Wright
Module I Overview · Coach Reya · 3-5 hours

Module 1 — Find an idea worth shipping

Coach: Reya Time budget: 3 to 5 focused hours (a weekend if you move, a week if you wander)

What you ship at the end of this module

One paragraph. About 120 words. It names a real person, describes one painful thing in their life, and ends with a one-sentence guess at the thing you might build for them.

That paragraph is your idea brief. It lives at idea_brief.md in your project folder.

It is also the seed of the next 11 modules. Every later coach either builds on this paragraph or sends you back to fix it.

Most people skip this step. They start coding before they know who they're coding for. They build something nobody wanted and then wonder why nobody wanted it.

A brief written by a 14-year-old who actually thought about it beats a Stanford MBA's pitch deck about a market the MBA can't describe in plain language. We have seen this happen, repeatedly, in this program.

Why customer first, not product first

A real builder thinks at three levels, in this order:

  1. The person. A specific human, with a name.
  2. The problem. The painful thing in their life.
  3. The product. The thing you'd build to fix it.

The order is the entire game. Customer first. Problem second. Product third. Skip the customer and you build for nobody.

This module trains the customer-first move. Once you've done it once, you have it for life. It is the single most-reused skill in the whole 12-module program.

The four lessons in this module

  1. What counts as a real idea. Why "an app for fitness" is not an idea. Why "a workout tracker for my older sister Maya, age 17, who runs cross-country" is.
  2. How to find problems in the wild. Three ways to look for problems. One of them requires courage. That one is the strongest.
  3. How to spot a fake idea. The four most common fake patterns, and how to catch one in your own list before you waste a month on it.
  4. How to pick between three candidates. A 3-question scoring test. No coin flips. No "I just feel like this one."

Each lesson is 15 to 25 minutes of reading plus a short exercise. The exercises are not optional. The exercises are where the actual learning happens. Reading without doing the exercise is like reading a recipe and never cooking.

Then: Coach Reya

After the four lessons, you copy Coach Reya's prompt into Claude Code. She asks you 12 questions. She does not write the brief for you.

She is hard to fool. If you try to skip a question with "I don't know," she rephrases and asks again. That is on purpose. The 60 minutes you spend with her is the most leveraged hour in the whole program.

Then: the checkpoint

Five questions. You answer in your own words. Each question maps to one lesson. Miss Q3, the checkpoint sends you back to Lesson 2.

When you pass, you mark Module 1 complete. Module 2 unlocks. Coach Lin is next.

What you need before you start

Three things:

  • A builder tool installed on your computer. Three good options: Claude Code (claude.com/download), Codex (chatgpt.com/codex), or Antigravity IDE (antigravity.google.com). Lesson 1 compares all three and helps you pick. None of these is the regular Claude or ChatGPT chatbot — those are not what builders use.
  • A notes app or a paper notebook. You will write things down.
  • 30 to 90 minutes of attention. Coach Reya works best when you're not also watching TikTok, eating, or in a group chat. Quiet room. Closed door. Phone face-down.

What this module does NOT teach

It does not teach you to build anything. No code. No website. No app. Building starts in Module 3.

It also does not teach you "validation," which is a startup word that gets messy. It teaches you to find an idea pointing at a real human with a real problem. That is the prerequisite for validation. Validation comes later.

What your parent will check

When your parent reads your idea brief, they look for four things:

  1. A real, specific person. Not "high school students." Not "kids who like coding." A name. "My cousin Maya, 13, who teaches herself piano on TikTok."
  2. A painful enough problem that the person already tries to fix it badly. "Maya has 14 tabs open hunting for chord progressions" is real. "Maya wishes she played piano better" is not.
  3. A small product guess at the end. One sentence. Not a feature list. "A Chrome extension that pulls chord progressions from any YouTube piano video Maya watches."
  4. You have a real answer to "how do you know that's a problem for Maya?" ("I watched her do it three Saturdays in a row" beats "I asked her once.")

They are not grading your writing. They are checking that you actually thought about Maya before you started imagining the product.

Begin

When you're ready, open LESSON_1.md. It's 20 minutes.

Coach Reya is waiting at the end of Lesson 4.

— Coach Reya (Module 1, Wright)