David (00:00)
That might very well be a tool in our... quiver.

an arrow in our quiver. I'm mixing analogies. It's a hammer in my quiver. Isn't that where you put yours?

Ilan (00:05)
Tool chest. Tool in the tool chest.

Hahaha! ⁓

David (00:13)
Hey, welcome to Prompt and Circumstance. My name's David. And this is the beginning of season two of our podcast where we're going to be exploring getting an actual product to market.

Ilan (00:17)
and I'm Ilan.

Wow, season two.

David (00:42)
Season two,

how far we've come.

Ilan (00:44)
All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about that, Why are we trying to show how to bring a product to market? How does that fit in with the overall ethos of our podcast?

David (01:01)
Yeah, well, you know, for a lot of product people and entrepreneurs, ⁓ you know, this, this whole AI tooling capability that we now have at our fingertips, it's really changing the game. And I think it, it would be great for us to build in public ⁓ and see where things are meeting the hype and where things fall short. So, ⁓ you know, both of us with our product experience, let's apply that.

Ilan (01:18)
Mm-hmm.

David (01:30)
where we're going to identify a problem to solve, identify the market, and then as we go through that process of addressing that market, we're going to want to be AI first. The ⁓ kinds of tools that we would use to accomplish all of the above, we would want to, all right, let's default to using an AI tool first and see how far we can get. Where do things fall short and where do we need to hand crank things?

the old-fashioned way.

Ilan (02:01)
Right. Yeah, I think that makes sense. The thing I would add there is that for product teams or product folks who are listening or watching here, you may not want to start your own thing. We're not even sure that we want to start our own thing long-term. know, both of us work full-time, but the goal here is really to be able to show you how AI tools

will be able to shortcut certain parts of the product development process for you. And we're going to learn along the way. So the real goal here is that we end up all having gotten better for this. And maybe David we'll be the first founder partnership to start a unicorn.

with just two people. But also maybe we'll make $5. And I think that if we're able to make $5 from a product that we create, that's

David (03:00)
Let's do it. Yeah.

You

Yeah, absolutely. you know, it doesn't have to be the case that ⁓ somebody applying similar methods is creating a brand new company. As a product person, you could totally have a new product that's zero to one. You could have a new feature that's part of an existing product that you are looking at how you can validate that as, as you, as you go through the process. So I think this is very ⁓ relevant.

Ilan (03:20)
Mm-hmm.

All right, so with that, we came into today, both having done a little bit of background research on some problem areas. And that's really what we're gonna focus on for the first episode of season two. is the first part of discovery, right? How do you find a problem that is worth solving? And in our case, this is green field, blue sky, whatever you wanna call it.

So, David, how did you go about generating some ideas on areas to think about?

Ilan (04:10)
This is a great time for me to tell you about our first sponsor for this week, Colab. Colab will help

go with your idea to the market, make sure that people actually want it. And then you can even get them to build that for you and hand over a product with your first paying customers.

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David (04:37)
All right, so what I did was I opened up deep research in GPT and I told it that I'm looking for some niche problems that I want to address or a different way of putting it, some problems to address in niche markets.

⁓ so the idea behind this is that, well, I, know, it could be easy to say, I want to help, ⁓ doctors in general. ⁓ but it's a lot easier to say, I want to help, you know, doctors in this situation, ⁓ who have these kinds of attributes. Yeah. Because this way it's a lot easier to find somebody with those attributes who have that particular issue or not, or maybe they don't have that issue and then you can just stop and, and pivot. So, ⁓ that's what I did.

GPT was kind enough to give me this report with 17,000 words, this 36 page report with 10 problems. so what I had actually asked for was not only a list of 10 potential problems, but also some ideas on how this might be addressed and why the existing solutions aren't so good. I went to...

Fairly broad with my approach to it. How about you? did what did you do?

Ilan (05:58)
I went deeper on a couple of areas that I cheated, I've already been thinking about. And so what I did is I just gave you two bullet points of what I'm thinking about,

So the first one is related to this problem of teachers and the amount of time that they spend marking assignments.

And there's what I have observed is that a number of teachers are now using chat GPT to mark assignments. had done a lot of research a few years ago about time savings for teachers. And this is just a general problem that

many teachers face is that they are overworked and they are looking for ways to save themselves time.

