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Comment by datahack | Hacker News Reader

Man it’s so frustrating to see another failure to gain revenue from x labs. I really wish I had the resources to take one of these out and find product market fit. I just don’t understand why product market fit isn’t established and revenue found before launching — these failures seem to elementary to avoid.

It just seems like they flail when they launch because they are science projects and don’t have established and verified customer pain.

I really think that one exercise could reshape the whole effort. Just work on problems that also have some element of customer traction — it doesn’t mean you can’t moonshot. But it does mean you can stay in business long enough to have a chance at a moonshot which is the really thought part usually.

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> I just don’t understand why product market fit isn’t established and revenue found before launching — these failures seem to elementary to avoid.

You can ask that question of the entire tech industry.

The answer is pretty straightforward: Because being a normal financially solvent business is not good enough. A simple technical improvement is not good enough.

Pichai needs another trillion dollars added to Google's market cap, or it's not good enough.

(And VC has the same problem, all of tech is broken.)

Only VC tech and companies on rising side of the Nasdaq

Yes. That is a problem.

Tech execs are strongly pressured to keep the AI hype going at all costs, which just makes the damage worse when it inevitably collapses.

Building technology might be actually kind of easy compared to finding product-market fit. The latter might be better described as "sales team - network - existing practices - existing monopolies - adoptation rate - product iteration speed - right region" fit.

I think the failure here, as it usually is, is doing it backwards: thinking you can invent X and then go find product market fit.”

If I knew how to be sure people would pay for a thing without my having even created a prototype, I'd be way richer.

Yeah. That’s fundamentally why we prototype and get to market fast and learn what we don’t yet know. And a perfectly cromulent outcome is, “this feels awesome but nobody wants it. Sunk cost. Shutting down.”

> I just don’t understand why product market fit isn’t established and revenue found before launching

Founders often profit more from funding rounds than revenue or exits so the incentives are not aligned toward a profitability outcome

They do need the skill of convincing VCs that there might be profitable.

It's a great skill, and almost entirely orthogonal to developing products worth having.

With ambitious projects like this, you’d expect the vast majority of them fail.

That was not the parent commenter’s point

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