Rent the Backyard built great-looking ADUs. It seemed like a great product, and got a lot of attention after YC. From the article it looks like the issues of running and capitalizing a factory was what killed them.
> I have a degree in Statistics & Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where I stayed up all night writing algorithms that arbitraged textbooks to pay my tuition. Before, I attended Phillips Exeter Academy ...
This is exactly the type of person I expect to know fuckall about building. I read /r/Construction and it's fascinating, not to mention daunting, how much goes into modern building. Huge debates from blue collar workers on the best way to frame, or pour concrete, or the amount of reinforcements needed. It looks as complex as software engineering but much more costly to make mistakes. Compare to another tech-meets-legacy industry company like FarmLogs, that's been going for 11 years. It worked because the founder grew up and worked on his farm as a kid. He knew exactly how to improve processes because he knew them inside and out.
This reads like the classic “tech people try to build an X company as if it were a tech company and learn that they know nothing about the X industry.”
I’d love to know more about what drove the mismatch of hiring unskilled labour for the unproven production line. Or rather, what went into the belief that the production line concept would cover for a lack of technical skill.
If lesson 2 was, “we should have taken the short-term more painful and expensive path of hiring experienced leaders for each trade or station” then that seems to suggest there were no experts.
So then how was the line designed and tested? Who were the people who built the first few houses before the unskilled workers were brought in? Who was training them? Where did those trainers go? How were the founders so confident in the absence of any expert authority?
I suspect I am misunderstanding the situation, and that there were skilled experts who know how to build houses, but they weren’t appropriate to be actual builders?
But that leads (and I recognize I’m layering a lot of assumptions to get to here) to the issue that you’re not building a house, you’re designing and tuning a production line. That already exists: construction crews. Ever see them build like 20 houses at the same time in a new subdivision? A big part of their value is not just that they know the details of their trade, but that they have honed the production line aspect. (tangent: I once watched, from my workshop, roofers across the street redo an entire roof in an afternoon in what I would describe as a ballet set to the score of nailguns)
I think lesson 2 actually feeds lesson 1: hire a pre-existing team of experts and give them the blueprint. Then watch how they design the production line.
Gosh this is fascinating. So many questions. I wish the post was longer.
I don't get why there was such an emphasis on building a factory/assembly line from the very beginning. An experienced general contractor can get 650sf dwellings built pretty easily, especially in the confines of a wharehouse.
It's not impossible and there are some advantages. I watched an entire apartment building in Oakland get assembled in like two weeks. The modular pieces were built at Factory OS in Vallejo and trucked in.
You’ve definitely got a point here, but I think you could announce that strategy and still spin some MVP/MLP/PMF jargon to explain why you’re slow-rolling the factory while building the first dozen units.
I think I could personally build ten little backyard houses in four years all by myself.
—edit—
Did some reading on this project and it seems they intended to do 10 units as a test run, just wondering if they get to keep them or if the homeowners have to buy them out?
It’s very confusing, some of the times they were saying they rented out the backyard and provided the house (plus a lien) and other times were talking about people taking out a second mortgage to pay for the little houses.
This is an odd obit. So much talk about "scaling", "assembly line", "factory", etc just to sell 10 units over four years!!
I would have thought a company like this would start out maybe with 1 unit a quarter, then 1 unit a month, then 2 units/month, etc. while seeking product/market fit. Use a general contractor who's good at assembling teams. Keep the core staff minimal.
Huh, I could've sworn there was an HN submission where this company announced they were pivoting to a different business model. I remember being happy, because I thought "get poor people to pay to live in a poverty box in their betters' back yards" was the most dystopian shit I'd ever heard.
Right after college, I lived in an illegal barely dry-walled off 1BR slice of a 4BR house and later in a (probably illegal) basement apartment in a split-level.
They fit my budget/needs and were way better than being homeless. I don’t see the problem of people building housing to serve the left third of the economic distribution.
"We believed that <snip>, workers with limited skills could be quickly trained and perform just as well as workers who would cost twice as much to employ"
My oh my. Will they ever learn?
