Method 2: Sit in their community

For most people your age, "where your candidate spends time" means a specific Discord server, a specific subreddit, a specific corner of TikTok, or one group chat.

The job: pick the one online place where your candidate actually spends time. Not where you wish they spent time. Where they actually do, every day.

Then read the place. Especially the negative posts. People complain in communities. Complaints are gold.

Three examples from previous Wright learners:

• r/Parenting. One learner read this for 60 minutes and noticed that 1 in 5 posts was about screen-time apps that "didn't work because my kid found a workaround." She built a screen-time tool specifically for parents whose kids had already beaten the existing apps.

• r/csMajors. A 17-year-old read this and noticed that the most-upvoted complaints were about coding interview prep feeling "fake." He built a tiny tool for college students to do code review on each other's real projects. Real practice, not LeetCode.

• A Roblox developer Discord. A 12-year-old hung out in a Roblox creator Discord and noticed the same five questions came up every week about monetization. She built a one-page Notion template specifically for new Roblox creators. She charged $3. By Module 12 she'd sold 70.

How to actually do this:

• 60 minutes. One community. Sort by Top of Week or Top of Month.
• Look for posts that start with "Anyone else..." or "Why does X always..." or "I hate that..."
• Write down the top 5 complaints you see.
• Circle the ones that name a specific tool or workflow. "Why does Notion always [specific behavior]" is gold. "Why is school so boring" is not, for our purposes.

The best communities have between 5,000 and 500,000 members and are about a narrow topic. A subreddit with 50 members is too small to see patterns. A subreddit with 5 million members is too broad to see anything specific.

If you have a community in mind, go now. If not, Method 3 is the fallback.