I've always feel bad because of my hairs — y'know I have very annoying type of ultra-dense black curls.

Since little kid I felt jealous for other kids, who had straight hairs — they could do some fancy hairstyles (which was a pretty serious at that time, when every teenager wanted to emphasize their style :) )

Unfortunately, my curls definitely doesn't look like Jon Snow's.

Till ending the high school I've always cut my hairs to very short (crew cut), then I had a short affair with dreadlocks (2 years) and then I've tried to grow a bit longer hairs.

During that time I've visited tons of barbers, but every single one of them has making me looks like a LEGO minifigure — I hated that.

My (not!)awesome haircut during most of my life.

After spending lots of money for a service that hasn't satisfied me I've finally decided to buy a hairdressing scissors, electric razor and a comb so I can try cut myself the way I really wanted.

After couple ups and downs I've mastered my way of cutting my hairs — still, I need my wife help with align hairs in the back of my head — but finally I'm totally satisfied with the effect.

A lesson to everyone

We should take this as an example of using 3rd party services in any part of our lives:

If service doesn't satisfies us with its outcome, and it's not hard for us to reproduce or improve it, then we should definitely try to do it by ourselves.

We can relate this to e.g. programming — if we're not satisfied with existing solutions/plugins/libraries/frameworks then we should try to create our own.

Stop paying for bad experiences, if something doesn't satisfy You — do not hesitate to change it or try to do it by yourself. In the end, it will pay off and filter market from black sheeps which really harms it and its clients.

We also have twin-like services like Plasso, Gumroad and Stripe, Amazon and eBay, Apple Music, Google Play Music and Spotify. And guess what? They're all operates well and have its own dedicated userbase which finds its own reasons behind choosing it over the competition.

Of course, some of these services was developed because their direct competitive company has one and they wanted to have their own version too, but some of them was created because its founders found that existing solutions was not executed properly for current market needs.

All this leads to market diversity so everyone can choose a service which suits them best and fulfills their needs.

So don't be so passive about bad services. Copy even from the best, improve to make them even better, then repeat.

And maybe one day Your service will be the best in its market field.

--ł.