The mistake was when they didn't just switch to selling two types of dough. They had a genuine innovation and should've squeezed as much juice out of that and moved on to finding some other innovation. You don't need to build exactly what you described to your first investors, you just need to build a valuable business for them.
Half-Baked Product
311–320 of 447 posts
Re: Half-Baked Product
#312Why do I feel like this is the story of the average B2B SaaS YC startup?
Re: Half-Baked Product
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’ve sat through some pitches like that, where it is very obvious that the founder/CEO has limited knowledge and expertise in what they’re pitching, where the product is limited, but their enthusiasm is off the charts. And for all the talk of investing into people, what was your opinion?
Not OP, but overconfidence is not a quality I would invest in.
You must not be from California
Re: Half-Baked Product
#314This is such European take on startups. Tesla was making shitty overpriced status symbols/value signalling cars and selling FSD for 10k knowing very well that it will not work with car hardware. It took them 10 years to "fake it until you make it stage". If founder keep iterating and hyping his ovens with enough capital he could become big player in oven maker space and disrupting industry. Learning from this article…
I know you're getting downvoted but this is painfully true, especially the part about the founder 'choosing which promise to break'. Something I've observed in many Europeans (really just any region with very conservative financing) is that they view venture capital as a system where ideas immediately take off or are doomed to fail. They don't think about how Apple, Amazon, Tesla, etc, took years of trial & error, making tradeoffs, breaking promises, and creating multiple product lines to deliver more and more value. Of course, maybe there's not much disruption to be done in the oven industry (I'd suspect that's actually the case in reality) but Microsoft started off as a flight simulator company; you can just pivot.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
What drives him then? Power?
Seeking approval. It's apparent from everything he posts on X + the memeing + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga.
> Seeking approval
Yea, that’s called narcissism. Their only drive in life is to be admired, and it’s much easier to lie and deceive to reach that goal, than doing something that’s truly praiseworthy
Re: Half-Baked Product
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Then he knowingly blew it all up overnight to ally with Trump.
He blew it up years before that with his "pedo guy" false accusation drama.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
What drives him then? Power?
Seeking approval. It's apparent from everything he posts on X + the memeing + the whole "I am a elite Path of Exile"-saga.
I think "self promotion" is a better description than "seeking approval".
IMO people who are seeking approval tend to not go out of their way to be assholes quite so often ("pedo guy" incident, for example).
Re: Half-Baked Product
#318We 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…
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…
Wow I never heard about his blog but just spent the last 3 hours reading it and wow its a treasure trove
Re: Half-Baked Product
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 n…
Google was definitely "exact same product, but better". It was a search box. However, I think Anova would be a better direct counterpoint. They started in sous vide, replacing existing products that did the same thing but better. But now they are literally trying to replace ovens . That effort started after the Electrolux acquisition in 2017, but they do seem to be pretty successful. A friend of mine really likes the…
But what were the huge, established companies that had refused to deliver a better product before Google came along?
Re: Half-Baked Product
#320The 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 it for production.