I just solved my own problem that I discovered while building a side-project! And it feels good 😎

"Build to solve your own problem" is maybe the number 1 startup advice I've seen online.

Today is an exciting day, as I just used a tool I created (https://www.supersparks.io) to solve my own problem from a programmatic SEO side-project of mine. The problem: enabling reviews & a community on a Webflow site.

When I first built this side-project (https://breweriesnearby.com), I had the idea of a reviews community where beer lovers could connect & share their experiences from different breweries around the world. Additionally, I wanted to add reviews to further improve the site's SEO.

When it was time to implement reviews, the only apps on the market were not able to:

1. Be custom designed in the Webflow Designer
2. Integrate with memberships tools to create a community

So instead, last year, I ended up building a workaround, no-code reviews system that had the following issues:

• Took me 2 days to build
• Used an embedded Airtable reviews form, which would take 5 seconds to load
• Only allowed guest reviews
• Used CMS items - CMS items are at a premium on programmatic SEO projects, especially considering Webflow's 10k item limit

The pain I felt from searching for existing solutions and building my own half-baked solution ended up becoming the inspiration for Supersparks.

Today, Supersparks addresses all of these pain points, as it:

1. Enables reviews on Webflow sites in 2 minutes
2. Allows full design control in the Webflow Designer
3. Doesn't use CMS items
4. Integrates with Webflow Memberships & Memberstack, so when a logged in leaves a review / comment, member data (eg. username & profile image) gets dynamically gets displayed on their content

The first time heard someone say "solve your own problem" I started writing down all of the problems I was having as a 24 year old. Some of the problems I remember writing were:

• packing for trips (I still loathe this),
• all startup ideas being taken (lol),
• getting into Berghain (I was living in Berlin at the time 😅)

Not only were these problems dumb and probably not solvable with tech, but I had no genuine interest in solving them.

This is not advice, but what worked best for me, was just going out of my comfort zone, starting my own side-project using tools I was interested in, and embracing getting stuck. I think a similar approach can be applied to ideation outside of SAAS - for example, a variation would be to talk to and (maybe even?) partner with someone with domain expertise & first-hand experiences with problems in an industry outside of tech. I think just getting out there & trying new things opens up so many avenues for new problems.

While Supersparks has a ways to go as a business & product, today I can proudly say that I am my own happy customer 😃. To see Supersparks in action, check out the link below:

https://www.breweriesnearby.com/brewery/category-12-brewing-victoria-bc

Thanks for reading if you made it this far!