Building Products People Don't Ask For

Nobody asked me to build any of the things I’m proudest of. No customer interview surfaced the need. No survey validated the demand. I built them because a small, specific annoyance in my own life refused to go away.

The validation trap

Modern product wisdom says: validate before you build. Talk to users. Find the pain point. This is good advice for companies spending other people’s money.

But it quietly assumes that people can articulate what they want. They mostly can’t. They can articulate what’s annoying about what they currently have — which is a different, smaller thing.

Personal software

There’s a category of product that only emerges when a builder solves their own problem with unreasonable care. The tools feel different. They have opinions. They omit entire feature categories because the builder knew, from lived experience, that those features are noise.

Build the thing you keep wishing existed. You are the validation.

The honest economics

Most of these projects won’t become businesses, and that has to be fine. The return comes in other currencies:

• Skill — you learn more shipping one real thing than reading fifty postmortems.
• Surface area — finished projects attract conversations, collaborators, and sometimes jobs.
• Taste — every completed build sharpens your sense of what good feels like.

When it does work

Occasionally, the thing nobody asked for turns out to be the thing many people wanted but couldn’t name. Those products don’t need launch campaigns. They spread because every user recognizes their own unspoken annoyance, finally handled.

You can’t aim for that outcome directly. You can only put yourself in its path — by building, finishing, and showing your work.