Mentor Wisdom: "The best founders and the best companies start with that founder who had a real need. It was about creating an answer for a need that they had." - Halle Berry, Actress and Entrepreneur
Mentor Lesson: Scratch your own itch
Most business advice tells you to find a gap in the market. But the smartest entrepreneurs don't start there at all.
They start with their own annoying problem that won't go away. The thing that bugs them so much they can't stop thinking about solutions. That's where the magic happens because when you're trying to solve your own headache, you actually care if it works or not.
Think about it like this. If you're building something just because some market research report said there's opportunity, you're basically guessing what other people want. You're playing a game of telephone with needs and solutions. But when you're scratching your own itch, you know exactly what success looks like because you're the one who's itching.
Take Dropbox for example. The founder kept forgetting his USB drive and got so tired of emailing files to himself that he built a solution. He wasn't solving some theoretical market gap. He was solving his own daily headache of trying to access files across different computers.
The founders who build the best stuff are usually the ones who got so fed up with the current options that they said forget it and made their own answer. They didn't need focus groups or surveys because they were the focus group. Every feature they added solved a real problem they actually had. Every update made their own life better first.
This is why products built by people who use them tend to feel different. They have that quality where you can tell someone really cared about the details because those details mattered to them personally. No fluff, no unnecessary bells and whistles, just the stuff that actually makes a difference.
The best part is when you solve your own problem really well, you usually discover a bunch of other people had that exact same problem too. You just happened to be the one annoyed enough to do something about it.
As promised, wisdom in under a minute.
Talk soon,
-Chris
P.S. This guide can help you turn your problems into profit.
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