“Turn problems you have faced into shareable tools” is a recurring behavioral pattern for Raymond Hou (Raymond): encounter friction in his own workflow, build something to solve it, refine it until outsiders can use it directly, and release it publicly for free to people with the same difficulty. This pattern runs through both his content products (courses, newsletters, and subscription services) and later small web tools. It is where he begins when defining a “good product.”
Raymond condenses this pattern into a product principle: the best products are not new ideas imagined from nothing, but solutions to problems one has personally experienced and genuinely solved. When discussing product design in The Super Individual’s Way of Working, he says a product should begin with “the problem you are facing right now; you have simply made it further along the path.” To him, documenting how one solves a problem is itself the best prototype for a future product.
Trigger: Friction in His Own Workflow
This pattern almost always starts with Raymond’s own pain point, rather than demand discovered through market research. Social posts were crowded together, so he made a line-break tool with an instant preview. His lectures needed live audience Q&A, but the paid version of Slido cost a lot for a year when there were more than two hundred participants, so he spent two days making a simple version on a server he already had. Currency conversion during travel displayed incorrectly on phones and iPads, so he quickly wrote a version that could be embedded in a webpage and Notion. Courses and marketing pages needed countdown timers, but the market offered subscription services, so he made a Chinese-language countdown generator that required no login and could be embedded. The common feature is that the need first became real in his own work; the tool simply productized a solution he already had.
The earliest documented example dates to 2017, when Raymond was still a student. To manage his own speaking and workshop schedule, pricing, and follow-up, he spent an hour building a database in Airtable and called it his “super secretary” in a post (he rebuilt it in Notion in 2019). His explanation at the time was that he liked using design and process optimization to make things that had not been well structured easy for others to pick up quickly.1 Nearly a decade later, the same need grew into Raymond’s AI Double as AI capabilities matured. Raymond’s own comparison is that he could not afford to hire help back then, so he built tools to semi-automate the work; the next step was full automation.
The Cycle: Use It Yourself → Refine It for Sharing → Publish and Get Feedback
Raymond’s approach follows a fixed cycle. First, build something to solve one’s own problem and make it usable. Second, refine that workable version until “other people can open it and use it,” including details that reduce friction, such as Chinese support, no login, and embedding in third-party pages. Third, share it publicly, often with a line such as “feel free to take it for free” or “share it with anyone else who needs it.” He gathered his small tools into a public website so that he, his teammates, and contractors could all use them, rather than leaving them only on his local machine.
The same cycle took shape even earlier in his content products. Raymond’s paid products started with free content. From 2015, he shared notes about digital work methods on social media; in 2017, he accumulated more complete learning records on Medium, writing up work problems he had solved in a searchable and verifiable form. After trust and demand had accumulated, he upgraded them into paid courses and subscription services. Whether an article or a web tool, his criterion is consistent: first solve one’s own problem, then make the result reusable by others. See The Product Funnel: From Mass Traffic to a Deep Community of One Hundred and Writing Is the Best Investment for Ordinary People.
One Principle: Don’t Build What You Wouldn’t Use Yourself
A personal principle supports this pattern: “I don’t make products and services that I wouldn’t use myself.” It helps him avoid a common product-making misconception—that a product requires a completely new idea. Raymond takes the opposite view: his own difficulties are often difficulties other people encounter too; the difference is that he found a solution first. He often cites the origin of Beijing’s Keep as evidence: its founder could not find a useful integrated tool for his own weight-loss journey, so he built a product, following the same logic of starting with a personal problem.
Raymond also applies this principle when deciding which tools to share. He tends to publish only things he would “use every day and save as a bookmark,” because continued use by himself validates quality and need. His post-review tool is one example: he already had the habit of reviewing old posts every day and manually tagging and categorizing them. The tool turned this high-friction daily action into something completed with arrow keys and keyboard shortcuts.2
AI Tools Amplify the Pattern
Starting in 2026, AI programming tools noticeably increased the frequency of output from this existing pattern. Raymond says he is a non-engineer who did not study a related field in college. In the past, many things he “always wanted to make but thought he couldn’t” had to be outsourced to engineers at significant cost, so he only dared to imagine them. After AI Agents lowered the barrier to creation, he built more than a dozen tools and an AI counterpart in a short time, implementing needs that had previously remained only in his mind.3 See AI Tool Applications.
Raymond emphasizes that as the barrier to tools falls, the key abilities shift to “describing the problem clearly” and “having the patience to verify the result.” He compares collaborating with AI to managing a colleague who is willing to do the work: he only needs to describe what he wants and inspect the result. This explains how the pattern can scale in the AI era without changing its nature. Its core remains “start with a real problem of your own”; AI simply makes the step of “turning the problem into a tool” faster.
This pattern has also extended from publicly shared small tools to infrastructure for the brand itself. At the end of July 2026, Raymond replaced a third-party short-link plugin the brand had used for years with a custom go.lifehacker.tw short-link service. From proposal to launch took about a day; they migrated 332 existing short links and three years of click records, then enabled teammates to create short links in Discord with a single command the following day. The starting point was the same friction: people who routinely share links in livestreams, posts, and presentations are the first to run into a short-link service’s limitations. The solution also followed the same cycle: solve one’s own problem first, then refine it into a service the team and system can reuse.
This behavioral pattern reflects Raymond’s The Super Individual: A Definition for Today’s Professionals. For a Super Individual who serves a small group of people who truly need their work, turning difficulties they have personally overcome into reusable tools and content is precisely the differentiated path he advocates.
Sources
Footnotes
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Raymond Hou, “#The Potential of a Super Secretary?” public Facebook post, 2017-04-12. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “Post Review and Highlights Tool,” public Facebook post, 2026-03-04. View original ↩
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Raymond Hou, “In 2026, You Don’t Need to Know How to Code, but You Deserve the Ability to Create,” public Facebook post, 2026-04-20. View original ↩