Use Your Product

100% agree..

actually my products came form my own use case!

get myself fully covered with my use case. then check with early adopters.

I absolutely love this,
I started a Product because I personally experienced the frustration of unresolved pain points. By utilizing your product, you not only gain its benefits as a user but also tap into a deeper understanding of the final user perspective. Sell it to yourself and your team first before selling it to people.

100% absolutely agree. My previous startup with 5 people (bad idea) no one in the team except me was actually using our own product (it was an app). I never understood.

I made my new app DeckFilter cause I needed myself in the first place but people also wanted it after I showed a short screen recording. I love this cause now I 110% believe in and love what I do.

Agree. The problem is when your product requires interaction with more users and... you don't have them hehe

My product idea come from when i try to solve my problem.

My site came from a problem that needed to be solved

Thiiiis!
Every single business should start from a deep, unsolved need.

I know I've done that, and many other successful entrepreneurs.

In my case, 3 years ago, I was searching for guides, articles, and case studies, related to creative, viral, and psychology marketing.
Why?

I wanted to work smarter, not harder. And I knew there were businesses doing 10X or 100X, using little to no money, by only doing things differently.

Unfortunately, there wasn't a single place that could provide ANYTHING barely even useful on these topics.

So I've dedicated myself to create such place.
Since then, I've been using my own website almost daily, and made $120k+

If anyone's interested, this is my website
https://kickstartsidehustle.com/brainiac/

yes, just use your product. I created something for myself and just sell it to other developers. simple recipe for success :)

Yes, I completely agree. 'Eating your own dog food' remains one of the most powerful methods for any startup, arguably the top principle to follow. Looking at it from another perspective, if you realize that you are not a typical user of your idea/business/service/product, you should be aware of the high risk associated with that business.

100% agree with this - you absolutely have to use your product to know if it's solving a problem or working correctly.

For example: I use my own product, https://simpleotp.com in order to power auth for all of my websites - and I use another product of mine https://watchdog.chat to moderate chat for my own communities.

I find a huge benefit in this, because I know immediately if the features I'm building are working properly and I don't have to wait for a customer to tell me something is off with their authentication flow.

Some of the recent features I built, such as Passkeys and image moderation, that my most recent customers told me were huge selling points, was tested on my own app first to make sure it was behaving as I would want it to behave.

As another example, I used to work as a Staff Software Engineer at DoorDash and every employee was required to use the Dasher app to do deliveries once per month to gain empathy for the customer and achieve other benefits (see below). Some people grumbled about this, but it was genuinely so useful to understand:

1. Is the app working?

2. Can we discover any UX or functional issues that real people might be running into while dropping off orders? One time I discovered and fixed a fairly serious duplicate order bug by doing this, where the restaurant was receiving the same order twice.

3. How is the experience for the consumer who receives the order?

Some things you only discover by using the product yourself.

Great points!