How to use the “scratch your own itch” technique to generate product ideas.
A "scratch your own itch product" is a product that solves a problem you personally have.
Let's say you have a three year old who, whenever you're not looking, likes to turn the volume up to maximum on your laptop. And, as a result, all your alerts end up being ridiculously loud.
This is both annoying and painful - an itch that needs to be scratched for sure!
One way you could solve this problem would be to make software that locks a laptop's volume level.
So let's say you build this software, it works great, it solves your problem. You can now package it up and sell it to other people.
You just created a product that scratched your own itch!
Finding an idea you personally care about makes a big difference to your chances of success. This is one reason why the "scratch your own itch" method is such a powerful way to come up with ideas.
- You scratching your own itch, which just feels good!
- You're solving a problem you care about, so it will make it easier to work on it for 2+ years.
- It might be easier to market because your customers have the same problem as you, and that should give you an insight into how to reach them.
Another example might help, so here's one I've thought of based on my own experiences.
As anyone who knows me will tell you, I have a desperate need to find childcare. However, the only childcare assistance my wife would consider is from people who are child care professionals, and into the types of child-rearing theories and methods that she is. For example:
- Conscious Parenting
- Resources for Infant Educarers (RIE)
- The Whole Brain Child
This leaves me in a precarious situation. Care.com is just not an option. And there is no on-demand marketplace, or any type of local marketplace, that caters to this type of specificity. That said, around our area there are a lot of people into these types of parenting methods, as we bump into them at all the kid events we go to.
So, in this case, the idea would be for a high-end care marketplace that specifically focuses on the Conscious Parenting niche.
If I were to then follow this idea through the Startup Academy process, my next steps might look something like this:
- I would shift my focus from the idea to the "market to serve" and validate that the market really did want it. I sure know I do! But I shouldn’t assume my itch is the same as the overall market.
- I would not build anything.
- I would launch a single landing page (with a contact form) and get some business cards made.
- I'd hand out those business cards to all the crunchy parents and people that we keep bumping into. This is just one option to start gathering interest.
- I would then use the man behind the curtain Wizard of Oz technique (which we’ll learn more about in Stage 8) to manually bring on caregivers that reached out via the website, and I would connect them with customers that came in via the website.
- After I had been running things like that for a few weeks, I would start to think about how to scale and automate it.
- If the business started to show larger growth, I'd start plugging in Stripe to deal with payments, etc.
While I do like the above child care business idea, I want to point out that marketplaces are difficult to grow, real world people are difficult to manage, and this is probably too large to be a side project.
So yes it's a good idea, but probably not the right idea for a first side project.