Fake #2: the customer who doesn't actually care

This one is sneaky. You have a real name, a real situation, you've watched them. The problem looks real. But when you push on whether they actually care about fixing it, they don't.

• "Sarah, 17, sometimes forgets to drink water." → Sarah does sometimes forget. Sarah does not lose sleep over it. Sarah has not downloaded any of the 200 free water-tracker apps that already exist. The problem is real. The pain is not.
• "My cousin Maya wishes Spotify's recommendation algorithm was better." → Real wish. But Maya does not spend any energy on fixing it. She just listens to what Spotify gives her. No pain, no purchase.
• "Kids at my school complain about cafeteria food." → They complain. They also have zero agency to fix it, and they're not the ones writing the checks. The pain is real, the customer is the wrong one (the customer would be the school district).

The test: ask one question.

"What is the person ALREADY doing, badly, to try to solve this themselves?"

If the answer is "nothing," the problem is not painful enough for them to pay.

People only pay to make a problem go away if they're already trying to make it go away by themselves first, and failing.

The signal: painful problems show up as bad workarounds. A sticky note on the monitor. A janky spreadsheet. Three apps stitched together. A hand-edited PDF. The bad workaround IS the proof the problem is real.

If your candidate has no workaround, write down a new candidate.

A learner once thought her sister had a "notifications problem." She watched for a week. Her sister did nothing about notifications. She just ignored them. No workaround. No pain. The learner almost moved on, but kept watching. She noticed her sister was using five different apps to track her school clubs. Volleyball schedule in one. Theater rehearsal in another. Student council in a third. She missed events constantly. She had built a hand-written paper calendar to consolidate them, which she rewrote every Sunday night, by hand, in pen.

The paper calendar was the workaround. The workaround was the signal. The learner built a single-page school-club consolidator. Her sister paid for it.

Got past Fake #2? Two more.