Scratch Your Own Itch
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One of the most common questions people ask me is how to know what to build, yet ironically, I find this to be the simplest question to answer: build software that solves your own problems. By doing so, you’re able to scratch your own itch.
If you’re like me, you’ll have many itches; however, it’s important to pick the right itch to scratch. Some itches go away on their own, others you’ll gently swat at briefly, but the most pervasive will require meticulous maneuvering until you’re able to locate and scratch a particularly hard-to-reach area. The hardest to reach itches feel the best to scratch.
Start by ensuring your itch actually requires a scratch. This check is to help guarantee it’s worth your time building a solution to a particular problem. If a problem barely bothers you, you’re barely likely to build a solution to solve it. The best itches to scratch are the ones that are recurring and persistent. The best problems to solve are no different.
Scratching your own itch ensures you intimately understand the problem you’re solving. Creating thorough and novel solutions requires a deep understanding of the problem your customer faces. A bonus of solving your own problem is that it shifts the worst-case scenario from acquiring zero customers to acquiring at least one customer: yourself.
If you choose your itches to scratch correctly, you’ll quickly realize that others have the same itch. This marks the sign of a viable business. The more people who experience the same problem, the larger the potential market size. But the larger the potential market size, the more abstract the problem you’re attempting to solve likely becomes. Smaller market sizes are easier to target. They help prevent biting off more than you can chew and maximize the chances that you eventually scratch the itch and deliver a working solution to yourself and your customers.
Don’t create problems, create solutions. Avoid building solutions to problems that don’t exist. You’d never randomly scratch an area that doesn’t itch. Don’t build software no one needs.
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