Build products you personally need to ensure problem understanding
Insight from Danny Postma
When to use
Throughout the founder journey
Don't do this
Ignoring mental models that lead to success
21 Founders Who Did This
Build tools that solve your own frustrations rather than speculative market research
Fall in love with the problem, not your solution - the problem makes you money
Build products you personally need to ensure problem understanding
Turn personal struggle into product insight by deeply researching the problem domain
Focus on problem first, then figure out which technology enables it Evidence: Cameron's philosophy: 'Don't think about technology first because you want to solve the problem and then figure out what technology can enable it.' This prevents being solution-first rather than problem-first.
Choose technology based on the problem you're solving, not trends or prestige
Building solutions in search of problems leads to features customers won't pay for, even if technically valid
Focus on product and customer feedback first, personal brand building second
Built tool because he was personally curious
Conrad personally approves every expense over $5 and runs payroll for the entire 3,000-person, $11B company to stay close to the product experience
Builds exclusively for his own pain at work, understanding problems deeply because he experiences them daily
First business idea failed after 3 weeks because he chose it based on money potential, not personal fit. Went back and identified Starter Story - a platform about founder journeys - which aligned with his skills and passion for understanding how businesses get built.
After nearly two decades in UI and design, built a design tool addressing his own frustrations with existing solutions. Positioned Vecti around specific beliefs about what creators deserve: better performance, better privacy, and better alignment with actual needs.
Needed a way for trusted friends to access important files without any single person having complete access. Couldn't find existing tool that met requirements, so built one using Shamir's Secret Sharing.
Reading to son every night, noticed disparity between available content and desire for personalized/representative stories. Combined with early Spotify experience in personalization, saw opportunity for AI-generated custom books as starting point for larger vision.
Built Pigeon (Gmail CRM) because he personally needed it to manage interview outreach for Starter Story. Also built custom CMS because WordPress frustrated him within 4 hours
Built tools he personally needed: Ruby on Rails to speed up web development, Kamal to simplify container deployment. Released each as open source after proving them internally.
Uses PostBridge every day to post his own content. Incentivized to make it better because he's his own most demanding user. In podcast interview: 'I'm someone who's using my own tool every day.'
Built ShipFast to solve his own repeated problem: setting up landing page, deploy, payments, emails, accounts for each new product. Deep personal understanding of the pain after doing it 15+ times
Chose to build tools for the indie hacker community he was already part of. Every product targets developers and solopreneurs who want to ship SaaS products. By being his own target user, he deeply understood every pain point
Built Tech Lockdown from personal experience during COVID lockdowns, when he observed the need for better tools to manage internet habits. Wrote content about topics he genuinely cared about.