3 ways to build a product from scratch

I was thinking about the 3 ways all products start:

1. An idea about the world.
2. Solving your own problem.
3. Solving a pre-existing audience's problem.

#1 is super risky since it's so hard to be right about your own life, let alone the lives of 100s or 1000s of strangers. If you can build it in a day, you can go search for an audience and learn the reality with it.

#2 is great because chances are if it's important to you and you solve it, it's important to someone like you. Got to watch out for IKEA effect in this case where you only love the solution because you built it.

#3 is obviously the best but most of us don't have an idle pre-existing audience sitting around so it's not always practical. In a way #1 and #2 are ways to get to #3 as soon as possible.

I dove into each one in detail, talked through some experiences I've had with them, and talked through some publicly known examples as well.