Build Software to Solve Your Own Problems

I received a comment on one of the video tips I posted on Instagram: "What to build next? What should my side project be?"

There is one idea that always wins -- build software to solve your own problems. It's always best to build something that someone actually needs, and will use. In other words, it's always best to have a "client" -- instead of building something that nobody asked for.

So, who is the client that is easiest to access? The person reading this right now! :-) Think about it -- when you are your own client, you don't need to do user interviews (voices in your head don't count) -- you already know the pain!

Where to start? Think back about your day -- and try to identify two things:

a) A tedious manual process that you have to do, or b) An app that you use, but are not quite happy with (maybe it doesn't have the features you need, or it's too expensive).

For me, the most recent example was budgeting. My use case is quite unique -- I wanted to track our family budget and my business (sole proprietorship) in a single app. All existing tools were either too basic or too complex. So, I just built my own thing!

Here is an important note -- software you build for yourself might never have more than one user! It doesn't have to become a startup. Just like my budgeting app -- it solves exactly what my wife and I need, and we love it. It's personal software, and it's built as such.

So, when you build something for yourself, enjoy using it (that's the primary goal!) and enjoy the process of learning as you build. Absolutely consider making it a public GitHub repo (easy to do, and gives you clear portfolio value, even if the code is not "perfect" -- and what is perfect code anyway?). But don't try to turn it into a business while you're still using it as personal software. If a business emerges, it'll likely be a clean rebuild anyway.