David (06:54)
so are is there a subset of teachers like maybe those who teach language versus those who teach math or science or music?

Ilan (07:02)
Yeah. So where I focused was on, teachers who need to mark, subjectively. So that would be language. So an English teacher marking essays or a French teacher marking a, you know, a short answer French assignment where there are some objective criteria, like, you know, how many grammar mistakes did you make?

But generally they need to apply their subjective reasoning to that marking and it's a lot more difficult. When I did research on this, when I talked to math teachers, the science teachers, they generally didn't mention marking as a problem area for them. They're like, I get that done in an hour after work every day, it's fine.

David (07:56)
Yeah.

Ilan (07:57)
It was really these language teachers, English, languages, history, ⁓ who tended to have ⁓ this observation that they're spending a lot of time marking. So I had actually built a product, I've begun validating it with my ICP. ⁓ But as I was doing that, I began talking to other folks.

outside of this area just about the application. And something that came up was, well, doesn't this have adjacent capabilities? What about somebody who's studying for the bar exam and they need to mark their essay? People pay thousands of dollars to have a person mark their practice essays for the bar exam.

David (08:50)
I think that's

a really good signal about willingness to pay, right? Like, you know, it's one thing to say that, yeah, I have this problem and it bothers me. It's another to say that I attempted to solve this with money because you can go in there and say, I can either solve it better and you can pay the same amount or I can solve it, you know, just as good with a lower rate of pay.

Ilan (08:54)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

So what that got me thinking is that maybe, maybe the market is not

language teachers and ⁓ history teachers, social science teachers. Maybe the market is anyone who has some kind of long form. ⁓

text that they need to evaluate in a consistent way and that the product itself is actually a platform ⁓ that could be white labeled to anybody where ⁓ it could be pre-trained with their materials and then become ⁓ the bar exam. ⁓

David (09:58)
Mm-hmm.

Ilan (10:02)
marker, could become the case study tool, it could become the tool for teachers, ⁓ and that the actual technology is that underlying tool which can be easily, fine-tuned for each of these capabilities.

David (10:14)
Yeah,

that's quite the revelation. I think ⁓ it's great because ⁓ it does provide a fairly crisp definition of the problem ⁓ while not limiting your market to be too narrow. ⁓ What comes to mind for me, because I wrote my GMAT ⁓ and part of that includes an essay.

And let me tell you, people are willing to pay for like Kaplan or other kinds of companies to provide them with the tools to prep for these exams. So that's really cool. What's your second one?

Ilan (10:54)
That's right.

The second one is very, very

for those of you who don't know me, ⁓ I'm an avid

You know, I've been biking a lot, uh, know, mountain biking, road riding, et cetera, for going on, uh, 25 years now.

David (11:15)
Is it it is it and it's both right is both mountain biking and road. I find that people tend to gravitate towards one or the other.

Ilan (11:19)
That's right.

mean, I can, we could, I was going to say we could have an entire podcast. I used to have an entire podcast about this. So,

David (11:23)
you

Ilan (11:29)
so the problem is

there's this very small niche of those people who like to have a custom There's a market of custom frame builders around the world you go to them and they will build a bike just for you.

David (11:48)
And what's the benefit of having a custom frame? Is it like a custom suit? just fits your body better and so it's more ergonomic?

Ilan (11:55)
That is certainly one of the benefits. I would say that a custom frame builder would probably position that as the main benefit. ⁓ I think that the main benefit is that everyone else who sees your bike, who knows what they're looking at, is gonna look at your bike and be like, wow, you have a custom bike. That's really cool. It's a status symbol, just like a custom suit

David (12:18)
It's a status symbol. I see.

I see. Okay.

Ilan (12:25)
in my own life, I've gone through phases where I think that I would like a custom frame and it is obscenely difficult to find who's out there, who's a good fit for the type of bike that you're looking for. ⁓ what are the costs because they vary widely. There are custom frame builders who will make you a frame for about

you know, $2,000, which may sound like a lot to some people, but if you go to your local bike shop and you ask how much is a medium high-end frame, it'll be about $2,000. $2,000. Yeah. 2000 Canadian, uh, maybe 2,500 Canadian, 2000 us. Um, and then there are, there's this, uh, one, one custom frame builder in Australia called Bastion

David (13:03)
2000 you said okay, yeah, and that's 2000 Canadian Mm-hmm Okay, all right

Ilan (13:20)
Their frames start around $10,000 US.

