I must build "what I want" and then "what other people want."

YCombinator's motto is "build what people want" but that strikes me as flawed advice for building products because it doesn't factor in my personal motivation. After college, I now worked for seven or eight years in other people's companies and so "I've built what other people want," and this obviously includes "building what my bosses want," "building what my freelance clients want" and "building what my bosses' company's client's want." Recently, I've got so burned out by always working towards "what other people want" that I quit my stable income from freelancing and solely focused on "building what I want." It's a completely different world and I'm now questioning YCombinator's motto, which I previously considered quite useful.

In my current project, for example, many people are reaching out to me, wanting certain things. We also have many people having an opinion on how we're supposed to do things too. But truly, if we'd bend over backward, were "customer-obsessed," and did what our customers wanted, "built what people want," then I think we'd have less success, not more. Our customers always tend to state the obvious truth, things we're aware of, the "stated preferences." They're not wrong and it's certainly useful talking to them, but more often than not, they want "a faster horse carriage" and we're building a car for them. I don't blame them and I don't think they're stupid, but it's that we, the product builders, have become such narrow-minded experts that their ideas seem too obvious and mundane to us.

But sometimes existing customers also even reach out without prior solicitation of feedback, and they'll make us aware of flaws in our product that we currently just can't address. And then I always feel unconfident in pushing back. Social media and the startup canon remind me of "building what people want" and make me cynical. How can we as a business push back on a customer's wishes, especially when they proactively send feedback? We must be too egoistic and self-centered. How can we dare not to "build what people want?"

In an interview at a16z's startup school, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, re-tells the leadup of a situation that almost made him quit his job. Spoiler alert: It climaxed with him getting his way and releasing a post titled "Coinbase is a mission-focused company," a personal pushback on the rising internal criticism coming from Coinbase employees wanting to re-orient the company towards more value-focused goals (e.g., social justice, etc.). Anyways, those politics aside, I think the more interesting aspect of that story is Brian telling his personal account, especially that he briefly considered quitting himself over pushing back on employees wanting to re-orient Coinbase towards un-aligned goals. Brian then tells his friends and family about it, that he considers quitting, and their reaction is: "Are you crazy?" And so it goes that he realizes that, first and foremost, he must like what he's working on before anyone else in the company, with him being the founder. Now square that with "building what people want."

And so, to me, that conflict is at the core of my disagreement with "building something people want." Surely, the Coinbase employees are also right in their own way; potentially, there's a world in which "we'd build what they want" and where Coinbase could be even... more successful? But I agree with Brian here that, first and foremost, I want to build something that I want because if I don't, then my motivation simply won't let me build at all. Working is hard, and working on things that don't motivate me is even harder. Being successful means working really hard and a long time on problems - I simply can't think of working on something that doesn't interest me for the sake of others, and so if I were to strictly build "what people want," I'd actually not build at all! I'd have to force myself to go to work and "build what other people want" and I'm not sure how long I could do that! Now, do I think that "building what people want" is generally bad advice? Not at all! After all, I want to "build what people want" because I want users, and I want to continue "building what I want to build." But then, to me, what follows is that first, I build what I want, and then I build what others want.