Building apps that solve my own problems first

Why every product I ship starts as a problem I have myself, and the one rule that keeps it honest.

Every product I build starts as a problem I have. Not a market I researched; a friction I felt.

The pattern is simple. I run into something that wastes my time or gets in my way. I build the smallest thing that fixes it for me. If it keeps earning its place in my own week, I ship it to other people who have the same problem. If it does not, I killed nothing important, because I built it for myself first.

This keeps me honest. It is very hard to fool yourself about whether a tool works when you are the one using it every day. The feedback is immediate and it is real. There is no survey, no persona, no imagined user; there is just me, annoyed or relieved.

It also sets the bar for quality. A thing I use myself has to actually work, not demo well. That is a higher standard than most roadmaps enforce.

The risk is obvious: my problems are not always other people's problems. So the second step matters as much as the first. Once the tool holds up for me, I go looking for the people who feel the same friction, and I listen for whether their version is the same shape as mine. Sometimes it is. Sometimes the useful product is one layer over from what I built. Either way I started from something true.

Build for one real user you understand completely. Start with the one in the mirror.