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 building from your own problem is a good start, because at least you are not guessing.
You know the pain for real.
But it can also trick you a bit.
Because sometimes you think “I have this problem, so many people must have it too” — and that is not always true.
I’m facing this now with something I’m building around gym consistency. The idea came from my own frustration after years in the gym.
I know the problem is real for me.
Now the real work is finding out if enough other people feel the same pain strongly enough.
For me it is always observing however my very first IT product was made to solve my bussiness problems
All of mine came out of my own annoyances, and they turn out to be the same annoyance each time: I was doing something by hand over and over.
Kagemusha exists because I kept signing in and out of Search Console, Stripe and AdSense across accounts, so it opens each of them as its own logged in app. The other one is a log my AI agent writes to, because it kept redoing work it had already done and I couldn't tell which change had moved anything.
Where it stops working is any field I haven't worked in myself. I've looked at a few and couldn't name a single daily frustration in them, so nothing got built.