong information about the mechanics of vaping? Check.<p>Boogyman chemistry? Check.<p>No indicative knowledge about how people actually use these devices? Check.<p>What about the children-isms? Double check.<p>Look, I get it. As someone who vapes, I truly do my best to treat it like smoking, which is saying I do my darndest to respect those around me.<p>I don't know what to think of Juul. I was told it has 50 mil nic and my jaw hit the floor. Those that vape knows that's a crazy number, and obviously these are incredibly low powered devices.<p>People do move from Juul to more advanced setups, and yes, they step all the way down to 12 or 6 mil (nicotine) off the bat and likely go down to 3 mil after a few months.
It feels like there's a premeditated process, here, in terms of timing.<p>1. Tobacco Cigarettes emerge as public health scare in the late 1990's.<p>2. McDonaldsization of Coffee via Starbucks in the late 1990's.<p>3. Cigarettes taxed and regulated with punishing costs and counter-media-manipulation.<p>4. Bindings introduced to market coffee with free wi-fi, boosting high-end coffee's incidental exposure to novice internet users at a time when caffeine is very-nearly required to negotiate the ever-expanding terrain of new technologies. (it's just good business, of course)<p>5. Millions of former nicotine addicts herded away from nicotine to expensive, premium high dose caffeine alternatives, serving as stimulant to wean many down off of nicotine cravings with new habits.<p>6. 20 years later, with ordinary tobacco cigarettes habits all-but-destroyed, across two generations of former users, and new technologies now well established, coffee habits can wind down. A mild campaign against coffee is introduced. See: acrylamide, poor stock performance, racial sensitivity incidents in liminal zones of large franchise chain restaurants.<p>7. Emerging technologies, now ready for maturity may be re-introduced with new players. These entities work to re-normalize a newly engineered and tested concept in managed synthetic addiction, with status symbol oriented marketing plays.<p>Why vaping is anything is beyond me, but I feel like this represents the fundamentals of a broader subversive program to phase out agricultural-plantation-oriented modes of daily-use otc psychoactives that play vital roles in common universal social norms that cut across a wide array of global cultural customs.