Turning Expertise into simple products

2024/07/08

I've been looking to invest in real estate for over a year now. Last week, I visited an apartment that required a lot of work to be renovated. Believe it or not, there was no bathroom — it had to be created from scratch. I don't even want to know what the former tenant was doing for showers!

The thing is, I know nothing about renovations or real estate. I discussed this with a friend who has experience in renovations and house flipping. I asked, 'How do you know the things you're supposed to know?'

This is exactly my issue: How can I gather just enough knowledge to make a significant investment?

We discussed how ChatGPT can help collect basic knowledge, but I wasn't convinced. We're talking real money here! My concern was that an AI language model might have common knowledge, but what about the specifics that only experts know?

I wanted to get it right. I also don't want to fall in the fallacy of never having enough data and do nothing. Podcasts, blog posts, tips, interviews, Youtube videos, all the info I need is already out there.

Then it hits me.

What if I were able to scan through hours of podcasts and thousands of blog posts to collect everything I am supposed to know on real estate and renovations without spending hours of my time ?

What if I were able to distill all these tips, compare point of views, capture processes and produce a < 5 pages summary ?

Best of all: I know how to do such a thing with AI.

Then, I realized: we can do the same thing for a lot of domains and people are already filling the OpenAI GPTs store with customized assistants.

Yet, the chat assistant-first user interface misses something big: How does the novice user know the questions to be asked ?

I think there's a great opportunity to build really simple products with expertise baked-in by focusing on bringing a novice user up to speed on a specific topic (and still provide a chat interface for later interactions when the user will know what to ask).

Looking back on the domains I once was a novice, there's some interesting situations to explore:

• Having your first child
• Buying your first home
• Buying a used car
• Buying customized website or software
• Building your first business

Basically any situation where the user is novice and does not have enough money to get high-ticket consulting services...

Something to think about, no ?