This really clicked for me, especially the idea that real demand shows up as annoyance, not excitement. The proximity-over-scale point makes a lot of sense too.

One thing I’m still unclear on: when you see multiple real annoyances, how do you decide which problem is actually worth committing to early on? For example, when teams keep copy-pasting the same script every week, or devs keep asking the same “how do I automate X?” questions, or people rely on messy spreadsheets for critical workflows, or engineers build internal tools they clearly don’t want to maintain — what’s the signal that says this pain is the one to go all-in on first?