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Half-Baked Product

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Re: Half-Baked Product

#271

Post by christina97 »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #191
red_admiral wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the fundamental problem is what Paul Graham pointed out here: https://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html "The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few goo…

> Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space. If most founders are wealthy, or even reasonably comfortable, it's possible they're too out of touch to identify a problem shared by enough people.

This may apply to B2C firms, but B2B firms are more likely to be run by people similar to them.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#272

Post by iamjackg »

stickfigure wrote: post #239
nikanj wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's some variant of chesterton's fence, where you believe all of these huge, established companies in a space are just stupid and refuse to release a product thats 10x better

This situation does exist though; otherwise startups and new products would never succeed. Big companies have blind spots. Netflix, Google, Airbnb, Uber, Slack, the iPhone, Github, Stripe, Dropbox. Big players at the time could have built their products, but didn't.

How many of those are "the exact same product, but better" though? Definitely the iPhone, and possibly Slack. Everything else you listed was a drastic change in the way an existing service (taxis, home media, backups) was delivered or priced, to the point where they feel like either an entirely different product (or an unsustainably priced one that wins by virtue of being cheaper at first, see Uber and Airbnb).

I'm not fundamentally disagreeing with you -- but I think there are some things where "everybody has clearly been doing this wrong the whole time" doesn't pass the smell test: ovens have been around for millennia, including through the whole industrial revolution and recent exponential modernization of technology.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#273

Post by ErroneousBosh »

TrackerFF wrote: post #138

One important part of the story is in the very beginning: The founder’s motivation. To become wealthy. You see this in the startup world a lot. Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise. There’s then a big mismatch between what the founder thinks is possible, and what the domain expert thinks is possible. Th…

> Founders with 5+ failed startups in different sectors, because said founder picked the fields mainly by doing some market analysis. Not domain expertise.

You mean the moment when someone says "It's Facebook but for dogs! That should be easy, right? I had the idea, that's the hard bit, you just need to write it!"

Re: Half-Baked Product

#275

Post by fwipsy »

phtrivier wrote: post #180

This article could have been written 20 years ago (source : I was there), probably 50 years ago, and will probably be written for ever. (Although future éditions will have fun about AI.) What I would love is to read more of the story from the perspective of the salesperson (we're all too sympathetic to the engineers, and potentially ceo - but I suspect their part of the story goes beyond "I'll just say yes to everyth…

"Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?"

Not if they're building inverting ovens for another big corporation. If you do one truly worthwhile thing better than everyone else, do you still need to chase after marginal opportunities to stay afloat? I'm sure there are many, many small companies (not "startups") who are just quietly filling a niche.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#278

Post by raddan »

jason_s wrote: post #240
flowerbreeze wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're joking, but I've long dreamed of a different type of dishwasher. One that washes instantly. I don't need it to fit more than a single plate at one time. Just put something in from one end, and out comes clean and dry plate on the other end. Like a car wash. I am quite certain these exist already large kitchens and I seem to remember one from a school diner from maybe 35 years ago, but I've alway…

That's called a Hobart. https://www.hobartcorp.com/products/commercial-dishwashers I've used these while working as a volunteer in a camp kitchen during work weekends, where we had maybe 20-40 guests eating a meal. You put dishes/silverware/pots/pans/whatever in a square tray, push it into one side of the Hobart, and pull down a lever to close the doors and start the cycle. They take a number of minutes that you can…

When I was a teenager, my very first real job (after being a paperboy) was being a dishwasher in a popular local seafood restaurant. Minimum wage at the time was $4.25/hr but they offered me $5.50/hr. Boy howdy!

On one shift I was paired with a ex-convict. With the exception of the cooks themselves, most of the kitchen was staffed with high school students and ex-cons. The ex-con I was paired with was a dead ringer for Roger Daltry. I was on the "dirty" side and he was on the "hot" side (because there is a pecking order in even the worst jobs), and for some reason, he wanted _me_ to control the opening of the door. I think the reason is that this guy was high all the time and would space out unless something grabbed his attention. Anyway, I made the mistake of opening the door a bit too soon, when the machine was running, and it blasted this guy with steam. I remember him yelping in pain and then glaring at me angrily. One of the line cooks said something along the lines of "we try not to kill our dishwashers" which probably stopped the guy from punching me.

It's a beast of a machine. A little out of place in an ordinary household kitchen...

Re: Half-Baked Product

#279

Post by paytonjjones »

stickfigure wrote: post #225
philipallstar wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going to Mars.

I'm convinced this is a schtick. Not that he doesn't genuinely want that, but it's not the root motivation. I suspect it's something more like wanting to be perceived as a real-world Tony Stark. The cave rescue capsule episode is illustrative. The guy likes attention.

> wanting to be perceived as a real-world Tony Stark

The thing is, he _had_ this. He had all of Reddit worshipping him. He had the press. He had the tech-internet.

Then he knowingly blew it all up overnight to ally with Trump.

I think the reasons why are pretty clear: a son-who-loves-me became a daughter-who-despises-me and his companies got repeatedly hamstrung by California Democrats.

But if his root motivation was truly just approval, he would have taken it on the chin and accepted slower growth of his other ambitions. So it's a little more complicated than that.

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