Built from lived experience, not a market gap

Why where you start changes what you're able to build.

The standard advice is to find a gap. Scan the market, spot the underserved segment, size the opportunity, build the thing that fills the hole. It's the logic of most pitch decks and most startups, and it isn't wrong, exactly. But it quietly assumes that the best place to understand a problem is from the outside, looking in. For a lot of problems, that's the worst place to be standing.

There's a different starting point: you've lived it. You've been in the room. You've felt the specific friction, watched what happens when a corner gets cut, and carried the cost of getting it wrong. That's not a backstory for the "about" page — it changes what you build.

Here's the part that usually gets undersold. Lived experience is normally pitched as motivation, or authenticity, or a good origin story. Those are real, but they're not the point. The actual gift is judgement: it tells you which trade-offs are load-bearing and which are cosmetic. Every product is a stack of compromises. From the outside, they all look roughly equal — pick whichever is cheaper to build. From the inside, you know that this one is fine to cut and that one will hurt someone, because you've seen it hurt someone.

Take the example I know best. There's a whole category of self-employed carers and personal assistants working outside any institution. Look at them as a market gap and the answer is obvious: they're self-employed, admin is annoying, so build an app that makes invoicing and scheduling easier. A productivity tool. It's reasonable. It would probably sell.

But if you've actually sat with the families and the clients, you know the real problem isn't admin convenience. It's that this kind of care is largely invisible and unaccountable — nobody can easily see what's happening, which is precisely the condition in which people get hurt. So the thing worth building isn't a productivity tool at all; it's infrastructure that makes care visible and accountable. And once you frame it that way, you reach for a design move the gap-spotter never would: you make the safeguarding record fall out of the invoicing. The carer logs a visit in order to get paid, and the act of getting paid quietly produces the record a family — or a safeguarding process — might one day need. Compliance becomes a byproduct of the thing people already want to do. You only design that if you understand which trade-off is load-bearing, and you only understand that from the inside.

Now the honest part, because a one-sided version of this argument is a worse one. Lived experience has its own failure mode, and it's worth naming. The danger is that you build for yourself: you assume your needs are everyone's, your edge case is the norm, and the sheer intensity of your own experience becomes proof of demand. It isn't. The market-gap people are right about one uncomfortable thing — a problem you've felt deeply is not automatically a problem anyone will pay to solve. Conviction can blind you to viability just as easily as a spreadsheet can blind you to truth.

So it isn't lived experience versus market discipline. It's a division of labour. Lived experience should drive the what and the how — what's actually worth building, and which trade-offs you refuse to make. Market discipline should pressure-test the whether — whether enough people share the problem to sustain the thing you've built. Start from the room you've been in, because that's where you learn what's true. Then go and check whether it's viable. Do it in that order. The reverse — finding a viable-looking gap and then trying to care about it — tends to produce things that are clever, defensible, and slightly hollow.

The gap is a fine thing to check. It's a bad thing to start from.