Half-Baked Product

One 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.

The defense is of course that some people can do that - Musk did it, so why not?

Another defense is that blindingly naïve optimism is sometimes needed to move the needle, as the concept “that can’t be done” simply doesn’t exist to some people.

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.

EDIT: The very latest happened only a couple of weeks ago. A startup had reached out to my employer as they’re developing a platform in our domain. Higher ups liked what they’d seen, enough to arrange a real meeting.

Startup is only 3 months old, and the moment I opened the platform I recognized a vibecoded (likely using clause) platform identical to almost all other launched on a daily basis.

So I probed a bit about data sources, serious questions regarding security, etc. but the guy was pretty fluent in consultant (turns out he had worked as a management consultant before launching), and the CTO was just nodding along.

In the end they wanted our data, and promised the moon on features - but as mentioned, I’m sure the whole product was entirely vibecoded.

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.

We 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 what customers want but doesn’t really understand what’s possible to make. The investor knows the numbers but doesn’t really understand how poorly the business is run.

I suspect if you look at successful startups you’ll often see a very small (1-3) group of founders who are very close, each can do more than one thing really well, and their combined expertise means that together they have very few blindspots.

This article could have been written 20 years ago (source : I was there), probably 50 years ago, and will probably be written for ever. (Although future éditions will have fun about AI.)

What I would love is to read more of the story from the perspective of the salesperson (we're all too sympathetic to the engineers, and potentially ceo - but I suspect their part of the story goes beyond "I'll just say yes to everything and cash my variable share of the deal". Otherwise, pour rational next move would be to all become salesperson and build oven on the side for fun.)

Also, I would love to read the perspective from the customer side ? ("What do you mean they sell oven that don't rotate ? We clearly specified that we needed an ISO-98765 compliant oven !!! OF COURSE it has to rotate !! why did the boss just went with the cheapest supplier again ?")

Or even the perspective from BigOven ("guys ! I read on linked in that this little startup has built a candle button, why don't we have that already ?")

More seriously - do you know of startups that got away with salespersons saying "no, sorry, we can't make rotating ovens, you should see our competition, or come back in three years." Aren't those dead as dodos, by virtue of not having any customer to pay the bill ?

> He offers them the same deal he got: low salary, lots of freedom, the perfect oven.

This is highly relatable. The part that it hides is the "lots of hours of your life" included part.

Similar story here.

Even though our ovens actually work fine, the problem is a new competitor: OpenOven. Their oven is completely free, and on the Italian forum everyone talks about them. It has even way more buttons than ours (most don't work very well, but the community loves it).

We almost sold to MrBaguette, one of the biggest bakery chains in the world, as they wanted new oven supplier for their next generation of kitchen. Their chef tried our oven and loved it. But in the end they went with the pricier one from Corporate Oven, because some VP thought we were too small and worried we wouldn't supply them in 20 years.

I like this part:

The founder gets angry. He promised the VCs 10% of Spain’s oven market. The entire market. “We can’t sacrifice any of them.”

It’s not just greed. The 5 million was raised with the entire market on the slide. The founder isn’t choosing between right and wrong: he’s choosing which promise to break.

I wonder what the author had in mind when he wrote "which promise to break". Is the founder thinking about his promises to the VCs? Or thinking between the VC and customers?

I think this is the most human moment of the entire story. Everything else is pretty standard tropes (and just like everyone in this chain, these tropes ring very very true). They're almost systemic issues.

But this is a moment where the one person who is supposed to actually have agency (the founder!) actually has a choice. I don't want to nitpick the technicalities of the choice (it seems pretty straightforward to me that getting to 10% of total market would more than justify multiple product lines), but the psychology here.

Why is the founder uncomfortable breaking promises to investors, but more comfortable selling a garbage product? Is he just hopeful?

I found the part about the engineer's motivation interesting:

> The founder offers [the engineer] 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: [...] And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.

That turned out to be a complete lie. Not necessarily a deliberate one - I think it's quite possible both the engineer and the founder were initially believing it - but it was still a situation that never existed in that way.

