Build solutions to problems you personally experienced as a user

Scratch your own itch from previous product experience - validated market opportunity through personal pain

Solve your own problem as validation - if you need it while building another product, others likely do too

Solve problems you personally experience rather than pursuing predetermined business cases

Worked as technical consultant for telecom company where app users couldn't effectively describe issues. Built solution to problem he personally experienced

Used ChatGPT extensively and identified missing features he personally wanted: search, folders, quality of life improvements.

Used lemlist daily for his own sales prospecting, experiencing every bug and improvement opportunity firsthand as a power user

Chose to build for product managers after serving as founding PM at five startups, personally experiencing the pain of slow research during rapid release cycles

As a business student at Michigan, personally experienced the problem of dry, uninspiring business news when helping younger students with mock interviews

Identified gap in leadership development from personal experience: no structured place for startup operators to build scaling skills independent of their employer. From 2013-2018 she participated in an informal COO community that was transformative, then productized that experience.

Akhund experienced terrible startup banking firsthand while running Heyzap — accounts frozen on large deposits, no digital workflows, branch-dependent operations. He built Mercury to solve the exact problem he and every founder around him faced.

Cravotta was a vaper himself at Pepperdine University and noticed no tools existed to help quit vaping, building a solution to his own personal problem

Lane personally experienced the backend education gap as a hiring manager struggling to find qualified Go developers, receiving only 5-7 applicants per job posting.

As a senior UX/UI designer working at Transdev, Brett personally experienced the pain of both freelancing (unreliable income, scope creep) and hiring agencies (expensive, slow). Built the solution he wished existed.

Josh Clemente experienced unexplained energy crashes while working at SpaceX, was denied CGM access by four doctors, self-tested with finger-pricks for weeks discovering glucose-energy correlation, then built Levels to solve his own metabolic monitoring problem

Identified the email integration problem while working at a CRM startup in 2012. Spent 15+ years building open source email tools before finally commercializing the solution.

Identified the cart recovery problem through running a Shopify agency that had built 700+ stores, personally experiencing how existing tools failed in the Latin American market

Built MakerPad because he personally experienced the inability to code but wanted to build tech businesses - solved his own problem

Discovered the content marketplace opportunity while working as a freelance writer on Upwork, personally experiencing the pain of finding gigs