“Scratch your own itch,” is one of the most influential aphorisms in entrepreneurship. It lies behind successful product companies like Apple, Dropbox, and Kickstarter, but it can also lead entrepreneurs predictably to failure.
This approach to entrepreneurship increases your market knowledge: as a potential user, you know the problem, how you’re currently trying to solve it, and what dimensions of performance matter. And you can use this knowledge to avoid much of the market risk in building a new product. But scratching your own itch will lead you astray if you are a high-performance consumer whose problem stems from existing products not performing well enough – in other words, if the itch results from a performance gap.
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