Essentially, they weren't aware of all the constraints that existed for their oven design and then mistook a situation where the constraints were unknown with one where there were no constraints at all and they could just build whatever they wanted. But the real constraints were set by the market, investors and corporate customers and those were already there before they even stated the company.

(I don't think it means you have to submit to those slavishly and can never bring anything of your actual vision into your products, but it feels naive to be completely unaware of them.)

Uncomfortably accurate, but a fantastic read. Somewhere between the candle button and "It doesn't rotate clockwise" I stopped laughing and started remembering.

I remember sitting in on a sales meeting early in my career. I kept quiet, but afterwards I complained to my manager that they were selling features that didn’t exist and conflicted with core concepts of the product. My manager told me that was how sales were made. I left the company not long after, I was already disgruntled prior to that discussion.

I’ve seen the same thing everywhere I go. I don’t have the disposition to be in sales, but I periodically daydream of making huge commissions by straight up bullshitting people. There seems to be no downside.

This was such a funny and refreshing read. Especially to find on this VC fuelled forum.

There was so much truth in this on a Dilbertesque level. If you can learn from this you are winning.

I am not saying "VC bad". I am saying it is a sharp-edged tool which you need to wield with great care. This humorous piece really points out the pitfalls.

Worth the read - do not just lurk here in the comment section (as I usually do!)

Slow clap… matches my experience in startups. And honestly, big tech as well. I think you can consider an enterprise to simply be a collection of many startups with shared revenue as funding.

Too close to the home, ouch. It’s such a microcosm of things. I can imagine people reading this going “ah, the founder was right, it’s those damn nerds” or “at least WE generated sales” and so on. The more you do startups the more it seems that the time is indeed a flat circle.

> When he gets home at night, he argues for hours on Italian forums about which type of oven is best. The Italian forums are, to him, the ultimate source of oven-truth.

This detail, among several others, is subtle but deeply fateful.

> A month later, Mario leaves the company. [...] In the retro, it gets written down as a “learning.”

That hurts and exemplifies everything I hate about the industry. Humans lost on a Kanban board, abstracted away and covered in business speak.

> When Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is

The most resonant line for me. This line for me is about how good project management meets team culture. You want a high performant team: one that remains focused and motivated - but the goals are carrots, not sticks.

This writing is too realistic to feel joy about it. Thanks for putting it together (and then to the HN)

I was waiting for the plot twist and it didn't come, so its genre is: horror.

I’ve felt like this before but I think the responsibility of the founding engineer is underestimated. 20% of the company is a cofounder and a partnership. The failure was compromising on the buttons. An engineer who can say “no” is far more valuable than the one who will grind out features for a sales call.

I LOVE THIS!! well done.

Can’t say this is fiction or non-fiction. Totally depressing. Too good.

> 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 understanding it", but the engineer's salary wasn't great anyway; the real goal was to build "the oven of his dreams". To do that, he very much needed to understand the algorithmic complexity involved.

What I assume happened is the engineer wasn't sure whether the idea could work, and the only way to find out was to try. Well, he tried, and he found out. Oh well.

Isn't this how VC is supposed to work? Ten startups try ten ambitious ideas. Nine fail, one succeeds. The one that succeeds does well enough to make up for the nine failures. And so it goes. There was nothing wrong with the nine founders who failed. They were just unlucky, and they can try again.

I think what went wrong in the story is very simple. The company didn't "fail fast".

It's flabbergasting how this story is close to the reality. Bookmarked, I would love to see it printed.

Such a great read! I kept on nodding and chuckling the whole time reading it. I can see myself as the founder, especially 'spending time in the oven forums' lol.

I went to the /blog route to see other posts by the author, but alas, there is only this one! And that's a gem.

you know the pamphlets passed to soldiers before war.

your article needs to be passed to engineers & I guess everyone before graduating college.

in all the satire - what our industry forgot is - how did people build/fund companies before Venture Capital ?

This is so well written. What would really be icing on the cake would be for Mario to join another oven company that had the same premise (or similar vein) where he got to experience that all over again. Either way, there’s always a starry eyed graduate that thinks this is my ticket.

Considerable arrogance is required to think you can improve on mature products enough to conquer a large market share. Such arrogance should be supported by having, if not a demonstrably fantastic prototype, at least an obviously good idea; otherwise you are following the example of Juicero or Theranos.

