When 'Scratching Your Own Itch' Wasn't Enough

As indie makers, we're often told to solve our own problems - to "scratch our own itch." Build tools for yourself, they said, and the customers will come. But what happens when you pour your heart into a SaaS only to be met with...crickets? That was my reality after my first failed product attempt. I'm a UI/UX designer by trade and always struggled with quickly mocking up client projects. My design tools were bloated and lacked collaboration features tailored for client services. So I built a lean, web-based prototyping suite explicitly for UI/UX workflows called Inkwell. It had real-time team collaboration baked in, review modes for gathering client feedback, and was priced for the realities of billable work. Perfect...or so I thought. Except no matter how much I pounded the digital pavement through maker communities, landing pages, and even running Instagram ads, I couldn't get any meaningful traction. A few sign ups here and there, but nothing sustainable. After doing more customer research and really listening, I realized my fatal flaw: I had an incredibly niche itch. Solving just my personal UI/UX pain point left me chasing a tiny segment of the much larger product design market. Rookie mistake! I briefly threw in the towel on Inkwell. But the drive to build something bigger kept nagging at me. That's when I had my "aha" pivot moment. Instead of just tooling for UI designers, why not build an entire design workflow platform for cross-functional product teams? One centralized hub for UX research, wireframing, prototyping, developer hand-off, and client presentation? A true "design to code" solution. By widening my aperture from just UI to holistic product design, all of a sudden the market positioning made way more sense. Plus it naturally expanded what started as a single "scratcher" app into an entire ecosystem of tools and workflows. I rebranded and relaunched the following year as Prohawk.io. From day one, the response was night and day compared to the first attempt. Turns out there was a major unsolved itch around streamlining the entire design process. Within 6 months I had hundreds of paid teams using Prohawk across agencies, startups, and enterprise product squads. Growth continues compounding as I roll out more workflow solutions. All because I learned the danger of too narrow an itch! The moral of the story? Never underestimate solving a big, hairy problem that stretches beyond just your own needs. While scratching your own itch is a helpful starting point, the most successful SaaS ideas tend to scratch everyone's itch.