Build products to solve your own recurring problems - personal pain validates the need
Based on experience from Samuel Abebe with SpeakerSplit.
When to use
Before building a full product, when testing market demand
Don't do this
Building features without validating real user need first
6 Founders Who Did This
Used Creator Hunter himself daily while working with creators, dogfooding the product throughout development
Basecamp was built as an internal project management tool for 37signals' web design consultancy because existing tools didn't match their philosophy of simplicity. Clients organically asked about the tool, validating demand before any commercial intent.
Spent a year at lead generation agency booking meetings for dozens of companies, becoming expert at sales prospecting and experiencing pain of manual email personalization daily
Built Boot.dev to solve his own recurring problem: as a hiring manager, he couldn't find backend developers because education platforms didn't teach backend skills.
Started as a personal dev tools directory to solve his own discovery problem, maintained consistently for years
Built project management tool to solve own recurring problem of dropping balls on client work and losing track of who was doing what across multiple projects.