Paul Jarvis on When & Why to Make Your Own Product

It’s strange how many of us get caught up in the technicalities of making something that we overlook nailing down the basics:

How do you solve a problem for someone (which is what a product does) when you don’t know who that “someone” is? How can you write sales copy when you don’t know who you’re writing for, or why? How can you create something so useful someone can’t live without it, if you aren’t sure what use it’d serve?

One well-tested approach to making products is spending a lot of time with the customers before you’ve made the product:

if you haven’t identified your audience or how you can definitively serve them, doing client work makes more sense than building products, especially at the beginning.

Click here to to Jarvis’s full post. It’s well worth a read for anyone who’s interested in making useful things.