Hi Rajaraman, I love this question!
It’s true that we build ProdPad to success by scratching our own itch. After all, we were both product managers at the time and needed tools to help us do our jobs better.
However, I think it’s remiss to assume that the best thing I could have done was to solve the problem closest to me. Had I taken a bigger step back, I could have explored a wider range of potential problems to solve, and likely found other opportunities that were just as, or even more lucrative than the path I went down. I think the common trait of ‘scratching your own itch’ as a successful starting point for entrepreneurs is muddied with survivorship bias and the inability to measure what could have been. I think that if more entrepreneurs spent more time in pure research and discovery mode, before picking a product/service to provide, we’d see a lot more value being created!