David (13:24)
That was around the price mark that I was thinking. now I like to bike, but I wouldn't put myself anywhere close to the category of being an avid cyclist. ⁓ But thinking about the price range of some of the avid level gear, I would have expected five figures.

Ilan (13:46)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, they easily go into five figures. the, I've gone a long time on this, as you can tell, as a subject that is near and dear to my heart. But the idea is some kind of discovering some kind of solution to this problem of people who are looking for custom frames, maybe at a certain price point.

and people who make custom frames who are looking for more customers.

David (14:21)
Yeah, well, it might not be a big TAM in terms of the number of people, but you know, the price per person might be higher than some of these other ones that GPT generated on my list. And so, you overall at like a dollar figure level, the TAM might be just as big and not bigger, I would argue. So, all right, let's dive into what GPT generated here.

Ilan (14:30)
Mm-hmm.

Ilan (14:51)
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David (15:30)
And so I took, I took the lazy, ⁓ no brain approach to it, which is just, they just do my thinking for me. ⁓ so, ⁓ it went out and, and identified, ⁓ these, these top 10, ⁓ problems to, to address. And, what I'm thinking of doing is just sort of vibe evaluating these at a, at a high level. And then if any of them, ⁓ seem interesting, then we can dive a little bit deeper into the report.

What do think?

Ilan (16:01)
Sounds great.

David (16:02)
The first problem is about pet care coordination, targeting tech savvy pet parents. That's interesting.

The next one is about addressing remote worker isolation. So distributed teams and freelancers who might, I assume, feel a little bit lonely. So maybe solving that problem. The third one is personal sustainability tracking. So for people who are eco-conscious, helping them to perhaps, you know, make sure that what they are doing is sustainable.

Ilan (16:34)
⁓ David, know, one thing that I wonder as you're going through these, are there, at the end of the day, I think that if you're going to be working in a problem space, especially a greenfield problem space, shouldn't it be something that interests you, you know, to which you have some kind of ⁓

connection. I mentioned it as you got to that personal sustainability tracking. I both of us are concerned about the direction of sustainability in the world. We've joked before that probably starting a podcast about AI tools was maybe not the vehicle to or water scarcity. But yeah, so I just I wonder if ⁓

David (17:15)
You mean you don't want more wildfires? ⁓

Yeah

Ilan (17:27)
as your vibe evaluating these, if there are any that jump out as something that, you know, you either have like a personal connection to, or where you know a little bit about the space. Like you mentioned pet coordination, you know, both of us have pets. That's something that I think both of us can at least bring a little bit of personal knowledge into.

David (17:54)
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And especially for people who are looking to spin up a whole company. You got to make sure that you care about what you do. Because, you know, the the expectation is that there's going to be some really difficult times. And all that you have to keep you going is the fact that you care about solving this problem. And that's a really good point. I was thinking of going through this just out of out of interest to see where you know, the kinds of stuff that

that GPT generated. And then yeah, let's, ⁓ I'll go through it quickly. about that? Yeah. So the next one is micro influencer management. So if it's, Hey, look, small content creators, that's us. ⁓ So I guess it's about managing, you know, their whole social channels. Next one is family caregiver coordination. So for maybe those who are taking care of the elderly or disabled in their family and, ⁓ you know, they got to do it all themselves.

Ilan (18:24)
Mm-hmm.

Sounds good.

haha

David (18:51)
Alright, next one is college application planning. for high school students who are college bound or perhaps the parents of those students looking to help take care of maybe some coordination around that. Solo travel safety and community. So for people who are traveling by themselves, perhaps especially young female travelers, safety is a concern ⁓ and maybe this is a way to help them address that. ⁓ Renter maintenance tracking. So...

⁓ for renters that are in small-scale housing. I don't know what this is referring to. I don't know what problem that could be referring to.

Ilan (19:28)
I've

actually ⁓ worked with a group. I've mentored a group in a course who tackled this problem. It's actually a big one that ⁓ maintenance software for landlords is really geared towards the macro landlords who own thousands of units. And ⁓ these landlords who own, you know, here it says fewer than 10 units. ⁓ You know, there are many landlords out there who own like one, two,

David (19:48)
I see.

