Why Entrepreneur’s Shouldn’t “Scratch Their Own Itch”

I’ve heard many times from business experts that it’s a great idea for entrepreneurs to “scratch their own itch”. In other words, solve problems that you are uniquely positioned to solve because you have a great understanding of the problem.

I think this is generally a bad idea. Here are some of the reasons.

Entrepreneurs are very good at making up problems

In the many years I’ve been doing this, I’ve made up lots of problems in my own head that desperately need to be solved. A big one in my story is my idea to create an Analytics dashboard for online startups. The idea was it would collate data from various web apps and present it in a really neat and simple fashion. I felt I was solving my own problem, because at the time I was trying to build a company through content marketing, and I was logging into lots of apps to see how things were going. Google Analytics, Xero, Klout (don’t ask), Twitter, Facebook etc.

Do you see the problem here? I actually didn’t have a major problem with the multiple systems, I had a major problems focusing on meaningless shit!

Related: It Doesn’t Fucking Matter

But I’d done a great job at manufacturing this problem in my head to a point where I thought “This is a huge problem, it would save me so much time to only go into the 1 system and then I could spend all of the rest of my time making money”. And guess what, since I have this problem, I am the best person to solve it!

Of course I wasn’t spending ANY of my time making money, so the 30 seconds saved really wouldn’t have helped me at all.

The irony of the whole situation is these days I am the perfect candidate for an online dashboard. I pay staff thousands of dollars to write custom reports for me on a whole range of areas of my business, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly. I spend more time looking at reports than doing anything else, yet I still to this day have not signed up for a software app that simplifies reports for me. These days I have much bigger problems to solve and finding a slightly more efficient way to do reports isn’t registering on my list.

Turns out it wasn’t as bit of a problem as I thought. If I wasn’t my own customer I probably would have worked that out sooner.

We already have too many jobs

Entrepreneurs have a hard enough job as it is, without adding in the need to be a customer. We need to harness our energy and excitement for what it’s useful for, creating great products for customers.

We get excited about solving problems which is great but if you are the one making up the problem? Not so good.

The customer’s job is to pay for a solution when they have a problem. They are very good at their job. Leave it to them.

These days I rely on other people and some evidence over a reasonable period of time to make decisions. If I think it’s a good idea I’ll either make a note of it for the future, or if I feel really strongly about it, tell my co-founders or team about it and see how it goes. We can’t be the people coming up with the ideas and paying for the solution to the problem. It’s just too many jobs.

External evidence is powerful. For most Entrepreneurs it’s not a great idea to think too deeply about the problems you are solving, rather gather some kind of external evidence that it actually is a problem (and I don’t mean approval-seeking on social media) and it’s a problem big enough for people to pay for a solution.

On that topic….

People vote with their wallets not their words

OK let’s put aside the fact that you are an expert at making up problems (that aren’t real) and you are simply far too busy to be a useful customer. There’s a far more serious problem to consider.

The big problem with scratching your own itch, is that you are signing up to pursue a product where you have no ability to gauge demand. One of the biggest lessons in my entrepreneurial career has been to not listen to what people say they will do, but instead watch what they ACTUALLY do.

I learned this the hard way in 2012 and haven’t stopped giving this advice since. Please do not ask people “would you pay for this…” ever.

Someone saying they ‘would hypothetically pay for something’ is not demand. You know what else is not demand? You saying ‘yeah this sounds like a good idea, I’d pay for this’. That’s even worse! Trust me, you don’t pay for anything until you HAVE to, or you are skilfully coerced to. I’m not personally that keen on coercion so the only option left is to build something that people need.

So if you’re building a product to solve your own problem (scratch your own itch), how are you going to know if it’s needed?

Sure you can say that you can just put up a link and try to sell it to people. The problem is, to do that you’d also have to be ignoring a whole lot of other commonly-held entrepreneurial advice around building a great product and ignoring the haters and doubters and hustling and grinding. You’ll find yourself in a situation where you can see so many things wrong with your product, that you’ll double down and hustle hard to try to get it 100% right. And maybe that’s not what the business needs.

I’m all for making a great product, but any cent you put into the product before you know whether or not you can build a business around it, is money wasted. The highest priority for a bootstrapped entrepreneur trying to launch a new idea, is always to find customers who will pay them. Sometimes that means trying to sell something you aren’t 100% proud of. This is a tricky situation, but the bottom line is if you can’t sign up customers, it’s probably not a good idea for you.

Forcing yourself to get out of your own head, and stopping trying to solve your own problems, might bring you to the harsh realisation that I got to eventually. And that is that this might not be the right idea for you.

Related: Perhaps you should give up

I’m working with a company right now who are building brewery software called Beer30. They are a new company and they are doing a great job. It’s been awesome to be on the other side of a software startup as the customer, not the person building the company. They have a lot of expertise in the industry but they aren’t operating a brewery, trying to build software for a brewery. They’ve gone out on their own and they are signing up paying customers (like us), and building features around their needs. It’s an awesome approach because from day 1 we’ve paid for this software and if it wasn’t doing a great job at meeting our needs we would stop paying. We’ve given them hours and hours of access to our team to discuss features and updates and they’ve built loads of features into the software that are great for us, and will also be great for their other current and future customers. I’m sure they will have their challenges, but to me this is a great way to build a business.

I realise none of this can be perfectly planned but if you can choose, I would recommend choosing to build a product for other people, not for yourself. There are far too many traps to fall into if you build something for yourself. Find some real, legit paying customers who will pay you and work with you on making a great product. That’s a better option than scratching your own itch.

Check out Amazon for my latest book This Is The Answer for discussions around other common business advice. The audiobook will be out soon.