Stickman Charles — Scratch Your Own Itch
2026/8/4 GMT-4
Hello, I'm Stickman Charles.
While reading Rework, one piece of advice stayed with me more than anything else:
Scratch your own itch.
The Curse of Sunk Costs
I'd known for a long time that startups create value by solving real problems. But knowing something and acting on it are rarely the same.
When I first started building EchoForge's EchoFamily product line—EchoCert, EchoUploader, EchoDash, and EchoID—I believed each product was solving a real problem.
Looking back, I'm not so sure.
Very few people actually need on-chain certificates, so EchoCert attracted almost no users.
Very few people need upload proofs without institutional authority behind them, so almost nobody used EchoUploader.
EchoDash and EchoID depended on those two products, so naturally, there wasn't much demand for them either.
Ironically, these components together were originally meant to become the foundation of EchoForgeDAO. (You can read more about that journey here: https://stickmancharles.com/journal/from-storyforgedao-to-echoforge.)
But I worried that launching a platform from scratch would be too difficult, so I split the idea into several smaller products instead, thinking that would reduce the barrier while giving me a chance to improve my engineering skills.
That part was true.
During that period I learned MeshSDK, Lucid Evolution, and many practical software engineering techniques.
But whenever someone asked whether these products were solving meaningful problems, I became uneasy.
Deep down, I didn't want to think about the answer.
Admitting it felt like admitting that all the work I'd already invested had been wasted.
Scratch Your Own Itch
Everything changed after a Cardano network upgrade.
I didn't notice the changes in time, and my services stopped working.
It eventually turned out to be a false alarm—the real issue was somewhere else—but the experience reminded me of the advice from Rework:
Scratch your own itch.
As a solo builder who isn't working full-time, my time is limited.
Besides building software, I study math and physics, read books, exercise, and write articles. I simply don't have the attention to constantly monitor changes across the Cardano tooling ecosystem.
So I thought:
What if there were a web app that monitored the major Cardano technology stacks for me?
It could save not only my own attention, but eventually other developers' as well.
The product came together quickly.
I called it EchoWatch.
Like my previous projects, I shared it in the communities I was already part of, without expecting much.
If it solved my own problem, I figured that was already enough.
Then, two days ago, something different happened.
A founder sent me a direct message asking whether I could add Pebble to EchoWatch because it was difficult for him to keep track of updates.
Before that moment, EchoForge had almost no users.
I had never received genuine product feedback.
In fact, it was entirely possible that I was the only person actually using my own products.
That message marked something different.
For the first time, EchoWatch had a real user.
Someone was relying on it to solve a real problem.
As of today, Pebble has officially been added to EchoWatch.
But more importantly, for the first time, I felt that I had genuinely solved a real user's need.
Keep thinking, and take care.