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independence5 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 7 claims against 2

applies to

b2b, no audience needed

confidence

high

evidence

10 claims · 8 articles · 4 receipts

window

2016-10-28 → 2026-05-13

5 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Scratch your own itch, then check it is not only yours

Building the thing that irritates you personally is the most attainable starting point and gives you an informed first user. The counter-argument is that you are not a typical customer, that builders share the same needs and those needs already have fifteen products, so the itch is a starting point and not evidence.

What both sides agree on

  • Discovering a big competitor does not settle the question; ask specifically whether you can beat them on product, on marketing, or by narrowing the niche.

Where this splits

Your own problem is treated both as the most reliable source of a first product and as the weakest kind of evidence for one.

  1. side 01 · 7 claims

    Build for your own irritation and use it yourself

    Clément Mihailescu · Corey Haines · Cory Zue · Derrick Reimer · Jakob Greenfeld · Justin Jackson · Tyler Tringas

    1. 1Become the heaviest user of your own product before you start marketing it.
    2. 2Build the tool for your own irritation and set the bar at being willing to be its only user; then watch whether the community reacts.
    3. 3An unusual life is a source of unusual problems worth solving, so scratch your own itch only in whatever part of your life is genuinely uncommon.
    4. 4Ship the tiny tool you built for your own use, because something you reach for regularly tends to serve other people too even when it is trivially simple.
    5. 5Turn the thing you have just spent months teaching yourself into the product, while the pain of learning it is still fresh.

  2. side 02 · 2 claims

    Your own itch is weak evidence of a market

    Cory Zue · Tyler Tringas

    1. 1Discount your own itches as a source of ideas, since the people who build software share broadly the same needs and most of those needs already have 15 competing products.
    2. 2For a developer tool, set the minimum viability bar at whether your own employer would pay for it.

What it returned

  • 1997

    Taylor Otwell built Forge because server configuration ate his time, Envoyer to kill deploy downtime, Spark to stop rewriting boilerplate. Derek Sivers built a shopping cart on his band's site in 1997, friends asked to use it, and CD Baby eventually had 200,000 customers.

  • Haines describes making himself the single biggest power user of SwipeWell between scoping the MVP and earning first revenue.

  • Zue lists out-producting, out-marketing and out-niching as the three responses to a powerful competitor and treats the answer as a judgment call.

  • Pieter Levels needed to compare cost of living and internet speed between cities each month while travelling, and turned a crowd-sourced dataset into Nomad List; the author credits the argument to Levels' book MAKE

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in product

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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