This past weekend, I had a chat with my friend Joel from Singapore over WhatsApp. We catch up every few months, exchanging insights on interesting products and updates on our current WIP side projects. However, this time the conversation took a different turn. When Joel asked what I'd been building recently, I found myself responding with "not much." Which torpedoed the rest of my morning.
Between working with a hardware electrical company and sourcing new projects, I spent several months earlier this year digging into the Future of Work. It’s something I reference in my newsletter. That focus was part of why my newsletter went a bit dark. In my spare time, instead of working on the newsletter, I was knee-deep in the idea maze and conducting customer development interviews with senior talent across the world related to managing work portfolios and winning new business. Despite months of research and new learnings, I hadn't built anything. No prototype, product, or customers.
Wading through books like founder stories or countless Audible biographies, I’ve noticed there are no hard and fast rules for building products, businesses, or art. Entrepreneurs, product people, indie builders, and creatives all share different best practices and what worked for them. Those outside the arena enjoy speculating on how to cross the chasm. PRDs, three months of research, following a Reforge playbook, landing pages – there’s no best practice that fits all. To me, it’s highly individual in the 0 to 1 phase, and unfortunately, luck, persistence, and catching fat tailwinds play significant roles.
When You Have a Personal Itch, Just Scratch It
From Airtable surveys to several rounds of 1-on-1 interviews, customer development and research interviews proved incredibly useful. They didn’t confirm my initial hypothesis and I’m thankful for the insights, but I wish I had a tangible product. Even if it was a rough MVP. The problem still exists, at least in my own day-to-day world. I’d happily exchange 3 weeks worth of interviews to build my little mousetrap instead. I’d at least have solved my own problem and potentially built the foundation that could appeal to others.
In the end, building a digital product is as much about understanding your own motivations and the market’s needs as it is about following any prescribed process. Whether you're scratching your own itch or conducting extensive customer development, the journey is unique to each builder. Embrace the uncertainty, learn from the process, and remember that there are no universal rules – just your own path to discovery.
Feel free to take what I say with a grain of salt. If you're building for yourself and scratching your own itch, you don't need to be as reliant on customer development. By serving your own needs, you'll likely build a superior product with the tightest feedback loop ever. At the end of whatever time you allocate to building the product, you'll at least have something you can use yourself. For me, I still have the same problem I had months ago because on this project, I focused more on research than building. So, sometimes, just start building and solve your own problems first.
As Walt said, "Once you've started, then you're in there with the punches flying. There's plenty of trouble, but you can handle it. You can't back out. It gets you down once in a while, but it's exciting. Our whole business is exciting." So, get in there and start building, embrace the challenges, and create something amazing.
