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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 f
by datahack 2y ago
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.
- Waterluvian 2y agoI think the failure here, as it usually is, is doing it backwards: thinking you can invent X and then go find product market fit.”
- jfengel 2y agoIf I knew how to be sure people would pay for a thing without my having even created a prototype, I'd be way richer.
- Waterluvian 2y agoYeah. 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.”
- kolinko 2y agoWith ambitious projects like this, you’d expect the vast majority of them fail.
- szundi 2y agoThat was not the parent commenter’s point
- ADeerAppeared 2y ago> 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.)
- szundi 2y agoOnly VC tech and companies on rising side of the Nasdaq
- ADeerAppeared 2y agoYes. 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.
- MrQuincle 2y agoBuilding 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.
- avereveard 2y ago> 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
- jfengel 2y agoThey 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.