Scratching My Own Itch and Finding Product/Market Fit

Here's a SaaS growth tip in an indie maker/solo founder style: "Scratching My Own Itch and Finding Product/Market Fit" As a solo maker, one of the biggest challenges is finding that elusive product/market fit. You know, creating something that people actually want and are willing to pay for. When you're bootstrapping and working alone, there's no VC money or big marketing budgets to fall back on. For me, the solution was quite literally scratching my own itch. A few years ago, I was running a small digital agency and kept running into the same pain point over and over again. Keeping track of all the client projects, contractors, deliverables, invoices, etc. was an organizational nightmare. I tried using various productivityapps and project management tools, but nothing quiet fit the unique needs of my services business. So I decided to dogfood my own problem and build a custom pipeline and work management system tailored specifically for agency/client work. It was pretty barebones at first, just some simple Kanban boards and basic invoicing. But I knew the pain point extremely well since I was living it daily. After getting my own workflows dialed in over the course of a year or so, I started hearing from others struggling with similar issues. A few friends running agencies wanted to buy the tooling I'd built since it seemed to solve a lot of pain points out-of-the-box. With a little prodding from the maker community, I decided to turn my little productivity suite into a SaaS product called Bento Studio. The key advantages were that: It catered specifically to the needs of client services businesses, not generic project management It could automate and centralize a lot of tedious processes I had real-world experience using it to run my own profitable agency I launched about 6 months ago with some basic documentation, onboarding sequences, and pricing tiers. And you know what? People started signing up from Day 1. Turns out there was a huge underserved need for more tailored client workflow tooling in this space. Things are still in the early days, but I'm overjoyed to have built a SaaS that generates real recurring revenue and has product/market fit. All because I decided to solve my own itch first rather than guessing at what the market wanted. For any indie makers out there struggling with finding an idea, my advice is simple: Build for yourself first. Odds are if you're experience a pain point, so are many others in your shoes. And nothing beats living and breathing that struggle first-hand!