Build Something You Can't Live Without

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2022-12-03 19:00:41

How do you build things that users will love and pay for? It's a question I've been pondering, and I recently rediscovered the following idea. If you build something to solve one of your own problems, in such a way that you couldn't live without that product, is that a good indication that other people will like it too?

Consider the space of all possible problems, almost all of them are problems that people won't care about. This is the domain of well-designed products that never make it to market, apps with no downloads, and unread blog posts. But there exists a small subset of problems that people do care about.

Just because you're in the zone of problems that people care about, it doesn't guarantee that everyone will care about it. If you're unlucky, it might just be you that has that problem. But in my experience, if it's a problem that at least one person cares about, there's a good chance that others will care about it too. Most people have similar problems, we're not as unique as we think we are.