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
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.
Solving your own problem feels like a strong starting point because the feedback loop is immediate.
Around Turgo, a lot of workflow ideas came from repetitive operational frustrations rather than huge product visions. Sometimes the best products start from fixing something small but constantly painful.
The idea came from a problem I personally experienced. One day, I decided to try out some of the most popular productivity apps on the market, and I ran into 2 major issues.
The first frustration was that the platforms were way too rigid: too many features, too complex, too many pop-ups, etc. It completely killed my productivity xd! And the second problem was that I wanted a unified system where you could add your own tools yourself, and I couldn't find anything like that. And that's how my SaaS was born.
Like you said, it all starts with a recurring frustration. The hardest part after that is getting noticed.
Honestly the "scratch your own itch" advice works best when your itch is also someone else's, which isn't always true. The tricky part is that founders are usually not average users of their own domain, so the problem you personally feel might be niche in a way that's hard to see from the inside.
That said, what you described with ProdShort, going from a daily frustration to a real workflow shift, is the most defensible version of it. You weren't theorizing about a market. You just kept hitting the same wall until you fixed it. That's harder to fake than most "I saw a gap in the market" origin stories.
I think solving your own problem is a great starting point, but the important part is checking whether other people feel the same pain.
My current project came from that kind of frustration. I kept watching YouTube videos about AI/SaaS/startup ideas, but after watching them I still wasn’t clear what to actually do next whether the idea was worth building, what the risks were, who would pay, or what the MVP should be.
That repeated gap pushed me to build something around turning startup idea videos into more decision-ready plans.
So for me, the personal problem created the first signal, but now the real test is whether other founders feel the same confusion after consuming idea content.
I think yes, if you can't find solutions that help you. I am actually in the same spot as you are now.
First we started with something easy - a CRM. So we looked at solutions like Zoho, Hubspot etc abut no one was offering stuff we wanted (which I can't explain here). So I decided that enough is enough. I personally jumped into programming - two years ago - while realising that marketing alone, is not enough anymore.
Hence we build - with the help of AI and my own skills - our very own CRM which now does everything we want. While we are not selling it, we are constantly enriching it and eventually we will.
Then we started having other issues - for example, getting traffic. We build a tool that does programmatic SEO. Then we faced issues with shipping providers and tracking - we built a tool as well - and its going to market this Monday.
And then, we decided to start looking at want the market wants that is aligned with what we offer so we are building other tools as well.
I believe the same as you are - frustrations lead people to develop their own products and make them go wild. Plus, it helps with our industry and our job which is going to go extinct in a few years :-(
We spent a lot of time just talking to potential users early on, and used social media as an anchor for questionnaires and quick polls. It's a low-friction way to test whether a frustration you're imagining is actually shared, or whether it's just you.
The trap with "build what you'd use yourself" is that without feedback and iteration, you end up building for an audience of one. Founders are unusual users almost by definition. The polls and conversations don't replace your own intuition, but they keep it honest and you find out pretty quickly which problems people will actually pay to solve versus which ones just sound good in a pitch
I think solving your own problem is probably the best starting point, but not enough by itself. For me, Theoria started from a very personal frustration: I kept opening papers, abstracts, PDFs, related tabs, and somehow ending up more confused than before. The first version was basically just me trying to make research feel less heavy: find papers, explain them in plain language, and let me ask basic questions without pretending I already understood the field. That gave me conviction, but it only started feeling like a product when I noticed other people had the same problem too: students, builders, curious people, even non-scientists who want to understand what a paper actually says without spending an hour decoding it. So my rule right now is: own problem gives you the emotional pull, but other people repeating the same pain tells you whether it should become a product.