Do you need to be a customer of your product before you build it?

Question

The question I keep wrestling with: how deeply should you have lived the problem before building the solution?

And how long should you spend inside the existing tools before committing to build your own? Curious where people land: founder-market fit as a requirement, or overrated?

Angel & Advisor, Coral Gables, FL · Answer

I think you might be overthinking it a bit.  Where your conviction comes from doesn't matter.  What matters is you'll see it through and sacrifice peace, money, and time for something that will probably amount to nothing.

Living the problem or having domain experience are great starting points.  If you have neither but believe you can build something better, you're a little delusional.   But starting a company is delusional anyway.

Stay obsessed with the customer and the problem, stay willing to learn, and it can work.

CPO, New York, NY · Answer

If someone's building a drug to fight a disease, do they need to have the disease first?  Of course not.  They see a real problem worth solving and go solve it.

Lived experience helps, it gives you instinct and empathy for the user.  But it's not a prerequisite.  Plenty of great companies were built by people from the outside that cared enough to fix it.

Juan Francisco Verhook · Answer

You don't have to be a user, but you need to understand the space cold.  I see founders every day shipping AI products into industries they clearly don't understand.  One look and it's dead on arrival because it solves a problem that isn't real.  Some spaces take years just to learn where the pain actually lives.

The test isn't "have I used this?".  It's do I understand this deeply enough to know the real pain?  Get the through obsessive research and talking to users, and you don't need to have lived it.

Guess from the outside, and people in the industry will spot it instantly.

Andres Gomez · Answer

No, but founders who are their own first customer often build the best products.  When you feel the need yourself, you understand the problem in a way research can't fully replicate.  You know what matters and what "good enough" really means.

Not a requirement though.  Just watch the trap of building only for yourself and assuming everyone shares your exact need.

Joe Berrizbeitia · Answer

Not necessarily, but it does make building harder.  That's where founder-market fit comes in.  Build in a domain you already know and you've got a head start.  You understand the problems, the customers, and what actually needs to exist.

Build in a space that's new to you and you'll spend a lot more time learning the market, understanding users, and validating assumptions before you can confidently commit to anything.  Doable, just a longer road.

Henry Waltz · Answer

"Need" is too strong.  It's more of a nice to have.  Being your own customer gives you an edge to validation and makes selling more natural.  Since you can speak to the pain firsthand.

But if you can validate and sell without it, through real research and listening to customers.  Then you don't need to eat your own dog food.   Plenty of great founders build for a user they aren't.  The shortcut if helpful, not mandatory.

Student & Aspiring Founder, Washington, DC · Answer

I built without being the customer and regretted it.  Spent 6 months learning what people actually needed vs what I thought.  Now I only build for problems I've felt myself.  Founder-market fit saves you a year of misdirection.

Founder & CEO, New York, NY · Answer

Some of the best products are built by people outside the problem.  You don't need to be the customer.  You DO need to talk to them obsessively.  
What kills founders is building for imaginary problems....... Spend time in existing tools, yes.  BUT spend more time listening to complaints.

Founder & CMO, Coral Gables, FL · Answer

The real question isn't customer or not customer.  Do you deeply understand the pain?  Founders obsessed with their own problem build myopic products.  Build because 50 people suffer from it, not because you did once.  That's the real requirement.

Daniel Ochoa · Answer

Founder market fit could be a bit overrated.  You don't need to be a daily user of the problem, but you need to obsess over it.  If you've done real research, talked to 50 people or more, and you're willing to fail for two years, that's enough.  The founders who succeed aren't always the ones who lived the pain.  They're the ones who refused to stop until it worked...

Founder & Brand Designer @STUDIOZ, Tirane, Albania · Answer

Personally, I'd spend more time on competitors platform once I've build my product. Basically, you want to build the product once you've identified a problem worth solving, not supposing there is a problem but talking people who face it daily. Once I am building, or built my product, I'd use the competitors platform to study them, see what they are missing, find the edge. Basically every successful company does this. Test the products of their competitors, find what they are doing wrong, and do it better

Do you need to be a customer of your product before you build it?

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