You could power a small town by attaching a generator to the (imaginary) revolving door of my company used by bootcamp grads, overseas devs and relatives of senior management who tinker with computers.
"Look, we have people who know how to do this. We can just hire a bunch of other people and have our people sit down with them for an afternoon or two and tell them how to do it, right? Why hasn't anyone done this before? Guess it's time to disrupt the market."
Jesus Christ, this almost physically hurt to read.
Its exactly the kind of thing I expect from when people in tech go try do something in other sectors without an adult in the room.
Thoughts on the "lessons" (out of order, deliberately).
Lesson 2: Word salad that basically means "we hired people who didn't know what they were doing, and expected the performance of professional tradesmen to just magically happen".
Lesson 1: see lesson 2, but with additional process issues that anyone with any construction experience could have warned you about, and chronic understaffing to keep a lean headcount.
Lesson 3: basically they decided to ignore tried and tested business strategies for growth and wing it instead. This didn't work.
Lesson 4-6 mostly, again, are poor business planning.
See also: recent HN threads of Hackernews readers largely incorrecting each other about work in the trades.
I've never wished ill on HN, but I'm glad they failed at this approach. People can get hurt, physically, financially, beyond repair by groups that take the software mentality into physical products.
Skilled laborers cost money not for what they're doing for you, but for the years and sweat they put into knowing safety practices, codes, and proper workmanship.
> Home owners who aren’t experts should be able to build their own house.
They can.
There's a massive difference though between self building for yourself, to live in, and building commercially for other, paying people to live in.
While both need to be at least compliant with minimum standards of some form, commercial builders must be held to a higher standard given the third parties they are putting at risk.
Businesses fail all the time. Very often because the founders are inexperienced and underestimate just how much knowledge and skill it takes to run something seemingly simple. This is not unusual, it should not “physically hurt” to read. There but for the grace of god etc.
"Move fast, break things" works fine with webshit.
It doesn't work when you are building houses for people to live in, where mistakes (say, electrical, structural, or plumbing wise) can lead to fatal incidents.
This lot were the absolute definition of fucking cowboys.
The idea is good. But there are already plenty of companies building modular homes in factories, and rvs in factories. They have been doing this for 60 years.
This startup could have focused on design sales permitting etc and built a couple as test, but it seems vastly more efficient to contract with an existing player than to try to everything from first principles
I have worked outside "my domain" multiple times through my life but I was willing to spend a year or years learning about the new domain before raising money. Really needed to make the case that I knew what I was talking about to investors who knew more about the domain than I did.
I thought the article was written in a very humble manner. The lessons shared were honest and heartfelt.
I spent my life in corporate. Lesson 6 (Planning is often the highest leverage work) touched something inside me. In a large corp, I have complained how slow we move, how things are planned to a ridiculous level, how there are people whose job it is to just to this function (or something related like strategy). It is interesting to see a start-up that follows the hacker ethos, but then gets in trouble due to lack of such functions.
38 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 98.4 ms ] threadOk, not The Pippin:
The Apple Pippin is a defunct open multimedia technology platform, designed by Apple Computer, and marketed as PiPP!N.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pippin
Does anyone know where their factory was?
> I have a degree in Statistics & Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where I stayed up all night writing algorithms that arbitraged textbooks to pay my tuition. Before, I attended Phillips Exeter Academy ...
This is exactly the type of person I expect to know fuckall about building. I read /r/Construction and it's fascinating, not to mention daunting, how much goes into modern building. Huge debates from blue collar workers on the best way to frame, or pour concrete, or the amount of reinforcements needed. It looks as complex as software engineering but much more costly to make mistakes. Compare to another tech-meets-legacy industry company like FarmLogs, that's been going for 11 years. It worked because the founder grew up and worked on his farm as a kid. He knew exactly how to improve processes because he knew them inside and out.
I’d love to know more about what drove the mismatch of hiring unskilled labour for the unproven production line. Or rather, what went into the belief that the production line concept would cover for a lack of technical skill.