Ilan (19:58)
up to 10 units and they don't really have a good solution. They use a lot of offline solutions, know, just WhatsApp to coordinate. ⁓ When is the maintenance happening? Like there's a problem. When is the maintenance happening, follow up, et cetera. And it can be quite frustrating for the renters if the landlord is not super communicative ⁓ because they just, you know, there's whatever, you know, your toilet is clogged or your toilet's broken and you just have no idea when you're going to have a toilet again.

David (20:06)
Mmm.

Right.

Yeah, that makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I'd imagine it sounds like it's going to be a kludge of spreadsheets and, ⁓ you know, I want to say Rolodex, but basically like Google Contacts, right, to know who's a call for what situation. Yep, makes sense. All right, so next one is Urban Gardening Network. So for urban gardening enthusiasts. So for those who live in some cities that have, you know, certain green spaces for people to garden.

Ilan (20:35)
Mm-hmm

Right.

David (20:56)
Maybe this has to do with finding other people in your community or solving some problems related to that. ⁓ Side hustle craft business management. So for indie craft sellers, so presumably people on like say Etsy ⁓ who make their own little trinkets or little hats or knit, that kind of stuff. So that's interesting. ⁓ There are two things that I personally want to add to our list to consider.

⁓ So the first one has to do with ⁓ tracking, not so much tracking, the problem is that ⁓ the food that we eat, the things that we consume, sometimes have things that we don't want to consume. So for example, artificial sweeteners. That's something that I personally don't want to consume. There's some ⁓ adverse health effects that might be associated with those that I want to avoid.

And so ⁓ another example would be some artificial colors are associated with elevating the risk of cancer. And so those things, for example, I want to make sure that I avoid. what I have to do today is manually read the entire ingredients of every single thing, new thing that I pick up at the store. And ⁓ it ends up being time consuming and my family moves on and I'm just left standing there in the aisle.

Ilan (22:13)
Hmm.

David (22:23)
⁓ So it becomes time consuming for me.

Ilan (22:26)
May I add to that as well? ⁓ You know, both of us have young children and that's also a concern when you have a very young child, right? You need to be ⁓ super, super careful about what, once they start eating on their own, what are you feeding them? ⁓ You know, what is in there? What is acceptable? I remember having this problem when, ⁓

My, my kid was young, that there was no good way of tracking and, and understanding what were the products that were acceptable, ⁓ given, you know, my, my goals parenting or, or the restrictions that I felt, were appropriate, for my child. So there's also potentially some other, ⁓ use cases or other markets there. ⁓ right. Other.

other ICPs.

David (23:23)
Yeah, absolutely. ⁓ You know, when I think about artificial colors, I'm thinking for my kids as well, because something like Allura Red, also known as Red 40 is associated with attention deficit issues for kids if they consume it very young. So absolutely. And you'd be surprised how many candy products that target children use

that coloring, upsetting. So I would like to make it easy for people to simply avoid those

Ilan (24:01)
I'll add as well with some evidence, right? Because you can easily find people who will tell you good or not good online, right? With absolutely no evidence, ⁓ nothing behind their argument other than I say that you should be doing this.

David (24:09)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah. Like, I don't know what xanthan gum is. Move on. Right. When it's perfectly inert. Yeah. So that's a good point to be able to ⁓ give trust on the judgment of it.

So ⁓ anyway, I think this is an interesting start on the GPT side. ⁓ As we dive into some of these, I'll be curious where it landed. So here we're talking about the eco-conscious consumers. Maybe let's have a look at that, at the personal sustainability tracking and see what it came up with.

All right, so it looks like the problem is that environmentally conscious people struggle to measure and improve their personal sustainability impact. Things like carbon footprint, waste reduction, or sustainable product choices in an easy and motivating way.

Ilan (25:08)
Yeah, this is, you know, when I was reading through something that jumped out, it's highlighted here, 81 % of global consumers feel companies should help improve the environment. This is one thing that is near and dear to my heart, the fact that there's a lot of emphasis on personal sustainability when all of us could switch to

⁓ You know super low consumption light bulbs and drive an electric car and it still won't make a dent in the overall emissions in the world But I think one of the things that came out here is the kind of green intent Consumer the person who's trying to find the companies who are doing the right thing ⁓ to make better ⁓ choices right? vote with their dollar on

David (25:59)
Mm-hmm.

