Why I Kept Building Tools for Builders (And Why You Might Too)

There's a pattern I've noticed in builder communities: an endless stream of Reddit scrapers, idea generators, $10K MRR guides, and directory builders. Tools that promise to show you where to dig for opportunities.

The AI era amplifies this because building is nearly free now. More people want to build, which creates demand for tools that tell them what to build. And since building is cheap, it's easy to build those tools too. Supply and demand feed each other endlessly.

Here's what happens: "Scratch your own itch" is great advice, but when your biggest itch is figuring out what to build, you end up building idea-finding tools for others in the same position. The biggest niche visible from inside builder communities is other builders, so "build for a niche" quietly becomes "build for builders."

The Reddit scrapers are the perfect example. They scrape communities for complaints to surface real problems. But they mostly scrape subreddits full of builders discussing their problems finding ideas. You're mining a mine full of other miners. The expensive structural problems that actual businesses would pay to solve don't get posted on Reddit—those people are too busy working.

I fell into this too. My first project was an analytics platform solving a founder's meta-problem rather than something I'd encountered in the real world. I was building for myself-as-founder, which felt like scratching my own itch but was really just drawing another map.

The real version of idea discovery is boring: you work somewhere, something is broken, nobody fixes it, you leave, and you remember it. That's how most real products start—from lived experience with a problem that stuck around in your head, not from a scraper or AI-generated list.

This isn't about individual products being bad. Some are genuinely helpful. It's about an ecosystem that makes map-drawing the default path of least resistance.

Read the full post: https://holenventures.substack.com/p/treasure-maps