Must consumer product builders themselves be the target customer to build effective consumer products?

Paul Graham · published Apr 2010

Founders should become users of their own product however unnatural it seems; Viaweb should have opened its own online store to understand users better.

Had they been direct marketers running a store, they'd have understood their users a lot better.

source Organic Startup Ideas

Paul Graham · published Jul 2013

The contained-fire strategy works even when done unconsciously; the danger is naively discarding part of the pattern, such as not building for yourself and early-adopter friends.

Most startups build for themselves and their friends, who happen to be early adopters, and only later see the broader market; founders from the corporate world lack such a ready initial market.

source Do Things that Don't Scale

Jeff Seibert · published Nov 22, 2023

Founders should build for themselves; deep personal experience of the problem is a superpower, not a source of harmful emotional attachment

It is far easier to build something you personally feel than to interpret other people's beliefs about the problem

Scope: you still need to verify the problem is shared by many others

6:12 20VC: Why OpenAI Will Become an Infrastructure Play, Why Apple Will Win in an AI World, Why Google is the Most Vulnerable Incumbent, Will LLMs Be Commoditised, Which Startups Are Thin vs Thick Wrappers on Top of LLMs with Jeff Seibert, Founder @ Digits

Jason Citron · published Nov 25, 2024

If you're building a consumer product you have to build it for yourself, because it's very hard to build consumer products when you are not the customer

Being the customer is what gives you the judgment to build the product

Scope: scoped to consumer products

43:00 20VC: Discord's Jason Citron on Why Everything We are Taught About Hiring & Management is BS | Do Richer Founders & Gamer Founders Make Better Founders? | Never Before Told Moments Behind Scaling to 200M Users

Paul Graham · published Jun 2026

Young founders should build something they and their friends want, because their intuitions about other people's needs are a poor signal while their own needs predict future demand.

They lack the experience to know what others need, but they are the age when people start using new things, so what they adopt now everyone will use in ten years.

Scope: young founders; usually

source How to Earn a Billion Dollars

Paul Graham · published Oct 2006

When building for users other than yourself you must switch to empirical mode — and if you can't talk specific members of your target group into using what you're making, you're on the wrong track.

You're flying on instruments: you can no longer rely on intuition and must find users and measure their responses.

source When not building for yourself switch to empirical mode and test with real target users directly