Back in 2007 my mom wrote a book, and no one would publish it. It's called "Butterfly Girl" — the story of a little girl lost in a storm and her long journey home. She wrote it for one reader: my daughter. She wanted her granddaughter to know where she came from, in her own words. The traditional publishers all passed. A beautiful, personal story about one family's journey wasn't a big enough market for them. So I told her not to wait for anyone's permission. We'd do it ourselves. What I didn't fully understand until we were in it: self-publishing back then was brutal. Formatting, printing, distribution, ISBNs, cover files — every step was manual, expensive, and built to make you quit. We pushed through it anyway, and she held her book in her hands. That moment was the whole point. Then Christmas came. And at the table, one relative after another leaned in and said some version of the same thing: "You know, I have a book in me too. How did you do it?" That's when it clicked. The pain I'd just spent months fighting through wasn't my mom's problem. It was everyone's problem. As I put it later: "there's a million other moms out there hundred million other moms you know actually billions of people out there who think they have a book in them and will never publish so it was the business model" That became FastPencil — an online writing and publishing platform. It didn't start with a market analysis or a TAM slide. It started with one person I loved, one urgent human problem, and a Christmas dinner full of people stuck behind the exact same wall. I've come to believe this is one of the most underrated sources of a great idea: proximity. Not brainstorming what the market wants in the abstract, but solving something real for someone you actually care about — then noticing how many other people are quietly living the same frustration. The narrow, personal problem is often the universal one wearing a disguise. So here's my question for you: Is there a version of this in your own story — a problem you solved for someone close to you that turned out to be universal? 🎙️ From my conversation with Julia Lucidi on the Founder Tactics podcast. Full episode: https://youtu.be/M58Dnn2UAlM