Best line: "Engineering has no time to stop and rethink their approach, because stopping isn’t in the backlog."
Half-Baked Product
331–340 of 447 posts
Re: Half-Baked Product
#332We get so obsessed with shipping shiny features for the next pitch deck that we forget the oven actually needs to bake bread.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#333He should have started his own pizza restaurants with his own ovens. Maybe then he'd learn more about baking. Especially pizza.
Restaurants wouldn't even need dish washers if they switched to paper plates. The pots and pans have to be washed by hand anyway. I was a dishwasher in a restaurant when I was only 14. I'd work a 12-hour shift on Saturdays because none of the 'real' dishwashers were available. The only perk I got was that I could have an occasional pipsi on-th-house. I also worked as a young adault in my father's restaurant. I'd come home from 'my' job every day, working on an electronics production line only to be shown the huge pile of dishes that had accumulated during the day. The production line paid me $2.50 per hour. My dad didn't pay me anything. But he let me park my 20-foot trailer in his back yard, which was adjacent to the restaurant property, and in the winter I had to refill my propane every 3 days.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#334[dead]
Re: Half-Baked Product
#335Ok that hurt, but seriously what's the right answer.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#336One 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…
Listen to any on the Elon Musk interviews, he knows more technical intricacies of his 1000+ employee companies than your average startup founder with 10 employees.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#337We 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…
A fundamental problem (let's not assume there's just one!) is this thinking right in the first paragraph:
> ... if he sells a new oven to the country’s pizza makers, pastry chefs, and bakers, he only needs to capture 10% of the market to become a billionaire.
i.e. the founder assumes that "ovens" is a single $10b-sized market, and it isn't, because reality has a surprising amount of detail (as sibling comment also notes).
You could interpret this whole story as a saga of very inefficient oven market(s) research, the end result of which is the forum post at the end:
> On the forum an old user warns “Make sure that you support rotating bases day 1”.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
There's also the upgrade path of 2 dishwashers with a single 'clean' token moved between the two. Cupboards are an legacy product holding back progress.
So the product to make then, is a dishwasher that's the size of cabinets, so people can afford to have two of them in the existing space that they have.
Re: Half-Baked Product
#339Earlier 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…
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Re: Half-Baked Product
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
The answer is obviously paper plates and plastic silverware /s
Then someone has to remember to buy them and take out the trash. The canonical solution is for you and your lazy roommates to eat straight from the pot over the sink. When done, fill the pot with water, to discourage the ants and roaches. Occasionally, you end up with a drowned ratling, but hey, wachagonna do? One pot, no dishes. Each roommate has to keep track of their private spoon. Greedy "clever" roommate who sho…
If you're going to optimize that, move over to Soylent or Huel. Instead of preparing food and eating it, it's more efficient to mix powder with water, and for people to drink the resulting slurry. As long as that mix has all the things a body needs, you're all set. No mess!