You Only Need to Start with a Product Market Fit of One — Yourself
When you write down a reminder for yourself, you’ve achieved product market fit. The reminder is the product and the market is yourself, and as long as there is a need for that product, it fits with the market of yourself.
In the endeavor to create a product that will sell, we forget that we can be our own customer. And if we ourselves are unwilling to buy what we are selling, then that should be a warning sign. It bears repeating:
If we are unwilling to buy what we we are selling, how can we expect anyone else to?
Such an acute awareness in creating value, creating a product so well designed that every aspect of it is exactly wanted by the end user, is available to us before we even begin, and yet we bypass it and skip straight to endeavoring in attempts at telepathy — guesswork in trying to predict whatever it is someone else might want and would be willing to pay for. We might be accurate in our guessing, but we can also know exactly what we would want.
Instead of trying to solve the problem of getting what we want by proxy of providing other people with what they want, we could instead try to solve our own problem first. Not the problem of making money for ourselves, but solving a problem we would personally be willing to pay money to solve.
And once we’ve done so, we can see who else shares our problems and would like the solution we’ve created for ourselves, the solution that we are personally willing to pay for. Because if we’re willing to pay for the solution, then so might they.
This is the empathy that UX designers seek to achieve and apply to create products, services, and experiences that others want.
Starting with empathizing with ourselves first, knowing what we ourselves would actually want and pay money for, guarantees we are working towards that is wanted by at least one person.
And rarely have we ever been truly alone in our problems, let alone in our wants.
