It’s very simple. Everbody just wants to make money.
Startups have nothing to do with innovation or making the world a better place.
It feels like it’s about creating the bubble, inflating it and cashing out before it bursts.
Half-Baked Product
321–330 of 447 posts
Re: Half-Baked Product
#322The best tools/businesses are coming from domain experts who vibecode, not anyone who can vibecode — because the ones who are not from that domain have not really experienced the painpoints to know what the industry needs, even when they work with a dev team requirements get lost in translation. The catch: domain experts don't know what they don't know about shipping. The fix — vibecoders build it, dev team hardens i…
Can you please give some examples of the best tools/businesses which are being built like this? Genuinely curious. I know the vibe tech is really good but I don't know of any upstarts using it, everyone cool is building/distributing the vibe tech. There are some games/copycats but nothing production grade in my radar.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#323Oh, I'm glad I don't work in the oven business. We're just starting a stealth startup that's revolutionizing dishwashers, and the prototypes are amazing. They use less water, less detergent, and this weekend we're hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they break glasses.
And the broken glass breaks the dishwasher. It is a feature: planned obsolescence.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#324It’s very simple. Everbody just wants to make money. Startups have nothing to do with innovation or making the world a better place. It feels like it’s about creating the bubble, inflating it and cashing out before it bursts.
I don’t think that’s true. Some people really do have product ideas that they want to share with the world.
The problem is that those people are really bad at making money, and have a hard time competing with the people whose motivation is money.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seeking approval. It's apparent from everything he posts on X + the memeing + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga.
> + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga That was the most "the emperor wears no clothes"-moment I've ever witnessed in my life. I play more PoE than I care to admit, and it was obvious within mere seconds that he has absolutely no clue what's going on. It was absolutely surreal to watch.
It started with d4 before poe and was painfully obvious then. Poe was just icing on the cake as it is not for the casual.
It is also so bizarre to brag about rankings for games where the grind to end game is a massive time sink. It wasnt like he was some LoL god where there is no grind only skill.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've long dreamed of a dishwasher that can detect when you remove the (cleaned) dishes from it, and presents a display saying 'load dishes' or something like that. And after finishing a cycle, says 'unload dishes'. Should be pretty easy to achieve with some load cells in the feet, but haven't seen any like that.
We had this at my old work, except it wasn't a display, it was a circular piece of paper with "clean" on one side and "dirty" on the other. When it was done, you rotate the paper so it was clean side up. Should we have gone for series A? It was a pretty great MVP after all, albeit manual, but automation of the paper flipping would of course come on the second iteration
> We had this at my old work, except it wasn't a display, it was a circular piece of paper with "clean" on one side and "dirty" on the other. When it was done, you rotate the paper so it was clean side up.
The downside of low tech solutions if many people touch it (i.e. not just the janitor or rostered staff) is that someone can still add their shared mug to the dishwasher just after a cycle's complete, causing the entire batch to be considered unclean. Or in your example, someone deciding to flip the sign but not emptying out the dishwasher.
Then again, these are little things that people have learnt to make do and just live with, and I'm not sure it's worth paying 2x or 3x, or even 20x the price just for fancy feet, like what the article thinks people might do with a fancy oven.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#327Oh, I'm glad I don't work in the oven business. We're just starting a stealth startup that's revolutionizing dishwashers, and the prototypes are amazing. They use less water, less detergent, and this weekend we're hoping to solve the last remaining issue: occasionally, they break glasses.
Reminds me of this monstrosity: https://youtube.com/shorts/YQ-6JTmF-Z4
Re: Half-Baked Product
#328Earlier 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.
Armchair analysis would also mention that Jeff Bezos is going for the Moon with his space, and how do you beat that guy with that ambition? Get to Mars, first. From a scientific perspective, the Moon makes more sense, but if we frame it as billionaires trying to out do one another, what comes after who's got the bigger yacht? So a competition between billionaires on who's better also makes sense as his true motivation.
End of the day though, why does it matter his true motivation? If I was working at one of his companies, as long as the paycheck cashes and the stock options are legally mine, if his motivation is money-based or attention-based or he's a true believer, I'm getting money and I can feed my kids.
It's not like I'm going to get the chance to talk with him personally and get to know him and sus out what it is, either, so it's all just pointless theorizing. What we, the general public "know" is a result of various people with their own agenda pushing their owna viewpoints? Does the man know anything at all, is he a total charlatan, or is he smart and gets it? Hit refresh on a different subreddit and get a different answer.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#329We keep seeing this. If you had to point out the fundamental problem, what would it be? I think it’s the disconnect. Each persona is an expert in their own field but is completely oblivious to other critical areas. The founder knows how to raise money but doesn’t really understand the customers. The engineer knows the tech but doesn’t really understand what it takes to keep the business afloat. The salesperson knows…
People have different strengths, but I consistently see teams that have people who are decent or better at their non-expert skills and their comments play a very small role in the discourse. Sometimes they speak up more and sometimes not, a lot of them manage to (learn to) just not care. I think there are many teams where the "expert" is not actually better at their role than the other team members.
I mostly see the leaders or the product people telling the engineers or designers that they don't understand business—implying that the latter aren't reasonable people who can advocate for things that balance the various dynamics that have been brought up in a meeting, that their view results from only considering the thing technically or aesthetically. It's a hand-wavey maneuver that's always there, said without specifics. This is particularly so given you've provided specs and designs and they rarely show business or market analysis. I've worked with many PMs to propose our work to stakeholders—they swear to the audience they've done the business work, but in preparing the presentation, they just googled a couple very broad things (one example, "the collaboration market is a $70B market"). I've worked with others, who I've tried to learn from, to show or point me to some basics of that analysis and they didn't know.
Product managers and product people in general have very little background in product management. It's not a degree or anything. Sometimes they come from backgrounds that are helpful, but we oddly have junior and entry level ones. This doesn't make that much sense, given they are formal or informal leaders of teams. What could they be bringing to the table? A (sad) exception is when access to meetings or information is gatekept, so then they're bringing that. Sometimes it's argued that PMs are good at seeing across things, but that has not been my experience. The problem with the each person is an expert in their own field is that in a lot of teams, the expert is frequently not better at their thing. The decision maker is not actually better at business or seeing across things or making decisions.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#330One 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…
> they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features I know a company that fits this so well that I almost want to check the names. It's older than 3 months though.
I also know a company that fits this very well. I wonder how many such companies are out there.