I’ve written for a bunch of startups over the years. Some of them were interesting, others less so. After a while, you basically knew instinctively which ones were doomed. Essentially, it came down to asking one simple question: what problem do you solve?
Despite endless blogs, books, podcasts, and tons of research looking into the issue, I’m still amazed that there are so many founders with horrible ideas. In the startup space, they call it product-market fit; in the real world we call selling something that people actually need.
Believe it or not, once upon a time, people used to say the words, “Oh, there’s an app for that” without wincing. As smartphones burst onto the scene, it was an exciting time because people were making things that solved a variety of problems, like boredom, dating, finding jobs, connecting with others, finances, and so on.
Now, with the rise of stop nicotine apps, we’re all the way down to providing solutions for non-problems. Let’s take a look.
The hype
Some of these anti-nicotine apps are better than others. There was a big buzz last year when two Penn grads raised $5 million for an app called Jones that helps you give up vaping.
The marketing for Jones fuses wellness and techno babble to obscure their business model, which is essentially to sell nicotine mints at extortionate markups, shift merch, and let gullible customers track their progress on an app. Of course, they also have an AI Coach that helps keep you stay motivated.
After Jones’ success, I’ve seen a lot of similar companies spring up, with some of them focusing on nicotine pouches. My worry is that there are a lot of these apps competing with the 1% of the population that uses pouches. Even worse, they’re actually hustling for the far smaller subset of people who use pouches but really want to stop.
Question for the investors
I would love to see the reasoning behind the $5 million that the VC firms NextView Ventures and Founder Capital used to justify their investment in Jones. Apart from the merch and price gouging upsides, it’s hard to see an organic path to success for this app.
On the website, Jones claims they’ve helped 20,000 people quit vaping. However, vaping is on a significant downward trend in the US over the last few years. Betting $5 million that there are enough people who are prepared to pay 3x the price for nicotine mints because it's connected to an app with an “AI” coach is a bold move. Especially when the potential success of the app effectively shrinks your total addressable market.
Could it be that the lies and moral panic pumped out at industrial scale by tobacco control and the media and all the loose talk of a “vaping epidemic” convinced these VC firms that there was a problem there to be solved?
A look at recent CDC data is a dark omen for apps like Jones.
Using more than 1 day a month counts as current use, and vaping is still just at 6% and dropping each year. It’s no wonder they’re scrambling to sell branded water bottles and baseball caps for $32 a pop. When it comes to the many pretender apps that have sprung up, things must be even grimmer.
Final thoughts
Research suggests that stop smoking apps were generally ineffective, poorly made, shockingly irresponsible custodians of user data. But at least they made sense; smoking, after all, is a major cause of death and illness.
Apps that reduce nicotine “addiction”, on the other hand, aren’t the difference between life and death. Vapes and nicotine pouches just don’t cause anywhere near the destruction of cigarettes, so it’s hard to say that apps that help you quit solve or address an actual problem. That’s bad news for apps like Jones and their investors, as much as I wish they do well and help people who want to quit and lead a basically as healthy a life as they did when they vaped or took pouches.
