"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The handshake comes first. The requirements come later.