Scratching Your Own Itch at Scale: Personal Need as Product Strategy

Baby Meal Planner started because my partner and I were straight-up exhausted by the daily puzzle of feeding a toddler nutritious meals. GrowPal came from wanting to track my kid's developmental milestones without drowning in medical jargon. School Scout? Born the week we started researching primary schools and realized the whole process was absurdly opaque.

Every single one of these projects began the same way: I hit a frustration, looked for an existing solution, found nothing adequate, and built one. The "scratch your own itch" approach to product development isn't new — but doing it 35 times in twelve months taught me exactly when it works and when it misleads.

Let's put it this way. It works brilliantly when your problem is shared by a clearly defined group. Number one — parents of young children all face meal planning fatigue. Number two — property investors all need portfolio tracking. Number three — coffee enthusiasts all want to discover new roasters. In these cases, personal experience gives you an unfair advantage in understanding the user, because you are the user. That's the dream, right?

But here's where it misleads — when you mistake your specific preferences for universal needs. I mean, I built a few tools that solved my exact workflow but assumed everyone worked the same way. They didn't. To be very frank, the lesson was that personal need is a great starting point for identifying a problem space, but you still need to validate that others experience the problem similarly — and that they'd value a solution enough to actually use it.

The best version of this approach is what I'd call "personal need plus." Start with your own frustration, but immediately zoom out. Talk to others in the same situation. Look for the patterns that are universal versus the quirks that are just yours. Build for the pattern. On one hand, your lived experience is your unfair edge. On the other hand, if you never pressure-test it against real users, you're just building for an audience of one.

So yeah, that's a little bit about how I think about it now. Scratch your own itch — but make sure it's a shared itch. That would summarise 35 launches in twelve months.