Validate Your Online Business Idea Using AI and Market Research

What if you could see the future as an  entrepreneur? What if you could know   if your business was going to work before you  ever launched it? Before you ever spent money,   before you ever took the risk and look  like an idiot to all your friends? Well,  

that's exactly what I'm going to show you today.  If you ever wanted to start an online business,   software, app, website, agency,  anything that lives on the internet,   but you didn't want to jump in with both feet  before knowing if there was a market for it,  

if there was demand for it, if you could be  better than your competitors. I'm going to   show you all of the tools that I use on a daily  basis to validate these business ideas before   Also, if you're just now meeting me for the first  time, my name is Chris Kerner. I'm a married dad  

of four living in Dallas Fort Worth. I have  started about 80 businesses over the last 16   years. Three of those have been worth over $10  million and seven of those have been worth over   $1 million. I am addicted to starting and growing  businesses and this channel is engineered to share  

my learnings, experiences, and tips and tricks  with all of you. Okay, let's start by listing   off all the tools I plan to use for this video  and then I'll show you how to use the tools in   the most strategic way so you can get the most out  of them. Let's start with the AI tools. Chad GPT,  

Claude, Perplexity, and then Manis. In my  opinion, those are the four best AI tools   if you're looking for a tool that can be agentic,  which means it can act as an agent. it can act on   your behalf to go surf the internet and bring  you back the most relevant information. Now,  

keep in mind that these AI tools are  only as good as the prompts I give them,   and they're only as good as the places I tell  them to go and extract data from. You're going   to see that my prompts are very specific, and I'm  going to tell them to go look at specific websites  

that are key to this whole thing working. Okay.  Now, the nonAI tools I plan to use will be Pikfu,   Gummy Search, and Reddit. Now, keep in mind,  you don't need an audience or a lot of money   to do any of these things I'm about to show  you. And almost all of these services offer  

free trials because we even want to mitigate  our risk while trying to mitigate our risk   as we learn which opportunities out there are  most likely to be successful for us. Okay. Now,   for the purposes of this experiment, the business  that I'm going to try to validate or invalidate  

is a direct competitor to QuickBooks or Zero.  Now, QuickBooks is a bookkeeping software that   you've probably heard of. I can't stand it. and  ZeroFreshbooks slash all of the other QuickBooks   competitors out there just don't seem to do it  for me either. So, by the end of this video,  

I'm going to use building a direct QuickBooks  competitor as an example of how you can validate   or invalidate an online business idea before  ever launching. And you can apply these exact   same principles to whatever idea it is that you  may have. Also, I know you're going to love this  

video, so please hit subscribe before you forget  so you can see more stuff like this in your feed.   All right, let's start with the prompt that I  plan to use across some of these AI tools. Now,   whether you're listening to this or watching this,  I'm going to go ahead and paste this exact prompt  

in the show notes below, so you don't need to  subscribe or anything to see it. Okay. Now,   I could paste this prompt across all of the AI  tools out there, including Grock and Gemini,   but I think I'm just going to get a lot of  redundant responses here. I want to use Manis  

because it does a great job of acting as an agent  for me. It's agentic. I want to use chat GPT5 for   the same reason. Now, I am a little let down  by ChatGpt 5, but I've noticed when I ask it to   employ its chat GPT agentic features, it does. If  I don't, then it won't because OpenAI is driving  

to save money on their processing costs. I'm going  to use Claude Opus 4.1 because I honestly think it   is the best model in the world right now. And I'm  going to use Perplexity because it does a good job   at displaying large tables of data and it works  really fast. and I'm an impatient man. Okay, so  

let's go to Perplexity first. I'm not going to use  deep research. I'm going to use labs. Perplexity   Labs is awesome because it will automatically  display data in different ways. Charts, graphs,   tables, pictures, while also combining these  features with its core deep research features. So,  

