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Half-Baked Product

weli.dev

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Re: Half-Baked Product

#141

Post by Planktonne »

weli wrote: post #90
alansaber wrote: post #85

Entertaining, very AI prose though.

Really? Didn't use an llm other than to do a quick grammar check because english is not my first language.

It's worth checking that your LLM actually did just do a quick grammar check, because you've got really quit a lot of LLM tells in the prose.

If it didn't make more changes than you're aware of, then you should be aware that some features of your style are common amongst LLMs, and over-use of them will alienate some percentage of your audience (even if unfairly).

Key ones to look out for:

- Staccato prose: repeated runs of short sentences (e.g. "The founder nods. He gets it. He gets all of it.") - Negative pivots: anything with the structure of '!X; Y' (e.g. 'it’s not that nobody saw it: it’s that every week something jumped ahead of it')

These are valid linguistic features, but if you use them a lot, it sounds like AI writing, and people are wary of AI writing (because of the tidal wave of malicious, spamming & extractive actors using it). It will impact your audience.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#142

Post by groundzeros2015 »

> Engineering stops trying to build a good oven and starts adding buttons and features. Nobody made that decision. It just happened

I’ve found that most people hate making tradeoffs. They don’t recognize that the things they do like don’t do everything.

So If you focus too much on a customer or worse an internal stakeholder who hasn’t designed or built things, it can became a Homer Simpson designing a car situation.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#143

Post by lilerjee »

Interesting story. This seems a true story of the author? The author understands the characters of the people in the process of business. Understanding reality is not easy.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#145

Post by weli »

lilerjee wrote: post #143

Interesting story. This seems a true story of the author? The author understands the characters of the people in the process of business. Understanding reality is not easy.

Not a situation that happened to me per se. More of a mix of situations that have happened to me and I've seen happen to people close to me aggregated into a single metaphor.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#146

Post by restlake »

pockybum522 wrote: post #52
smugglerFlynn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly it is not unique to VC. Many in-house products of large companies follow exact same story: sunk cost fallacy, investing in expectation management instead of the product itself, risky and expensive bets dressed as 'MVPs', riding on perpetual promises etc.

Agreed, I have no experience with VC anything, but I was still nodding along the whole time as I was reading.

same. substitute VC with upper management and I (corporate dev through and through) became more queasy as I read. product and strategic mismanagement is the real deal regardless of the source of capital

Re: Half-Baked Product

#147

Post by groundzeros2015 »

weli wrote: post #81
Mizza wrote: post #29

Ouch, that hits close to home, and it seems like it does for a lot of others out there as well. So what's the solution? Is there a playbook that avoids these pitfalls, or is it just the cost of the spin. Ideally, something early engineers can point to when we see non-technical founders falling into familiar traps.

If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster? For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise thin…

A lot of these things are just inexperienced management:

- not understanding sales and properly incentivizing them

- attacking only urgent problems (urgent vs important matrix)

- not taking constraints expressed by domain experts as real. (Big companies are actually good at this.)

Re: Half-Baked Product

#149

Post by groundzeros2015 »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #96
weli wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster? For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise thin…

> Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster? for me the company should never have existed in the first place. and that lies with the founder. starts with them. falls on them. i'm biased i suppose because my part in the "10%" part of my story was finding out just how little research anyone actually did... they all just wanted to play the role of important businessm…

> just how little research anyone actually did

More often I see the opposite. 100 page pdfs that fall apart in first contact with reality.

I think it’s not about research, but it’s very hard to contribute in a field you haven’t actually had a career in.

Re: Half-Baked Product

#150

Post by murphomatic »

> “But this is a startup. And startups are built with blood and sweat. Everyone here has to sacrifice. You have two weeks.”

If only this simply applied to startups. Many enterprises today still remember their startup roots a little TOO clearly.

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