If lesson 2 was, “we should have taken the short-term more painful and expensive path of hiring experienced leaders for each trade or station” then that seems to suggest there were no experts.
So then how was the line designed and tested? Who were the people who built the first few houses before the unskilled workers were brought in? Who was training them? Where did those trainers go? How were the founders so confident in the absence of any expert authority?
I suspect I am misunderstanding the situation, and that there were skilled experts who know how to build houses, but they weren’t appropriate to be actual builders?
But that leads (and I recognize I’m layering a lot of assumptions to get to here) to the issue that you’re not building a house, you’re designing and tuning a production line. That already exists: construction crews. Ever see them build like 20 houses at the same time in a new subdivision? A big part of their value is not just that they know the details of their trade, but that they have honed the production line aspect. (tangent: I once watched, from my workshop, roofers across the street redo an entire roof in an afternoon in what I would describe as a ballet set to the score of nailguns)
I think lesson 2 actually feeds lesson 1: hire a pre-existing team of experts and give them the blueprint. Then watch how they design the production line.
Gosh this is fascinating. So many questions. I wish the post was longer.
—edit—
Did some reading on this project and it seems they intended to do 10 units as a test run, just wondering if they get to keep them or if the homeowners have to buy them out?
That makes it sound like the customers are renting their back yards to third parties, and the company was just selling a product.
I would have thought a company like this would start out maybe with 1 unit a quarter, then 1 unit a month, then 2 units/month, etc. while seeking product/market fit. Use a general contractor who's good at assembling teams. Keep the core staff minimal.
They fit my budget/needs and were way better than being homeless. I don’t see the problem of people building housing to serve the left third of the economic distribution.
My oh my. Will they ever learn?
You could power a small town by attaching a generator to the (imaginary) revolving door of my company used by bootcamp grads, overseas devs and relatives of senior management who tinker with computers.
That last one is not made up!
Its exactly the kind of thing I expect from when people in tech go try do something in other sectors without an adult in the room.
Thoughts on the "lessons" (out of order, deliberately).
Lesson 2: Word salad that basically means "we hired people who didn't know what they were doing, and expected the performance of professional tradesmen to just magically happen".
Lesson 1: see lesson 2, but with additional process issues that anyone with any construction experience could have warned you about, and chronic understaffing to keep a lean headcount.
Lesson 3: basically they decided to ignore tried and tested business strategies for growth and wing it instead. This didn't work.
Lesson 4-6 mostly, again, are poor business planning.
See also: recent HN threads of Hackernews readers largely incorrecting each other about work in the trades.
Skilled laborers cost money not for what they're doing for you, but for the years and sweat they put into knowing safety practices, codes, and proper workmanship.
Exactly. And in this case, the physical product was to be housing. We have building codes for a reason...
Home owners who aren’t experts should be able to build their own house.
They can.
There's a massive difference though between self building for yourself, to live in, and building commercially for other, paying people to live in.
While both need to be at least compliant with minimum standards of some form, commercial builders must be held to a higher standard given the third parties they are putting at risk.
The hyperbole and disdain is unappealing.
It doesn't work when you are building houses for people to live in, where mistakes (say, electrical, structural, or plumbing wise) can lead to fatal incidents.
This lot were the absolute definition of fucking cowboys.
This startup could have focused on design sales permitting etc and built a couple as test, but it seems vastly more efficient to contract with an existing player than to try to everything from first principles
I have worked outside "my domain" multiple times through my life but I was willing to spend a year or years learning about the new domain before raising money. Really needed to make the case that I knew what I was talking about to investors who knew more about the domain than I did.
I spent my life in corporate. Lesson 6 (Planning is often the highest leverage work) touched something inside me. In a large corp, I have complained how slow we move, how things are planned to a ridiculous level, how there are people whose job it is to just to this function (or something related like strategy). It is interesting to see a start-up that follows the hacker ethos, but then gets in trouble due to lack of such functions.