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Comment by red_admiral | Hacker News Reader

To 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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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.

The key difference is the founder built a product in search of a problem to solve, rather than the other way around.

The "secret" is just to talk to people in the field they're trying to "revolutionize," and ideally observe them work. Often, people become blind to workflow problems and workarounds become normal process. They never even consider to look for a better way to do something. Those are the opportunities for founders to solve.

But what I've seen a lot is founders just arbitrarily coming up with an idea that sounds cool on paper, raising money, and only realizing too late that there is zero actual market fit.

> But are they problems worth spending time?

They're not problems people need solved. They're problems people think they want solved. need != want.

the high street bakers needed reliability with improved efficiency at an affordable price (cost of risk). they didn't need improved efficiency, less reliability and still really expensive.

Pre-purchase, the customers are just looking at lists of features. Post-purchase, they realize the ovens burn bread and cake 10% of the time and pizza 100% of the time, and they just want a good working oven that doesn't burn food.

It seems like most customers are returning the oven, which would normally be an extremely strong signal that there is a quality problem. In the SaaS world, the equivalent would be churn, but it's not always as straightforward since if users quit before they sign up (e.g. by reading a review or using a free trial), then they don't show up in that metric.

In SaaS quality is one of the problems that cause churn. Value,price and politics also play a big role - now matter how good or bad the product quality is

A lot pf good products are a combination of features that customers need and use and features they think they need and ask for, but never use. But the sales wouldn't be as good without them. It's a bit comical once it becomes apparent, but it is a widespread pattern.

That's because the assumption is the new product can already do what their current product can, so the things customers ask for is the extras. It's really easy to forget that a lot of work went into "baseline" features which are assumed to be standard (in this case the not burning part).

People trying to think of startup ideas aren't doing it accidentally. They don't want ovens or baked goods. They want to be a founder and/or money. I feel like PG is only right halfway (which maybe means he's not right). He's implying it's wrong to do it that way (to try to think of startup ideas), that it won't work, but geez louise has it worked. To get funded, to get rich, to get an exit. He's also helped enable that path quite a bit.

I've worked for startups that worked on genuine problems that had high customer demand, and there was still the problem of selling what the product could be instead of what it is. At least in my experience, it's omnipresent in B2B and has to be specifically handled regardless of how well your solution addresses a problem.

...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.

Wow I never heard about his blog but just spent the last 3 hours reading it and wow its a treasure trove

> 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.

Depends what kind of market you are going after. Mass market for end users, sure, your argument applies. But there are lots of other types too.

> Enterprise sales isn’t about ovens.

The handshake comes first. The requirements come later.

Which is why income inequality is so insidious. The more successful your rich people are the less effective they become.

This may apply to B2C firms, but B2B firms are more likely to be run by people similar to them.

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