alt Hacker NewsTo 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 good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough to fool you into working on them."
Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space.
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Wow I never heard about his blog but just spent the last 3 hours reading it and wow its a treasure trove
...which is why none of the best software is a product or a service. The best software is always a tool, made by people who have a problem for people who have that problem.
Occasionally the business types come along and make it worse by turning it into a product or a service. Other times they make bad products and bad services from scratch.
The people in this story are focusing at the wrong layer (as are many of us). They need to stop trying to sell ovens and start trying to sell baked goods. Maybe once they're good at that, they can also sell whatever oven they came up with along the way.
> Finding a problem _you have yourself_ also increases the chance that you understand the problem space.
If most founders are wealthy, or even reasonably comfortable, it's possible they're too out of touch to identify a problem shared by enough people.
I dunno, going back to the article, at some point customers are getting exactly what they're asking for:
"their kitchens are custom-built, so they need ovens with specific dimensions. Oh, and a rotating base like the one they already have."
“My oven at home connects to the fireplace. Does yours?”
“I make a lot of wedding cakes, what have you got for me?”
“Do you have a Ramadan mode?”
Those are all problems.
But are they problems worth spending time? I dunno.