Having an Idea Doesn't Mean Understanding the Problem

I want to build an app that I genuinely wish had existed when I started becoming a designer.

That sentence has been at the center of Bubble Brain from the beginning.

But I'm starting to realize that building something you wish existed is both an advantage and a trap.

It gives you an unusually strong connection to the problem. You know the feelings, frustrations, and moments that made you think something should exist in the first place.

But it also makes it incredibly easy to assume that your experience is the experience.

So before designing anything, I decided to stay with the problem a little longer.

If you want to watch this part of the process, you can watch it here:

Having an idea doesn't mean understanding the problem

My first instinct was the obvious one.

Think about features. Think about the experience. Open Figma. Start imagining what Bubble Brain could become.

Instead, I started asking questions.

• Why do I think this product needs to exist?
• What would it actually help someone with?
• What is happening in someone's life before they open Bubble Brain?

And, maybe most importantly:

What am I really trying to solve?

The more I challenged the original idea, the less this started to feel like a learning problem.

There is already an enormous amount of design knowledge available. Courses, videos, books, communities, AI, mentors.

And yet someone can consume all of that and still think:

I don't know if I'm good enough yet.

That changed the direction of the entire brainstorm.

Maybe the missing piece isn't more knowledge

I started looking at the moments surrounding that feeling.

• Should I apply for this job?
• Is this project good enough for my portfolio?
• Am I actually improving?
• Why does everyone else seem further ahead?
• Can I really call myself a designer?

These aren't necessarily questions caused by a lack of information.

They can come from not having a reliable way to understand your own progress.

And when you can't evaluate your progress internally, you start looking for evidence externally.

• A recruiter responds.
• Someone likes your work.
• A mentor says you're doing well.
• You get the interview.
• You get the job.

And when that validation disappears, confidence can disappear with it.

That was the moment Bubble Brain started becoming something very different in my head.

Instead of asking how I could teach designers more, I became interested in something else:

Could a product help designers see where they are, recognize how they're growing, understand what to improve next, and keep moving even when they don't feel completely ready?

And then it became personal

This is where brainstorming became more uncomfortable — and more useful.

Because I recognized a lot of myself in the problem I was describing.

I've experienced the feeling of looking at designers further ahead and immediately measuring myself against them.

I've wondered whether I'm progressing fast enough.

I've felt the strange gap between knowing that I've grown and still feeling like where I am isn't where I want to be.

And I realized that maybe part of what I want Bubble Brain to communicate is something I have needed to hear myself:

Where you are right now is a phase, not your final definition.

You can know where you want to go without treating where you are today as evidence that you're failing.

That feeling became much more interesting to me than simply building another tool that tells designers what to learn next.

But it also raised another question.

Am I discovering a problem, or projecting my own?

This might be one of the most important things I've learned during this first phase.

Being personally connected to a problem can make you deeply curious about it.

But it doesn't make your assumptions true.

I can use my own experiences as a starting point. I can't use them as research.

And that's why I think brainstorming was so valuable here.

It didn't validate Bubble Brain.

It didn't prove that designers need this product.

It didn't even tell me exactly what the product should be.

It helped me figure out what I need to learn next.

I started this phase thinking about an app.

I'm leaving it thinking much more about a human experience:

• The distance between where someone is and where they believe they should be.
• The difficulty of recognizing your own progress while you're still inside it.
• The dependence on external validation when you don't yet trust your own judgment.
• And the tendency to wait for some invisible moment when you finally feel ready.

Those are hypotheses now.

And the next step is getting out of my own head and talking to the people I'm hoping to build this for.

Because before I decide what Bubble Brain should become, I need to know whether this feeling belongs only to me — or whether other designers have been quietly experiencing it too.