What Sonos gets about good design
A lot of people think Sonos products are over priced — and that’s a valid viewpoint if you don’t consider what Sonos speakers actually do well or what they do distinct from other speakers.
So pretty much if you strip away good product design, yes, you can find better “value” in speakers.
It is true that if you have $500 to spend, you could get better sounding traditional speakers than Sonos for $500. But when you spend $500 on Sonos speakers you get a built-in amp/receiver. You don’t need speaker wires. You can send the music from your phone or computer straight to the speakers.
And of course, Sonos lets you group many speakers together to play the same music throughout your entire house. This is a surprisingly awesome feature.
In order to match the value prop of Sonos speakers you would need to get an amp/receiver, speaker wire, speakers, and devices to help you send audio wirelessly to your speakers. It would be expensive, messy, and time consuming to setup.
What Sonos has done is strip out complexity from home audio, while also bringing a new experience that wasn’t possible before (multi-room synced wireless audio). People hate wires. You can see this across product and home design.
Sonos speakers also look really good, and for many people this is a very important purchasing consideration. Many people didn’t buy traditional speaker setups before because they were ugly. And if you didn’t want ugly speakers all over your house, you had to spend a bunch of money to hide them in your walls.
I bring all of this up, because if you don’t get the basic value proposition of Sonos, you’ll always find their new products overpriced or just marketing or whatever. This applies to everything. If you don’t understand the value prop of a product, you won’t be able to accurately judge it.
Sonos users love their speakers. They can be transformative in how people interact with music and audio.
The new Sonos Roam is a perfect example of this. At $169, it’s far from the cheapest portable bluetooth speaker. Heck it’s fairly expensive!
But your average bluetooth speaker sounds bad. Your average bluetooth speaker can’t be linked with other speakers. Your average bluetooth speaker isn’t water and dust proof.
From a business perspective, there isn’t a lot of margin or money to be made selling $20 disposable bluetooth speakers. That’s why Sonos isn’t trying to make one.
The Roam will probably be another good sounding Sonos speaker, and it’s a speaker that you can take anywhere with you, including the pool and beach. Unlike basically every other bluetooth speaker, it also has wifi, which is far more stable than bluetooth when you have access to a wifi connection. Wifi also means that these speakers can work with Apple’s AirPlay 2, and can be grouped with other Sonos speakers into a whole house setup.
From a usability perspective, the Roam should be far beyond your typical bluetooth speaker.
This is a very unique value prop. This, in many ways, positions the Roam as a way to get new users into the Sonos ecosystem with its lower price. And if they like the Sonos experience, they may end up spending hundreds or thousands more.
Sonos has been trying to expand the market for portable speakers. The Move is a really premium portable speaker at $399, but it helped establish a new market. That’s why it made sense for Sonos to build and sell.
The market is saturated with poorly designed, ugly, cheap, disposable bluetooth speakers. The real money is to be made with new kinds of speakers that enable new kinds of experiences.
When trying to expand total addressable market (TAM), you need to get people who are non-traditional buyers to buy your products. Your traditional amp/receiver and speaker setup put off a lot of people. Many people liked listening to music, but they hated the technology.
With Sonos and its newer competitors, a lot of people who like music can now buy hardware that fits them much better.
So what does Sonos do well, and what lessons can others take away from them?
They created new features and experiences that didn’t previously exist (the classic users don’t know what they want until you show it to them)
Their speakers look refined and a lot more people are comfortable putting speakers in more places in their house than ever before (we have Sonos speakers in just about every room in our house, and there is no way that would be true with traditional speakers)
They always look for what can they add to the market that isn’t quite being served
They focus on quality, and they don’t release products that don’t have a premium experience
This are some of the core reasons that Sonos was able to jump into a very mature market and become successful. This is also a good reason that just because a market is mature it doesn’t mean that you can’t innovate and disrupt it.
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