Half-Baked Product | Weli's blogHalf-Baked Product<br>2026-07-02<br>The Founder<br>A freshly minted founder decides to get into the oven business. He can’t bake a cake or knead bread, but he knows the kitchen appliance market inside and out. He’s analyzed every business in Spain and reached a conclusion: if he sells a new oven to the country’s pizza makers, pastry chefs, and bakers, he only needs to capture 10% of the market to become a billionaire.<br>10% always looks small when you type it into an Excel spreadsheet.<br>The founder is very good. He builds a plan that, on paper, is flawless and airtight: manufacture a more efficient oven using new technology. Selling it is easy. Want to work more efficiently? Buy our oven. End of pitch. The founder has experience talking to investors and raises enough money to build an MVP.<br>The Engineer<br>The founder looks for someone who knows how to build ovens and finds an engineer from a prestigious school. The engineer has spent 10 years building ovens and knows how to make one. More than that: he’s the kind of person who spends all day talking and arguing about ovens. He goes to oven conferences. When he gets home at night, he argues for hours on Italian forums about which type of oven is best. The Italian forums are, to him, the ultimate source of oven-truth.<br>He’s tired of building ovens at Corporate Oven. Ten years making the same oven he’s told to make. He wants the freedom to build his own.<br>The founder offers him 20% of the company and total freedom to build the perfect oven. The salary isn’t great, but there’s the promise: if things go well, someday he could be a millionaire. And something more important than money: he’ll finally get to build the oven of his dreams.<br>He signs.<br>The MVP<br>With little money and lots of enthusiasm, they build an MVP. Two months later it’s done. It’s a functional oven and, more importantly, it has one improvement over traditional ovens: you input the amount of flour, yeast, and water, and the oven automatically knows when to stop for a perfect bake.<br>In theory.<br>In practice it doesn’t work very well, but it’s good enough for an MVP. They go to market and sell 5 prototypes: two bakers the founder knows, the engineer’s mother who bakes cakes, and two oven enthusiasts who buy it out of curiosity.<br>The feedback is unanimous:<br>“My bread came out burnt.” “The cake was raw.” “Every single pizza burns.”<br>But all things considered, it’s positive: a third of the time, the prototype worked and produced the perfect cake, bread, or pizza.<br>“This is just a prototype. Imagine when we ship the real product. Trust us.”<br>And with that, the founder goes to see an old colleague who now works at a VC: “In 2 months we’ve built a prototype, we already have 5 customers, and it’s very promising. We just need money to scale, build a better version, and sell to every bakery and pastry shop in Spain.”<br>Nobody asks whether the 5 customers would buy again.<br>The founder is very good. He raises 5 million. Ovens Inc. is born.<br>Forum of the Bakers<br>They start improving the prototype. The engineer realizes something: building an algorithm that calculates baking time for cakes, pizzas, and bread is quite a bit more complex than it looked. Every dough is its own universe. They need to hire more engineers.<br>The engineer knows exactly where to look. On the Italian forums there are two users he’s spent years arguing with about convection and refractory stone: Mario and Luigi. He’s never met them in person, but he knows their opinions on ovens better than his own family’s. He offers them the same deal he got: low salary, lots of freedom, the perfect oven.<br>They sign.<br>Meanwhile, the founder needs to sell ovens, but Facebook and Instagram ads get no traction. Turns out nobody buys a fifteen-thousand-euro industrial oven because it popped up in their stories. So he hires a legendary sales team: the best salespeople in all of Spain. People who have never sold ovens, who know nothing about ovens, but who are hungry to sell and very excited about the company.<br>At first it goes badly. Few people want a new oven; they’re happy with the one they have. Why switch? Most small businesses don’t care about a 15% efficiency gain: the risk of switching is too high. If Juan’s Bakery swaps ovens and the new oven fails, Juan loses his customers and shuts down. For Juan, efficiency is optional; tomorrow’s bread is not. Better to stick with the old oven, even if it’s worse on paper. He’d only switch if Manolo’s Bakery across the street started selling cheaper bread thanks to a more efficient oven and he had no choice. But Manolo thinks exactly the same as Juan, so nobody moves. Perfect equilibrium. Economists have a name for this; Juan and Manolo call it common sense.<br>Big businesses are another story. For them,...