It’s because you are artificially lending yourself to problem spaces that you have no intuition or interest in. For example, you’d had to have be in X problem space and an actual consumer/user in that space to even know what the pain points are. If you do that your ideas and solutions are going to sound dumb to people in those spaces.

However, if you pick something you yourself deal with regularly, no matter how stupid, your solutions will be intuitive.

Developers struggle with this constantly because we think ‘this is probably what SaaS consumers need’. How fuck do you know? You just don’t, unless you’ve been in it.

You can’t fake this one believe it or not. Great writers always give the advice that you shouldn’t just become an author, first live a little, so when you write you have something to write about. The same goes for devs.

That’s why 90% of us look at stuff like TikTok and Snapchat and are baffled at their success. Many of us shun social media or how different age groups value it, we fail to understand what makes these things compelling. We simply don’t know because we don’t tweet, we don’t dance in videos, we don’t post stories, so the whole thing seems stupid to us. If we showed up to that space and tried to make something, we’d fundamentally get Google+.

Can’t fake it bro.