281–290 of 447 posts
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Those Restaurant “dishwashers” are sanatizers. A dishwasher is a person in a restaurant. They are the ones removing and getting the dish clean.
Dishwashers? How dare you. We preferred to be called “Sanitation Engineers - Dishwashing Division” Even had bossman put it on our paystub (he was so tolerant of us kids. I think he was just happy that we were into buffoonery and not meth).
Honest question: Does the founder end up making money this way? Can you really get rich building a failed business?
Lots of people assume that the valuable thing is the direct business, but a business can be a lot more than that. A competitor may buy you for your engineers or sales team or patents, or assets, or whatever (e.g. Siri, Motorola, etc)... and just toss the rest of the business or sell that stuff off after they have what they want. In other industries they may just buy companies for their assets. Also you never know what will happen with a pivot (e.g. twitter, slack, etc).
The bleak reality is if you can keep growing (making more money than you spend) that alone is usually desirable enough for people to keep giving you money and eventually provide an exit. Why? because it's really hard to do. Its a skill.
> The engineer realizes something: building an algorithm that calculates baking time for cakes, pizzas, and bread is quite a bit more complex than it looked. Every dough is its own universe. They need to hire more engineers. Why did the engineer "who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens" not realize this sooner? Sure, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not u…
In the story they spend months to build the MVP and people don't like it. This clearly is first point where they could "fail fast", but they believe they can improve and they do. I guess I'm thinking where is the "fail fast" that is fast enough, but also not quitting too early?
Oh, that was another problem! The story says:
>> In practice it doesn’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP.
No, that's quite clearly not good enough for an MVP! If your product's core functionality—baking stuff, in this case—only works one third of the time, then your product is not viable! It is maybe a proof of concept, but certainly not a product.†
So the company never should have released an MVP, they should have kept working on their reliability problems. Which is when the engineer should have realized "alright, this isn't going to work," and the whole company needs to pivot or close up shop.
Alternately, if they ship a real MVP that can produce perfect cakes with reasonable reliability, and the customers don't like it, that would also be time to change plans.
What happened in the story is they shipped a product that obviously doesn't work, customers dislike the fact that it doesn't work, and the obvious conclusion is "well, they didn't like it because it doesn't work yet," which is true but also obvious. You didn't learn anything.
This doesn't really answer your question and I don't think a definitive answer exists (and I've never worked in this space). But, obviously, this company should have stopped sooner than they did.
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† The only exception I can see is if you can come up with a potential customer for which "an oven that bakes correctly one third of the time" would still meet their needs. Under the scenario in the story, I don't think this exists. For, say, an AI coding agent that can run automated tests and throw away bad results, a one third success rate may still be useful in some scenarios.
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Restaurant dishwashers use an enormous amount of water. They require a hot water supply that’s much hotter than residential heaters typically supply. They require a more complete manual pre-rinse and scrub. They only accept kitchenware that’s made for them and destroy the rest. Restaurants cycle dishes a lot during a single mealtime. Homes don’t. I don’t think “I can’t wait 2 hours” is typically a real problem.
the real problem with home dishwasher is that it extend the duration of the task. the task is prepare food, eat, clean. when you leave the kitchen and come back the next day the task is now different, its unpack, prepare,eat,clean. you are constantly not finishing today's tasks. it lives to see another day. if you can fix it, bound it to the workflow, you will be a billionaire
Oh, 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dishwashers? How dare you. We preferred to be called “Sanitation Engineers - Dishwashing Division” Even had bossman put it on our paystub (he was so tolerant of us kids. I think he was just happy that we were into buffoonery and not meth).
Did this actually happen? That's pretty wholesome lmao.
This is highly relatable. The part that it hides is the "lots of hours of your life" included part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps a match for the UK market? From what I've read they often don't rinse the soap off of dishes there (I wish I were making this up).
Maybe it's the cause of our "bad teeth". (I heard the rumour too. But no-one I know fails to rinse the "washing up liquid" (as we call it) off their plates)