I constantly have ideas floating around in my head for cool and useful web-services or products, the problem is that they’d never be useful to me. Most of them would be great for homeowners, teachers, etc. but I’d probably never use them after launch. This is why I think a lot of web-based business fail so often, they aren’t their own users.

Chris Wanstrath gave a great keynote at Startup Riot where he told his tale of FamSpam and GitHub, which illustrates my point perfectly. He talks about a ton of other great things as well; check it out. In the end GitHub was what he loved to develop and use, which made it better for everyone. For an idea to be successful (in any form of the word) it needs to be brilliant. I don’t mean brilliant like having the most ridiculous algorithm in the world (although sometimes that does work) or having all PhD’s working for you. I mean a product that is 100% useful to it’s audience and continues to be a great experience for them.

Your high school teacher who told you that if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life, was so right. I forked that quote and changed it: if you create what you love, you’ll always have a user. What I mean by this is, create something that is useful to yourself and in the end it’ll be a better product because of it. GitHub is what it is today because Chris and PJ use it themselves, everyday. You need to take it a step past just believing in what you’re doing, you need to use what you are doing.

Being your own user gives you a front row seat to see what could make it a better product. You can be selfish; develop features and fix bugs that bother you, as a user. You’ll be making it better for yourself, but at the same time all your other users. From a user-experience point of view, it’s easier to put yourself in the shoes of your customers, if you are one (obviously). You don’t have to pretend to be part of them or try to speak their language, you naturally will and other users will appreciate that.