alt Hacker NewsHere 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.
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Ten years later: The woman's oven is still a niche product, but awareness of it is growing, because the quality is just so good. Professionals swear by it and the name is written only with the utmost reverence in the Italian (and other) forums.
The baker is happy and proud with what she could contribute to the worldwide bakers community and has made enough money that she and her family never need to worry again. There is just one problem: By now, she is getting old and none of her kids are interested in bakery or oven tech. She's also getting a steadily growing amount of offers to sell the rights to the brand.
Eventually, she caves and sells the brand and designs to BigOven. They promote her brand front and center and initially also use her design. But over time, BigOven replaces more and more parts with cheaper equivalents while keeping the overall look the same - until eventually, they replace the entire product with a stock design.
The bakers take a while to catch on (during which time BigOven makes a ton of additional money from the brand value) but eventually, the quality decline becomes impossible to ignore. Frustrated posts about corporate greed and enshittification make the rounds on the Italian forums.
"They don't make em like they used to" someone writes...
But slow organic growth is not a hyperscaling unicorn. Who wants to invest money for a mere 50% return? We need to x100 or x1000 it for it to even be worth to invest.