Be a user of your own product. Make it better based on your own desires. But don’t trick yourself into thinking you are the user.

Williams is advocating a disciplined form of “dogfooding”: founders should use what they build so they can feel friction firsthand and iterate from genuine experience. The caution—“don’t trick yourself into thinking you are the user”—warns against a common product fallacy: confusing the creator’s tastes, skills, and context with those of the broader market. A builder may be more motivated, more technical, and more forgiving than typical customers, so optimizing solely for oneself can yield a product that is elegant to its makers but misfit for its intended audience. The quote balances empathy-through-use with the need for external validation and user research.