🚀 Add to Chrome – It’s Free - YouTube Summarizer
Category: Business Strategy
Tags: AIAutomationBusinessStartupsValidation
Entities: A16ZAdam RobertsonAlexChatGPTClayG2GlassdoorGoogleGum LoopVertieY Combinator
00:00
AI has made it easier than ever to build a business, but 90% of businesses will fail because of one single thing. People just don't know how to come up with that 1% idea that makes people actually want to buy your product.
So, in this video, I'm going to break down my exact
00:15
framework for uncovering high potential AI software ideas. I'm going to show you how you can generate hundreds of ideas, validate 10 of them, and then launch at least one.
and we're going to do it all by leveraging publicly available insights right here on the internet using AI research assistants that saves you tons of time. Now, if you're new to
00:31
the channel, my name's Alex. I'm a surgeon and the founder of a bunch of AI companies, all of which have scaled to over 1 million in revenue in their first year.
And we're going to be covering five methods to validate our idea. So, hit that subscribe button and let's dive into the very first method on the list.
So, method number one is right at the
00:46
top of our funnel when we're starting with a blank canvas and have absolutely no idea what we're doing. And it's all about looking at pre-validated ideas.
And one of the best places for this, even if you don't want to raise VC money, is to go to Y Combinator's RFP list or look at the thesis page on a VC
01:02
website, like this AI agent thesis by the team at A16Z. So, as we can see from Y Combinator's request for proposals list, there are a bunch of things that seem to be on trend at the moment.
And the Y Combinator team have already researched these. And if you're looking at a different VC's website, they
01:17
probably got analysts who are looking and scanning the market for all of these different themes that are popping up all the time. And so this saves you a bunch of effort at the beginning when you're starting out by allowing you to quickly look through things that pop out.
Now, we can use AI here to help us, too. So, if we jump over into chat GPT, we can
01:32
grab our Y Combinator RFP list and then we can add in a prompt that gives chat GPT a little bit of information about us and our interests and what we're looking to achieve. So, for example, for me, I might say, "My name's Alex.
I'm a surgeon. I'm interested in building a business within the medical space.
01:48
Please use this Y Combinator RFP list to generate me a hundred ideas that I can apply into medicine that give me an unfair advantage. And the more specific I am here, the better.
So I might say I want to create something that revolutionizes surgical training or I want to create something that's a voice
02:04
agent for automating medical note-taking. And what you'll see is that chat GBT will output a bunch of ideas here.
Now the problem with chat GBT is it's a little bit basic for what we want. So, we're not interfacing with any customers here, and Chat GBT is kind of giving us pretty good, but relatively
02:19
vague ideas of what we should pursue, but at least we've now got a little bit of an idea about what we want to dive into. Okay, so method two is then all about social media listening.
The beauty of forums like Reddit is that you've got people discussing their problems around existing software or existing industries
02:35
all in the public domain. Now, what I used to do when I built some of my first companies would I would just live in a Reddit subreddit of something like, you know, medical training or AI and I'd look at the problems that people were having.
So, for example, one of my very first businesses that I set up was around medical exam preparation. And so,
02:51
I would sit in something like the USMLE or medical doctor subreddits as a bit of a lurker and look at the things that people were using and their complaints. So they might complain against an existing exam preparation company and say it wasn't very good or they might be asking for help preparing for an exam or
03:08
they weren't sure about something. And this gave me an idea for a business where if I could create it and then market it to those people, I knew they were probably pretty likely to firstly use it and then secondly to pay for it.
It also gave me an idea about how much people were actually spending on existing companies. So they would often
03:23
share how much they'd spent on existing tools out there and then it meant that I had a really good price point to come in at to either undercut these or to offer better features and charge higher. Now that used to take me hours and hours, but we can automate that with a couple of AI automation workflows.
So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to jump
03:39
into one of my favorite AI automation workflow tools which is called Gum Loop. And I'm going to use a workflow that I've already set up which is a social media listening one.
Now, basically what this does is it will allow us to go into a particular Reddit subreddit and it will scrape all of the conversations
03:55
around a particular topic. So, again, using our information from method one, identifying our kind of niche and our Y combinator RFP ideas, we could say something like go into the marketing subreddit and analyze what tools marketeteers are using for creating blog
04:10
posts or SEO or something like that. And then what this will do is it will scrape those reviews.
And then we can add in a step that uses OpenAI's API to summarize this. And then it will output this with a problem statement list based on our prompt.
So we might use a prompt that says something like identify the common
04:26
problems that people are talking about or identify the common frustrations that people have with a particular tool. And this is another great tip here.
When we think about the subreddits, we don't just want to go into the generic industry subreddits. We can also dive into competitor subreddits.
