A worked example

Three candidates from Lessons 1-3:

Candidate A: A Discord moderation bot for kid mods without credit cards (Mateo's idea from Lesson 1).

• Reach? 5. Mateo is on the same server as Sam.
• Frequency? 4. Spam hits the server every couple of days.
• Buildability? 4. v1 is auto-mute users who post the same message 3 times in 30 seconds. One to two weekends on Cloudflare Workers.

Total: 13.

Candidate B: Tara's college essay tracker for Priya.

• Reach? 5. Priya lives at home.
• Frequency? 5. Daily during the October-January application window.
• Buildability? 3. v1 is a Notion template with a custom tag system. Two weekends.

Total: 13.

Candidate C: A Spotify recommendation improvement for Maya (we called this fake-pattern #2 in Lesson 3).

• Reach? 4. Maya is her cousin.
• Frequency? 5. Daily.
• Buildability? 1. Beating Spotify's recommendation algorithm? Years. Not at 13.

Total: 10. Candidate C is out.

Two candidates tie at 13. The tiebreaker is which one came out of you fastest. Tara had to think for 20 minutes about Candidate A. Candidate B came out in 90 seconds. B wins.

(In real life, Tara picked B. She built it. Priya was the first user, free, because Priya is her sister. The second user, a friend of Priya's, paid $15. By Module 12, Tara had 23 high-school seniors paying $15 each in application season. She rebuilt it in Module 11 as a yearly subscription. She'll be back in November.)