Scratch your own itch

Everything that worked for me came from scratching my own itches.

I once made Naval25 — a tiny site where people voted on their favorite Naval Ravikant quotes. Sounds pointless, but it was something I cared about, so I built it.

And that “pointless” project made noise. It gave me feedback. It opened doors to the next thing, and the next, until eventually I built ShipFast, my boilerplate, born from the itch of rebuilding the same setup again and again. That one made $1.2M.

Solve your own problem → Ship an MVP → Discover new problems → Scratch again

It doesn’t need to be a big problem. My friend Jack wanted to stop doomscrolling TikTok. So he built an app for himself. That itch gave him his first revenue, which taught him how to do marketing, which led to his next SaaS at $15K MRR.

Scratching your own itch works because:

• You care enough to finish it.

• It’s authentic, so people feel it.

• Sometimes your itch is everyone else’s too.

Right now, I’m building BioAge — a health dashboard that connects my food intake, workouts, sleep data, and lab tests. Because everything in health is connected: food affects sleep, sleep affects performance, and performance affects food cravings. I wanted a way to see the whole picture of my body in one place.

It’s not really a business yet. Maybe it will be one day. But that’s not the point. The point is: I had an itch, so I scratched it.

Don’t start with a “business.” Start with yourself.

Curiosity is where startups start.

— Marc Lou