Scratch Your Own Itch

Definition

"The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use." Being your own user replaces guesswork with direct knowledge: "When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. If you're solving someone else's problem, you're constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is."

In the Book

The book's own founding example is Highrise, 37signals' contact-management tool, built because the company needed a way to track who they'd talked to and when to follow up — "There was no need for focus groups, market studies, or middlemen. We had the itch, so we scratched it." It stacks up outside cases to generalize the pattern: James Dyson invented the cyclonic bagless vacuum after his own bag vacuum kept losing suction to clogged pores; Vic Firth, a timpanist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, started making his own drumsticks because commercial ones didn't measure up, eventually building a factory that turns out more than 85,000 sticks a day with 62 percent of the market; and track coach Bill Bowerman poured rubber into his family's waffle iron to make better running shoes for his team, creating Nike's waffle sole.

Why It Matters

Being the user collapses the usual distance between the person building something and the person judging whether it's any good, turning validation from a research exercise into a lived, immediate check. It matters wherever a builder is otherwise forced to infer someone else's needs secondhand — the itch-scratcher skips straight to ground truth because they are the ground truth.