Ilan (26:01)
which products ⁓ they should use and in that way maybe influence the broader private market ⁓ towards ⁓ being more sustainable.

David (26:16)
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. ⁓ The convenience factor that this report mentions, I think ⁓ is a key part of all this. You could, in theory, while standing at the store, maybe after looking at the ingredients of a product, then look up the ⁓ ESG report for that company. Yeah, just open up your browser and navigate to the investor relations side of the-- Right, you're not doing that.

Ilan (26:43)
Mm-hmm.

David (26:45)
⁓ Yeah, I think that's a really good point that if we are able to surface this information and make it more conveniently accessible, ⁓ then that could make a difference for people. What's interesting here is that there's some good citations ⁓ that the report has provided. And so if we wanted to...

look at the actual source and not just trust AI, willy nilly. We have that option here. All right. So moving on. So here it's identified the ideal customer persona. So it's saying somebody with a green intent living in North America between 20 and 45, middle class.

I think it's speculating. There's no citations here justifying that. So I had asked GPT to look at what are the current ways that people are solving for each of these problems. And it looks like there are some apps like Joulebug and Oroeco. Is that how say it?

Ilan (27:48)
I ⁓ Okay

David (27:49)
Oro Eko. Okay, I think I see

it now. Oroeco. All right. Where they are trying to gamify sustainable actions. Okay. ⁓ Anyway, so I think that's interesting that, found these apps ⁓ as things that are trying to solve the current problem. And so if we were to dive into this, I'd be curious to learn more about, ⁓ are the people using that?

Like what are they dissatisfied with, for example?

Ilan (28:20)
Yeah, I think that it's interesting though, at a high level reading through this, the ⁓ thing that jumped out at me is that there are many people trying to solve this problem and yet ⁓ there's not a great uptake on those solutions. so, ⁓

a any effort in this area probably is reserved for that kind of like small scale, know, very targeted, very niche user ⁓ area rather than something that is like a bigger market kind of ⁓ kind of app.

Nothing wrong with that, but that's what jumped out at me, right? If like lots of people have tried and they've all failed, yeah, you need to do more research on why that is, but it also kind of tells you that maybe there's like not a there there.

David (29:15)
Alright So here the next section is about potential solutions. And this is again, part of the prompt that I gave it is to speculate on, hey, what might be a lightweight software application

that could help address this? So it's talking about a personal carbon and waste tracker that people could use to log their daily sustainable actions. ⁓ I don't know. ⁓ Next would be a green rewards and marketplace. It's okay, I guess. And by the way, with each of these suggestions, I told it to come up with a business model as well. Right? I mean, it's one thing to address the problem. The other is also, hey, let's find a way to monetize. So ⁓

Talking about affiliate revenue model, that's kind of meh. And let's see one more here. Community challenge and coaching app. Okay. So an example would be a 30 day zero plastic I guess this would take advantage of maybe social networks where it's like, hey, I recycled, you know.

Ilan (30:19)
He

David (30:20)
12 cartons today. How about you?

Ilan (30:25)
Right, use shame as a...

David (30:27)
⁓

Yeah, that's right. You better go out and buy some cartons and just pour out the content so that you can recycle it some more.

Ilan (30:38)
Right.

I do think that, ⁓ this highlights the possibility of using AI for doing some of your market research. Right. We've talked about this a little bit in our, ⁓ deep research episode. ⁓ but what are the advantages that you can see in general is cited.

metrics around the market, you get some competitive intelligence as well. You can start to understand, as I said earlier, is there a there there? ⁓ And the deep research application has done some of that pre thinking ⁓ for you so that you can take that and like really apply your own critical

to these problems.

Ilan (31:29)
All right, David, so where do we go next?

David (31:32)
Let's each take one idea and let's dive a little bit deeper into the discovery aspect of that. And I think it'd be great for us to use an AI powered tool that we haven't previously used.

Ilan (31:46)
Very cool. So we're each going to come next week with one AI tool that we're going to discuss here on the podcast and tell you how it helped us or didn't to speed along our discovery process.

David (32:01)
Yeah, well, I look forward to learning about your choice of a tool. All right, we'll catch you on the next one. Don't forget to like and subscribe, give us a rating and review. And you can find us on the socials at @pandcpodcast. See ya.

Ilan (32:05)
Same.

See you next week.