How to solve, or why you need to be your own user

Twine was a good product, but it existed within a domain I know nothing about.

Accounting and bookkeeping. This is not my domain.

Once the product was 80% complete—without all the bells and whistles, typically when you're solving a "real" problem—you get the domain user using the product as they should, because they have the problem.

The other guy wanted to get an investor so we could add the bells and whistles.

Maybe this is a bad take on my behalf—maybe it needs the bells and whistles to be sold and adopted. But I couldn't tell. I was flying blind in a domain I didn't understand.

In the end, my 50% of the company was revoked. It wasn't formalized yet. That's the lesson here, kids.

So what happened?

I had all the connected accounts and software within a Google account. That got locked down with 2FA. The site got turned off—as there was an overseas company starting a remake.

The surface-level lesson: be convicted enough in your product that you formalize the company fast. Also, only start companies with people you have known for at least 5 years. People's behaviors are hard to predict—myself included. Hell, I had just come out of a 14-year marriage.

But the deeper lesson is this: you need to be your own user.

If you're building something in a domain you don't understand, you're flying blind. You can't tell if the bells and whistles are necessary or just nice-to-haves. You can't validate if you're solving the right problem or just building features that sound good. Every decision becomes a guess, and every guess erodes your conviction.

When you're your own user, you know the pain points intimately. You understand what's essential versus what's fluff. You can make decisions with conviction because you're solving your problem, not someone else's. You've felt the friction. You've lived the frustration. You know what needs to exist and what can wait.

Twine taught me that lesson the hard way. I was building for a domain I didn't live in, and when push came to shove, I couldn't defend the product's direction with the same conviction I would have if it solved my own daily problems. I had no ground to stand on. No personal experience to draw from. Just features that sounded reasonable in theory but felt hollow in practice.

The irony is that the product worked. It solved a real problem. But because I wasn't the user, I couldn't tell if we were building the right thing or just building something. When the partnership fractured, I had no deep conviction to fall back on. I couldn't fight for it because I didn't truly understand it.

Be your own user. Or at least, be so close to the problem that you can feel it in your bones.