I agree very much with this article. Kaufman is a very cool, stand-up guy; everyone I met at Quirky was smart and nimble and on board with the vision. The products ranged from naïf (hence "Quirky") to straight up brilliant. It makes sense to me that they simply took on too much, and should have focused and iterated on their better products.
Better products wouldnt have helped. Customers dont know something is better until after they buy. They certainly had a branding issue by focusing on their products instead of on their users.
If they asked themselves before making every decision, "how will this help our users invent better products and bring them to market, they may have survived. Instead they asked themselves, " what can we do to make more money."
Their core product was their community, they never seemed to get that!
