Method 1: Watch one person for a week

Pick one of the two candidates you circled in Lesson 1. The friction person.

For one week, watch them. Specifically, notice:

• When they get frustrated. Their face, their breath, the swear word they mutter.
• When they pull out their phone to look something up because the answer wasn't where they expected.
• When they say "ugh" or "this always takes forever."
• The tiny workarounds they invent. A sticky note on their monitor. A janky Google Doc. A spreadsheet that breaks every Tuesday. The 12 tabs open just to do one thing.

Write each frustration down. Do not analyze. Just write it. One line per friction point.

By the end of the week you'll have between 5 and 20 little notes. Some are nothing. Some are the seed of a real product.

Here's the deep reason this works: people are bad at telling you their problems. They are very good at showing you their problems, if you're willing to sit there and watch.

Ask Priya what her problem with college apps is, and she'd say "the essays." Watch Priya do college apps for one Saturday, and you see something completely different.

Here's what Tara actually saw:

Priya didn't have an essay problem. Priya wrote essays well. The problem was that Priya was applying to 12 different schools. Each school had its own portal, with different prompt wording, different character limits, different submission instructions. Priya was juggling 12 browser tabs and 12 Google Docs and could not remember which essay was for which school. I watched her paste the wrong essay into the wrong school's portal three separate times in one Saturday. She caught two of them. She is almost certainly going to find out in March that she did not catch the third. She has a spreadsheet to track which essays are "in progress" vs "final" vs "submitted." The spreadsheet broke on Tuesday because she couldn't remember which version was latest. She rewrote the spreadsheet from scratch. Took her 40 minutes.

Tara's idea was not "an AI essay coach." It was a single dashboard for tracking 12 college essays across 12 portals, with one source of truth for which essay belongs to which prompt. Different product. Much smaller. Much more specific. Priya would have paid for it the moment she saw it.

The only reason Tara got there was that she watched.

How to actually do this in real life:

• Pick the person. If you live with them, easy. If not, find a reason to be near them ("hey can I sit in your room while I study?" works).
• Open notes on your phone. When you spot friction, type one line, put the phone away. Don't interrupt.
• Don't talk to them about it during the week. The watching is the data. The conversation comes later, with Coach Reya.
• Sunday night, look at your notes. Cluster the ones that are about the same thing. The biggest cluster is your candidate problem.

What if you can't physically watch them? Then go to Method 2.