Commentary: “Big bad wolf, go home!” 🐺

Dear Readers,

A few nights ago, my two-year-old daughter Diana woke up at around midnight and started crying uncontrollably. I rolled up my Daddy sleeves with confidence, thinking that I could solve this by going through “the debug list”:

• Does she have her blanket and/or toy?
• Is her diaper wet?
• Did she poop?
• Is she hungry?
• Does she have a tummy ache?
• Does she want attention?

But even after I did everything on the list, nothing worked and the sobbing just got louder. It’s usually at this point when most parents start doing random stuff to stop the tears from falling. So I sang some of her favorite songs, including “The Wheels on the Bus,” “Baby Shark,” and “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” 🚌🦈🕷️ I also hugged and caressed her, tell her how much mommy and daddy love her so she knew I was there for her.

Did the singing and soothing work? Nope. Then in all randomness I said, “Alright, Diana, calm down and sleep… before the big bad wolf finds you! Daddy will beat the big bad wolf. Daddy will protect you!”

After that, she quieted down and fell asleep within minutes. I did have to say, “beat the big bad wolf” and “big bad wolf, go home!” several times to reassure that I was around to protect her from “the wolf.” 😂 If I hadn’t misread the situation, Diana might have had a nightmare, so I was lucky to find the solution pretty quickly.

Product-market fit

Back in my room, I recounted what happened to my wife and decided that I’d write about it in this week’s commentary because I realized something: “debugging a baby” is very similar to finding product-market fit.

Founders can have so many resources at their disposal, such as an understanding of the total addressable market, a list of best practices, a treasure trove of user data, and an army of awesome product people to build and ship products.

All of these are surely helpful. But finding product-market fit is very much an iterative, trial-and-error process, so you will fail several times before tasting success. And failing is OK – it’s part of the game. I don’t know any founder who can claim that their first version of the product achieved perfect market fit and then went on to live happily ever after.

As founders, we either fail to understand what users want or users simply don’t know what they want. It’s very similar to parents who are trying to soothe babies: The ability of kids to communicate their needs and wants is limited by their growing skills, so grown-ups need to help them figure things out.

Making something people want is hard, and that’s why I’ve always been empathetic towards founders. But now I’ve learned to be empathetic towards parents, too. A lot of our readers started building and working in tech and startups in their 20s. So naturally, many of you are moving or have gone to what’s commonly the next phase in life: parenthood. If you’re a parent, perhaps you’ll find this note extra interesting and relatable. If you aren’t, that’s cool – I hope you enjoyed reading it, anyway.

You can find last week’s commentary – “On Gojek and Nadiem Makarim” – here. If you’re a TIA subscriber, you can read all our commentaries here.

See ya next week!

– Willis, Tech in Asia

P.S. I believe founders and product managers can be better at being parents because their jobs tend to require them have tons of empathy. That’s exactly what you need to understand babies.