[mburney]

What evidence exists that building a product that you would use leads to a greater chance of success? I can think of plenty of counterexamples of entrepreneurs that have built successful products for an audience other than themselves.

[nate]

I doubt you are going to fine the statistical evidence. Though that would be an awesome find.

The main reason I want to be the user of the product I make: it's 100 times easier to get out of bed in the morning to work on the thing you want to use that day. If you are working on something for someone else, and the "I'm an entrepreneur" honeymoon wears off and you are struggling to get your first revenue, it's HARD to work on that thing you think other people need. Even if you've got some evidence that other people need it.

Doing customer development is so much harder in practice than theory :) When you get to be your own customer, you get to save tons and tons of times waiting for folks to return your emails and calls.

[diwank]

A 'greater chance of success' is too loose a variable to really correlate with something like intuition. Success and its magnitude are highly variate. The best you can do is, as PG says, don't make the stupid mistakes.

Speaking of examples, a lot of products have come from building things for oneself (BaseCamp for instance.) Building a product you use may not be much of a help if you're making any fundamental mistake. However, it makes the life of the developer a hell lot easier.

When you are designing a service you use, intuition comes to your aid. Some things just feel right and some things just wrong. It is not something I can really put into words. Intuition, like determination, may not be something you could measure or plot on bar graphs but boy, it does matter.