Is solving your "own problems" the best way to build a product?
For us, it started from something frustrating: creating content felt very annoying and time-consuming. We tried the classic way: scripting, memorizing, filming, editing. But none of it felt authentic. And honestly, it was eating time we needed to focus on other things.
At the same time, we kept reading the same advice everywhere:
"founders should build in public and create content consistently". Easy to say… but harder to do in reality. So instead of forcing ourselves to create content from scratch, we tried something simple: recording our own calls and using those moments as content.
What surprised us was how much easier it became. The content felt more natural, and it didn’t feel like extra work anymore. That’s how @ProdShort was born.
It made us realize that many product ideas probably don’t start from "big visions", but from small daily frustrations that keep coming back.
From your experience:
Did your product idea come from a problem you personally faced?
Or was it something you noticed while observing others?
Replies
Products built from observing others often look cleaner on paper, but products build from lived frustration usually feel more practical.
Yeah, ShipClip came from the same itch. I was making demos in OBS, editing them in Final Cut, then uploading to YouTube. It took about an hour to get a 5-minute video. Existing tools either took forever to export, made everything look like a Zoom call, or were Electron apps that ate half my RAM. Kept thinking "someone should build a fast Mac-native one." Eventually realized the someone was me.
Agree on the small-frustrations angle. The "big vision" framing is usually written after the fact. Day one is "this annoys me every Tuesday."
The harder question for me was figuring out when a personal workflow hack is actually a product. Curious how you crossed that line with ProdShort.
Both, in my case — and I think the combination is what made it stick.
The trigger was my mom's medicine cabinet. She was taking 7 supplements (a mix of Korean brands and stuff I'd bought her from iHerb), and three had overlapping zinc, two had absorption conflicts. That's the "own problem" angle — I needed this for someone in my own family.
But what made it a viable product (vs. a one-time spreadsheet) was observation: I noticed millions of people in Korea + the US do international supplement stacking and no app indexes both databases. The personal frustration showed me the problem; observing the broader pattern showed me the market.
Pure "own problems" apps risk being too niche. Pure observation can lack conviction. The sweet spot is when you're solving a personal problem that turns out to be widespread.
What was the exact moment where this stopped feeling like a workaround and started feeling like a company?
Our product just born from our daily problems.
It was creative processes and creative production management pain.
We had to do creative work ourselves and manage creative team at the same time.
So we spent years to understand how that processes are going, how we think, create, collaborate and ship everything on time.
We launched the product prototype in our studio and things changed.. We did the first test on ourselves, and it passed!
So i think most of good products born from real pain of founders.
ProdShort
@adana_marukhyan Real pain usually creates the best products!! what are you actually building??
If its doesn't annoy you enough, you will not really get the spark from building it. personally i am doing alot in Marketing related work, from sme to blue chip companies. Its a big hassle with reporting, researching and gathering of data hence the reason i am building what i am building right now.
ProdShort
@roy_kek what are you working on?
@amraniyasser currently building a 24/7 AI marketing team. I realise the core issue with Ai marketing related agent is the actual training and localisation training as well as existing data base and analytic infrastructure.
we have been building it for the past few months and have gotten it train by seasoned marketers ranging from SME to bluechip companies.
It's a mix of my own and as well as other's @amraniyasser. I come from a background in tech where many of company's users were very broad, focused on the local economy and allowed us to define our ICP broadly to extend reach. With my own experiences and challenges as an owner, and starting there first - building my product allowed for a deeper sense of user empathy. Which made areas like product, UX/UI, and GTM very natural to build for.
On the flipside, observing others gave a separate lens that was not my own. That helped remove us from being to into our heads in the product/company and really listen to what the user has to say so we're building for them and not from our own vanity and ego.
ProdShort
@rvalenzjetti Starting from your own experience gives a strong base !! Did users ever surprise you with feedback you didn’t expect at all?
I think the strongest product ideas usually start from a personal frustration, but become real opportunities when you notice other people struggling with the same thing too. That repeated signal is what makes it more than just your own problem.
Mine came from watching, not experiencing. I never got sick from a recalled product. But I kept noticing the same pattern: a recall gets issued, it's buried on a government website in a PDF nobody reads, and families find out weeks later if at all.
So I started looking into it. 13 countries, all with different agencies, different formats, different levels of accessibility. Some have APIs. Some publish scanned PDFs. One was behind a bot-detection wall that blocks any non-browser request.
The frustration wasn't "I need this tool." It was "how does this not exist already." That's a different kind of itch than personal pain. And it creates a different kind of product. Personal-pain products tend to be tight and opinionated. Gap-observation products tend to be broader and harder to scope. I've fought scope creep basically every week because of it.
I think the biggest advantage of developing something for your problem is being able to have a user feedback right from the beginning. There are millions of problems to be solved in the world but knowing the customer gives you a great advantage where to start and how to solve the problem. I have just one product but not originated from my own pain. The first aim of my first product was to experience a product's lifecycle from coding to marketing as a solopreneur.