I kind of get the best of both worlds.  It's like deep research but leveled up. So,   I'm going to paste in the prompt and then move  on to Manis. Says it's going to take 11 minutes.   You can see that I'm choosing the agent feature  on Manis and I am using the free Manis plan by  

the way. I've had the paid version in the past,  but I just didn't use it enough to justify keeping   it. All right, Manis is working. Let's go to  Claude Opus 4.1. Hit the drop down. I have the   $20 a month plan. I've got the web search dropown  checked and I have the deep research button  

checked. Boom. All right. Last but not least, chat  GPT5. I'm going to hit agent mode and I'm going to   go. Claude has some follow-up questions for me.  Am I interested in competing in a specific market   segment? Freelancers, small businesses under 10  employees, mid-market to 10 to 50. Yes, actually,  

I'm glad it asked. I should have included that  in the prompt. Businesses with 0 to 10 employees.   There are about 35 million businesses in the  United States, and I think 30 of them, 30 million   of them have no employees. So, that's my market. I  don't care about the big businesses when it comes  

to this. Second question, what's your initial  hypothesis for differentiation, lower price point,   better UX, that's user experience, specific  vertical focus, or something else. AI enabled,   cheaper. I'm thinking $19 a month and more simple  core features only. It just never breaks. If  

you've used QuickBooks, you probably have noticed  that the connection with your bank accounts always   break and you have to reconnect it. It's really  annoying and I've actually dug into that problem   and it's very fixable. Third question Claude asked  is, "Do you have any specific feature areas you're  

already considering focusing on?" I'm just going  to say no. I'll leave that open-ended. All right.   If we check in on chat GPT, it is going, going,  gone. It's moving pretty fast. Perplexity has   seven minutes left and Manis is cranking along  as well. So, while these cook, we're going to  

go use these nonAI tools. You're going to love  these. Also, I am not affiliated with any of   these tools mentioned in the video. I'll see if  I can get some discount affiliate links. If so,   I'll put them in the show notes. It'd be great  if you could support me. All right, I do have a  

Gummy Search account. I'm logged in. I'm going to  purchase a day pass for $10. Paid plans are 29 to   $200 a month. That's really not necessary.  I'm just going to buy a $10 day pass. And it   looks like I had quantity of two in my cart, so I  accidentally bought a two-day pass. Awesome. Okay,  

so if you've never scraped anything on the  internet, it can be a little intimidating. There   are tools like Outs Scraper, Appify, Scrapebox,  Gummy Search that makes the scraping process a   lot easier. So, what Gummy Search does is it's  built on top of Reddit to help better display  

things that I might be looking for on Reddit, such  as QuickBooks user complaints that are most often   repeated. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and activate  one of my two day passes. And then I'm going to go   to the audience tab, make a new audience, and I'm  going to type in small business. I'd like to find  

about 10 million or so total Reddit subscribers  across all subreddits related to small business.   So, these are the small business subreddits. I'm  going to choose r/ small business small business   Canada business entrepreneur small business owners  business ideas r/ side project and that has 10.4  

million members across these seven subreddits.  That should be plenty. Create audience. Okay,   now I just search for keywords. I'm just going to  search QuickBooks and then I'm going to click on   the patterns tab. Summarize 100 submissions. So,  right now, in a matter of seconds, it's going to  

summarize 21,000 words about QuickBooks based on  what people have posted in these seven subreddits.   Okay, the most often repeating pattern is  seeking alternatives to QuickBooks. Okay,   this is awesome. I'm immediately excited. I didn't  do any of this research before hitting record, by  

the way. This is all done fresh. I'm trying to get  into the habit of whenever I do cool stuff like   this on the internet, just hitting record. So,  seeking alternatives to QuickBooks. Number two,   concerns about QuickBooks pricing and subscription  issues. Number three, integration of QuickBooks  

with other software. Four, building or considering  alternatives to QuickBooks. Five, using QuickBooks   for payroll and bookkeeping. Six, issues  and frustrations with QuickBooks. All right,   let's try that with Zero now, which is QuickBooks  biggest competitor. All right, we're going to find  

patterns in 24,000 words about zero. The most  common pattern is people having zero integration   issues. The second one is simply people asking  for accounting software recommendations. That's   neither good nor bad. Zero is popping up because  people are recommending it. So if I had to choose,  

