Is solving your "own problems" the best way to build a product?

The best product ideas usually come from problems annoying enough that you keep trying to "fix the process" before realizing it should be a product.

What stands out here is less the content creation part and more the fact you removed a workflow that was draining focus.

When founders naturally keep using their own product without discipline or reminders, that usually says a lot.

Products built from observing others often look cleaner on paper, but products build from lived frustration usually feel more practical.

What was the exact moment where this stopped feeling like a workaround and started feeling like a company?

Yeah, ShipClip came from the same itch. I was making demos in OBS, editing them in Final Cut, then uploading to YouTube. It took about an hour to get a 5-minute video. Existing tools either took forever to export, made everything look like a Zoom call, or were Electron apps that ate half my RAM. Kept thinking "someone should build a fast Mac-native one." Eventually realized the someone was me.

Agree on the small-frustrations angle. The "big vision" framing is usually written after the fact. Day one is "this annoys me every Tuesday."

The harder question for me was figuring out when a personal workflow hack is actually a product. Curious how you crossed that line with ProdShort.

Both, in my case — and I think the combination is what made it stick.

The trigger was my mom's medicine cabinet. She was taking 7 supplements (a mix of Korean brands and stuff I'd bought her from iHerb), and three had overlapping zinc, two had absorption conflicts. That's the "own problem" angle — I needed this for someone in my own family.

But what made it a viable product (vs. a one-time spreadsheet) was observation: I noticed millions of people in Korea + the US do international supplement stacking and no app indexes both databases. The personal frustration showed me the problem; observing the broader pattern showed me the market.

Pure "own problems" apps risk being too niche. Pure observation can lack conviction. The sweet spot is when you're solving a personal problem that turns out to be widespread.

Our product just born from our daily problems.

It was creative processes and creative production management pain.

We had to do creative work ourselves and manage creative team at the same time.

So we spent years to understand how that processes are going, how we think, create, collaborate and ship everything on time.

We launched the product prototype in our studio and things changed.. We did the first test on ourselves, and it passed!

So i think most of good products born from real pain of founders.

If its doesn't annoy you enough, you will not really get the spark from building it. personally i am doing alot in Marketing related work, from sme to blue chip companies. Its a big hassle with reporting, researching and gathering of data hence the reason i am building what i am building right now.

It's a mix of my own and as well as other's @amraniyasser. I come from a background in tech where many of company's users were very broad, focused on the local economy and allowed us to define our ICP broadly to extend reach. With my own experiences and challenges as an owner, and starting there first - building my product allowed for a deeper sense of user empathy. Which made areas like product, UX/UI, and GTM very natural to build for.

On the flipside, observing others gave a separate lens that was not my own. That helped remove us from being to into our heads in the product/company and really listen to what the user has to say so we're building for them and not from our own vanity and ego.