Paul Graham: Young Founders Should Start by Building What They Want
Paul Graham stated that young founders should especially start by building what they want, as this can avoid unclear products. As target users, founders will not settle for vague designs, thus being forced to identify problems. This method, while not the only one, effectively compels founders to confront user pain points.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
As a co-founder of Y Combinator, Paul Graham has previously emphasized "dogfooding" in his essays. This advice continues his advocacy for founders to personally validate their products, similar to the case of Airbnb's founder testing rentals himself. By driving iterations through personal use, founders leverage their experiences to identify ambiguities, motivated by the desire to reduce early product-market fit risks and enhance building efficiency and user retention. This is akin to the founder-driven use cases of Notion or Figma, as early-stage startups transition from market research to personal validation. Essentially, this represents a form of technical substitution: using oneself as a user instead of relying on third-party research, with the mechanism being real usage feedback forming a closed-loop iteration, reducing abstract assumption errors, and accelerating the path from MVP to PMF. ABAB News · Cognitive Law
If you don't use it yourself, you can't create a good product; vagueness ends with personal testing.
The target user is oneself, so the pain points are naturally clear.
The greatest advantage of young founders is their authentic user perspective.