So, for example, if I was building a
04:43
microlearning service that competed against Cahoot, I might want to jump into Cahoot's subreddit or Quizzes' subreddit as the kind of big incumbents there and then scrape any frustrations customers might be having to think about how I'm going to position my product and the features we want to offer. So, now we've generated that in Gum Loop.
What
04:59
else can we do? Reddit's great, but often the people on there might just be using things a little bit socially or not paying for it or just be individuals.
What about if we want to start a B-2B AI company and really take things to the next level? One of the best places to go here is G2 reviews.
05:15
And this is where customers, typically enterprise customers, can review existing products online and all of those reviews are validated. So, you know it's coming from paying customers.
Again, I used to go through this all the time with some of our competitors at Vertie and analyze what features people liked, what they didn't like, and then
05:31
think how I could position Vertie to compete against those and go after those specific industries um of people who might be frustrated. Now, again, that just took absolutely ages.
So, again, we can set up an AI automation workflow where we're scraping those G2 reviews and pulling those into something like
05:47
Gum Loop or any other AI automation tool like N8N or anything you're happy using. Now, as a little regression here, if you're not that techy or you're not up to speed on AI workflows and agents just yet, and if you're not, do check out some of these videos that I've got on my channel looking at them in a little bit
06:02
more detail. If you're not, a really simple way to hack both methods 2 and method 3 here is to just take a screenshot of the G2 reviews or of a Reddit conversation and then upload that into chat GPT and ask ChatGpt to summarize some of the problems or
06:18
summarize the pros and cons of a competitor or of an industry and then ask ChatGpt to help you formulate the killer features and USPS of your own product. Now, method number four sticks on that same lines, but is probably more geared up to how you're going to actually reach out to customers and
06:34
potentially build out a service business here, right? So, the other thing that we can socially listen to and use these similar workflow scraping methods is then Google reviews for local businesses.
And what we can do here is we can set up an automation again in gum loop or we can also use clay for local businesses and we can scrape some of
06:51
their reviews and particularly look at businesses with negative reviews. Or we can go to tools like glass door where it gives feedback from employees and look at businesses that might be quite low in either employee scores or customer scores and then target them with a business idea that helps them improve
07:06
their customer service or their employee experience. and we know that those businesses have an existing problem and we can even use our scraped summarization of those reviews to send out an email to those companies and really drive that painoint home.
So, we might say something like, "Hey, I saw your Google reviews are down at the
07:21
moment and you've got a few customers complaining about your customer service. I wondered whether you'd be interested in an AI tool that can automate this for you.
Let me know if you're interested." And we can even link that into our gum loop or clay automation by having the AI generate that email using a custom prompt that takes the Google review data
07:38
and then maps it out automatically for you and puts it into an email. And that then brings us to the final method on our list now that we're collecting all this information that's publicly available on the internet from social media from Google and everywhere.
And now it's time to really dive into customer interviews. And what we can do here is we can actually go back into our
07:55
communities. And this might be Reddit, might be Facebook groups, which is a great one I've used before, where there are people engaging around a specific topic.
So it might be a Facebook group on marketing. And you can use chat GBT to search and ask what is the largest
08:10
community on Facebook for something like, you know, let's say marketing or sales and then it will point you in that direction. And this is a great strategy because again, you can start learning from those communities.
You can scrape off any positive or negative comments that are being posted there using scraping tools like Clayent or some of
08:27
the tools from Gum Loop. But one of the coolest things here is actually to become a part of those communities, offer helpful advice and engagement without being too businessorientated initially and then slowly introduce the idea that you're building something for that audience and see if you can organically bring people onto user
08:44
interviews that you can then conduct yourself. And there's a really quick example of this in action and the power of it.
Adam Robertson recently did a webinar with Clay's go-to market lead when he joined as a go-to market lead, he didn't actually go out and set up marketing automations or push sales.
08:59
What he did was he hung around in marketing and sales communities on Facebook and just spoke with loads and loads of people over a year to identify their problems and understand how Clay could be optimized and improved from a product point of view. So that then it was all about productled growth.
and
09:15
they've just raised an insane amount of money at a huge valuation all because their users love using the product and it solves a real need. Now, in the future, we can probably use AI tools to automate user interviews and user survey generation as well.
But for the moment, those are my top five methods for really
09:31
validating your ideas, going from that list of potentially a hundred on that Y combinator list mapped out in chat GPT through social listening down to individual user interviews to help you build your product. Now, I hope that's been really useful for you.
That's something that I've used to build 50 million plus valued companies and I hope
09:47
that you can put it into practice too. I've got another video on AI tools and automation.
I'll pop up over here. Thanks so much for watching and subscribing and I'll catch you again in the next one.
See you.