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Concept

Scratch your own itch

Scratching your own itch means building a business around a problem you have yourself. You know the problem better than any market research, you know when the solution is good enough, and you are your own first customer.

Fried and Hansson built Basecamp because they needed a way to manage their own client projects, and Rework generalises the rule: the best businesses solve a problem the founder has. The advantage is not sentimental. A founder with the problem can judge the solution without a survey, notices what is missing on the first day, and does not have to imagine the customer because they are one. The pastry chef who cannot find good sourdough in her town, the physiotherapist whose own patients cannot get an appointment inside a month, the translator whose clients need a contract turned around in a day: each starts with a problem they already understand from the inside. If you do not have the itch, the first job is to find who does and spend time with them before anything is built.

A real-life example

A pastry chef in Eskişehir cannot buy decent sourdough anywhere in her town, so she bakes twelve loaves in her own oven and offers them to her neighbourhood group. She sells nine on the first Saturday; the business has started from a problem she had herself.

How to use it

  1. 1Write the problem you have that your idea solves, in one sentence.
  2. 2If you do not have the problem, find three people who do and spend an hour with each before building anything.
  3. 3Use yourself as the first customer: would you pay for this, at this price, this week?