Watch Strangers Use It

Why it matters

There is a specific, useful kind of discomfort in watching someone else try to use your product and get stuck on something you thought was obvious. You already know exactly how your thing works, because you built it - which is exactly why you cannot see its confusing parts on your own anymore. Strangers can, immediately, just by trying to use it.

This lesson asks you to sit through five of those sessions, live over a call or screen recording, or recorded and sent to you, and just watch. Do not jump in to explain. Do not defend a design choice. Write down every place someone pauses, asks “wait, what do I do here,” or clicks the wrong thing. That discomfort is data, and it is some of the most honest feedback you will get in this whole path.

Out of everything you notice across five sessions, you pick the top three problems - the ones that came up more than once, or that stopped someone cold - and you fix them within 48 hours. Not a full redesign, just those three things. Then you keep going with outreach. Watching users and fixing fast, in short cycles, is the actual mechanism behind the Launch gate: it is how you turn strangers who tried your thing into strangers who actually used it.

What to watch for

Eric Migicovsky - How to Talk to Users

• Watch for how the questions shift once someone has actually used your product, compared to the earlier interviews where you were only testing the problem.
• Notice how he asks about a specific moment of confusion rather than a general opinion of the experience.
• Skip anything covered earlier about pre-launch interviews; focus on the post-launch angle for this re-watch.

Start with Claude

After each session, bring Claude your raw notes and let it help you find the real pattern instead of guessing which fixes matter most.

I just watched 5 strangers use my product for the Launch stage of Make First. Here are my raw notes from each session - where they paused, what confused them, what they said out loud: [paste your notes].

Don't tell me what to fix yet. First, ask me questions to help me separate a problem that showed up in multiple sessions from something only one person hit. Then help me narrow it down to the top 3 real fixes, and for each one, ask me what the smallest change would be that actually solves it, rather than a bigger redesign.