Don't build for yourself
There’s a startup cliché that you should “build for yourself,” “solve your own problem,” and “work on something you’re passionate about.”
I think this is bullshit. And it’s bullshit that’s perpetuated by VCs because that’s what founders tell them they’re doing. In reality founders are finding problems all sorts of ways and then creating a story that they can sell that connects them to the problem. The story is probably even correct, it’s just not the origin.
To take my own example, when we started Moxie, we didn’t know much about medspas. But in the process, tapped in a passion of ours to help entrepreneurs build their own businesses - which is both true and constantly inspiring to us. We didn’t start our search with that in mind, but that’s what we found.
Why do people tell founders to build for yourself? Well, it’s easier path to doing two things you definitely do need to do:
Build something people want
Find them and sell it to them
And both things are SO much easier when you’re building for yourself - because you know what you want and know a whole bunch of people like you. So it’s a lot of extra work to understand how to build something for someone else and how to find them (I’ll likely write about this later.)
The other reason you’re told you need to start a company on your own passion vs a “MBA-style” search is because starting a company is well, hard. So you need something to keep you going. But let me put it this way: if you start a company because you just love saddlebred horses so much, the problems you will be working on are not about saddlebred horses. You will suffer through your best employee quitting, 50 iterations on GTM channels, your largest customer churning.
So you need something else to keep you going: the day-to-day craftsmenship of shipping, a great team, your customers, learning to enjoy the ‘chewing glass’ that is entrepreneurship, or just a chip on your shoulder that makes you need to win. It’s usually some combination.
So yes, it’s a lot easier to start a company if you’re solving your own problem. But if you’re a twenty-something engineer in San Francisco, I’m not sure you can. It’s too late. The easy ideas are done: you can get lunch faster, better dev tools, ways to find a date, and so on. If you’re solving your own problem you have to believe you have a unique insight, and I think that’s mostly going to come outside of central casting (especially with AI and no-code), in a good way.
And remember, many successful startup founders worked on multiple ideas and/or did a highly analytical search. They weren’t swept away in passion by one idea. What really pulled them was traction.
Mark Zuckerberg launched Wirehog (a p2p service) 8 months after Facebook
Jeff Bezos famously decided to launch Amazon based on a research report on web growth at DE Shaw, and then picked books because the characteristics (easy to ship, wide selection) were optimal for the web.
Apoorva Mehta tried more than 20 ideas before launching Instacart.
Dylan Field first worked on an idea for a drone startup before pivoting to Figma.
…and so on. Instead of discovering your passion, building something people want, and then finding customers, I might reverse it.
Find your customers, build something they want, and then discover your passion.