Raw Product
It's fascinating how, in the world of software and hardware development, the journey from a brilliant idea to a successful product is rarely a straight line. Often, the path is winding, full of unexpected turns, and sometimes leads us to a product that, while promising, ends up being... well, "half-baked."
This "half-baked" product metaphor deeply resonates with anyone who has been in the trenches, building something. The distance between the polished presentation for investors and the brutal reality of user feedback is an abyss that few startups manage to cross without some scars.
The Dream Furnace
Imagine a founder fresh out of the oven (no pun intended). He doesn't know how to bake a cake or knead bread, but he knows the kitchen appliance market like the back of his hand. His impeccable analysis points to a golden niche: industrial ovens. If he can capture just 10% of the pizzeria, confectionery, and bakery market in Spain, he'll be a billionaire. Ten percent always seems like a small number when typed into a spreadsheet.
With a "bulletproof" business plan and experience speaking with investors, he raises initial capital to build an MVP. The idea is simple: manufacture a more efficient oven with new technology. Selling will be easy, right? "Want to be more efficient? Buy our oven." End of the pitch.
To build this marvel, he finds an engineer with ten years of experience in ovens, a true enthusiast who attends conferences on the subject and discusses for hours in Italian forums about the best type of oven. Tired of the corporate routine, the engineer accepts the offer: 20% of the company, a modest salary, and total freedom to build the oven of his dreams. It's more than money; it's a chance to create his masterpiece.
With little money and much enthusiasm, the MVP is built in two months. It's a functional oven and, theoretically, a marvel: you input the amount of flour, yeast, and water, and it automatically knows when to stop for perfect baking. In practice, it doesn't work very well, but it's an MVP, right?
The Reality of Baking
The MVP is brought to market. Five prototypes are sold: two bakers known to the founder, the engineer's mother (who bakes cakes), and two oven enthusiasts. The feedback is unanimous: "My bread burned," "The cake was raw," "Every pizza burns." But, surprisingly, the overall feedback is positive. After all, one-third of the time, the prototype worked and produced perfect cake, bread, or pizza. "It's just a prototype. Imagine when we launch the real product. Trust us."
With this "proof" in hand, the founder manages to raise 5 million euros from a VC. Ovens Inc. is born.
The engineering team, now with the addition of Mario and Luigi — two oven gurus from the Italian forums, recruited with the same promise of freedom and the perfect oven — begins to improve the prototype. The engineer soon realizes the complexity: creating an algorithm that calculates baking time for cakes, pizzas, and bread is much harder than it seemed. Each dough is a universe.
Meanwhile, the founder needs to sell. Facebook and Instagram ads don't generate traction. Nobody buys a fifteen-thousand-euro industrial oven because it appeared on their feed. A "legendary" sales team is hired: the best salespeople in Spain, hungry to sell, but with no oven experience.
Initially, sales are difficult. Small businesses, like João's Bakery or Manolo's Confectionery, don't care about a 15% efficiency gain. The risk of changing ovens is too high. If the new oven fails, João loses his customers and closes his doors. For him, efficiency is optional; tomorrow's bread is not. It's better to stick with the old, familiar oven. A perfect balance, which economists call market inertia and João and Manolo call common sense.
Large companies, however, are another story. For them, 15% efficiency means millions of euros saved per year. And one of the salespeople manages to get in touch with Pepepizza.
The Burnt Bread Dilemma
In engineering, things don't improve much. The algorithm is still unstable. The failure rate dropped from two-thirds to one-third, but each percentage point of improvement costs twice as much as the previous one. And then, the uncomfortable discovery: if the oven only did two of the three things (bread, cakes or pizza), the algorithm would only fail 5% of the time.
The engineer brings the proposal to the founder: let's sacrifice a market and have a product that really works. The founder is furious. He promised the VCs 10% of the entire Spanish oven market. He's not choosing between right and wrong; he's choosing which promise to break. The engineer returns to his desk, with his three types of dough and his 33% failure rate.
On the sales side, contact with Pepepizza progresses. Corporate deals don't close via email. The founder flies to Pepepizza headquarters, meets the owner, and the chemistry is so good that they go to Mallorca together. Nobody knows what was discussed there.
Why This Matters
The story of the "half-baked" oven is a vivid reminder of the tension between a founder's ambitious vision and the reality of technical execution and the market. The promise to "do everything for everyone" is seductive, but often leads to a product that, while technologically interesting, doesn't fully satisfy anyone.
For us, developers, this underscores the importance of a well-defined scope and the courage to say "no" to features that dilute the product's core value. It's better to do one thing exceptionally well than several things mediocrely. A product that works perfectly for a specific niche has a better chance of success than one that tries to embrace the world and ends up "half-baked" on all fronts. The reality of the market and the intrinsic complexity of any real system will always exact their toll.
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