One of the best ways to choose a SaaS idea is to “scratch your own itch,” because being your own customer has huge advantages. I did exactly that… and I nearly shipped an MVP missing a critical feature that would have made it unusable for most customers.
The “Scratch Your Own Itch” Blind Spot
Here’s what happened. I’m writing a sales tracker for people like my wife who sell via WhatsApp. So I started building the app based on what she needs. Here’s where I went off the rails a bit.
To keep things really simple early on, we’ve been delivering our stingless bee honey for free, personally. That way we don’t need to worry about couriers smashing our glass jars, or have to deal with calculating and adding in shipping
As a result, Order Hand didn’t have any way to record shipping either. I wish I could say that this was by design, but it wasn’t. It just never occurred to me that shipping costs was a necessary feature. It was a gigantic blind spot.
I discovered my mistake because we’re working on expanding our honey business, which means going beyond free delivery by hand.
Free delivery by hand is unscalable. We have to figure out how to safely ship glass via courier, and that instantly highlighted the glaring shortcoming in Order Hand: almost everyone needs to charge for shipping
This happened right in the nick of time too, because I was about to add the billing code so I can charge for the app, and release it.
Could you imagine what would happen if I had released a sales tracker that doesn’t support shipping costs? It would be an immediate fail, because it would be useless to almost everyone, including us a week or two from now.
Not the end of the world, mind you. I would have taken the harsh feedback and iterated fast. But, it’s still a pretty bad start.
The Lesson
Just because you are your own target customer doesn’t mean that you know what the market actually needs. Your own workflow has hidden assumptions. In my case, it was free shipping. For you it could be something else. Either way, those assumptions quietly become product decisions that can bite you further down the line.
The best way to catch this? Talk to more people from your target market as early as possible. Or, just launch fast, accept the “egg on face” embarrassment of getting it wrong. Fix your goofy mistakes fast. And iterate as quickly as possible to that golden state known as “product-market-fit.”
Me, I’m fixing my mistake before launching, because it’s so blatantly obvious now that I see it. Then I’ll probably still get “egg on face” come launch time due to missing features, and I’ll work my way forward from there.
The MVP is a fraction of what I have planned. but I need to get something out there ASAP, and get real market feedback…