In the article, the "smart" oven is only a speculation (maybe it works, and maybe someone will pay for it) and as such it is appropriate as a relatively low effort and low risk experiment on the part of an established oven maker (develop rudimentary automation and offer it as a very mildly disruptive feature at a modest price increase).

Brilliant! And this isn't really just about startups. Large companies are operating the exact same way.

Here is another story: A baker who bakes for her kids every day makes an oven. She spends years perfecting it by herself with details only someone who uses this product would notice. The nuance of gold baked details in just the right places on the bread, the infusion of essences for the cakes. The precise charring on the pizzas. She goes to young founder events to meet likeminded makers and they talk about space ovens and OvenCrunch incubators fund them just on school name and ideas. But the oven maker with the kids doesn’t even get an interview. She applies with a working product and increasing sales year over year for 10 years and no interview. Her over becomes an organically growing best seller and she doesn’t need the seed money anymore. Incubator founders have spend their seed funding on fancy trips and conferences and flying over the Egyptian pyramids on instagram. The Incubator partners say they don’t fund oven makers anymore because the business is too slow to grow and consumer stuff is a tarpit.

The technology is amazing. The marketing around it is a decade ahead of its capability, and the pushiness to make LLMs do what they still can't is just irritating. The question to me is "who is seeing the goal posts?" And the answer is "the marketing department of whoever sells it".

Brilliant. What I liked are the characters - it's hard to make every character motivation reasonable and so well communicated.

What I think is a bit of a missed opportunity is for the product to fail with "the pizza|cake|pastry is half-baked" and so customers still have to do the rest of the job anyway.

The classic solution-in-search-of-a-problem.

If the founder had started by talking with people in the problem space, he could have discovered what problems were actually worth solving before investing any money and effort into a product.

Everything after that happened were downstream effects of creating something without a defensible reason why and for whom.

> 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.

Reading this made me hyperventilate

Wow I was laughing internally. I couldn’t dare to laugh out loud because this story is too real to me. The moment I noticed that I just had to look back my life. Good read

Is this how they view us? Like yeah. I'm going to spend all night arguing with the Haskell lovers (that's a slur in my books) on Reddit, but it's not my hobby. Rather, responsibility demands I direct these functional programmers away from the devil.

> “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.

This was an absolute delight to read. I have tried to build so many ovens in my life…

This one hits a little too close to home. I left my company around 9 months ago due to being "Mario" at my old company. It was a good decision because it ended up being a sinking ship. I wish I left much sooner, but I didn't know the red flags at the time. An expensive lesson for me

I made an account just to reply to this post. Happened to me. Word per word. From the start until the end. Exactly like it is.

Has anyone ever experienced the alternative? to building products from scratch, growing a business, without the drama?

I have started a number of (failed) companies and this, this article summarizes the last 15 years of my life. A software dev trying to play startup founder.

To whoever wrote this , thank you for so eloquently articulating something I’d failed to put into words.

This was exquisitely cringe-laden and I think I may be the Luigi figure

This was such a great read! Thank you! Too bad Oven Inc never got more headcount. Otherwise the engineers could've had a day hackathon week while the managers and founder went to a retreat for a strategy offsite.

Being able to say no, across the company! Having an engineering team which is allowed to say No the founder. Having a sales team which is allowed to say No to the customer. Having founders who are allowed to say No to themselves, sit patiently and figure the root-causes.

This is like a punch in the gut. Holy buckets. How do you prevent this? Bootstrap?

Entertaining, very AI prose though.

for me, the moral of the story is that it's easier to promise things than to deliver them. or, engineering was the bottleneck. in my experience, this is not particular to start-ups, or even software engineering.

why does this happen though? i think it could be due to short-term thinking. like buying things with a credit card: you get the shiny new thing immediately, but the payment is diluted over time. likewise, once the sale is made, you may feel the reward immediately (though i guess it depends on the exact nature of the deal), but the work that will have to be done, will be done over time.

also, it's no wonder that the founder, or, outside start-ups, the marketing department, which specializes in promising impossible things, manages to evade the blame...

Wow, this is so damn close to truth :)