it's more good than bad. And then the other three  patterns are just people looking for software   solutions. So immediately this is telling me  that people have serious issues with QuickBooks,   but not many issues with Zero. So that can lead  me down a different rabbit hole. What do people  

love about Zero that I could implement into my  software? Let's click on the sentiment tab and   see what the sentiment is about Zero compared to  QuickBooks. Also, what's cool about this is you   can click this track button here and you'll get  email notifications if the sentiment changes or if  

new patterns emerge based on the topic that you're  following. All right, the sentiment towards zero   in these posts is generally neutral to slightly  negative. While some users appreciate its features   like automatic bank reconciliation, others find  it too complicated or expensive, there are also  

mentions of specific limitations such as issues  with quoting features in integration problems. So,   it has a 48 out of 100 sentiment score. 100  would be a perfectly positive sentiment. We're   going to do the same thing with QuickBooks and  see how it compares. And I'll tell you what,  

once all this research is over, I'm going to  show you how I personally launch landing pages   that can start collecting emails in about 3 to  four minutes. It's so easy and it costs about   $2 a year the way I do it. Okay. The sentiment  for QuickBooks is 38 out of 100 compared to 48  

out of 100 for zero. Significant number of users  are expressing frustration over pricing complexity   and technical issues. Okay, so basically people  generally dislike both QuickBooks and Zero,   but they like Zero a little better. Now  we can go to the ask feature and ask AI a  

question about Zero or QuickBooks or whatever  features people hate or can't live without,   and it will answer us based on all of these posts  in all of these subreddits. What complaint occurs   the most often regarding both QuickBooks and  Zero? That is the question I'm asking AI. Okay,  

the number one complaint about QuickBooks and  Zero is not just that their prices are high,   but that their prices keep going up. Why does  QuickBooks Online just keep going up? Zero keeps   going up. So, what this is telling me is if I were  to build a competitor to QuickBooks, the number  

one message in my marketing should be cheap price  forever because that's the opposite of what my   competitors are actually doing in real life. Okay,  there's a bunch more we can do with gummy search,   but this is the 8020 of it. Let's move on to the  next tool. Pikfu is one of the most underrated,  

slept on tools on the internet. It's been around  forever. I use it for all kinds of random things,   and it's especially good if you want to pull  relevant information from a relevant audience,   but you don't have your own audience. You can  find a shortcut by using Pikfu. Once again,  

this is not sponsored by them, but I do have  an affiliate link if you want to use it. So,   I'm logged in. I go to my dashboard and what Pikfu  is is it's a polling platform. They have millions   of people signed up to complete surveys and polls  that we submit to them. And Pikfu knows if these  

people are American, international, how old they  are, their gender, their likes, dislikes, hobbies,   level of wealth, etc. This is just amazing data.  So, I'm going to click new poll. Type my question.   What do you hate most about QuickBooks? I'm not  going to actually run this poll because this  

would cost me money right now, but I'm going to  show you how it works. The most important thing   to do here is audience sample size. It says 50 is  the most popular. I like to double that and go for   100 people in my poll. Now, this will guarantee  you 100 responses. It's not just going to put it  

in front of 100 people and only 12 respond. You  pay a buck per response. So, it would be $100 to   pull 100 people, but that's 100 specific targeted  people. In this case, people living in the United   States that are small business owners. Yes, I  checked all those boxes. We can even do age range,  

gender identity, political, Amazon Prime member,  app store, spending habits, age of kids. You can   go on and on and on. But here's the trade-off.  The more specific you get with your audience,   the more it's going to cost you to pull them.  So, I'm just going to keep it to small business  

owners. 100 responses for 100 bucks. Then you  click preview and pay. and within an hour you   will have your responses. How valuable is that? My  audience is so valuable because I can just throw   up an Instagram poll and within minutes can know  what to post about, what business to talk about,  

etc. But you watching or listening to this can  shortcut all that just by using something like   this. And the third nonI tool that I talked about  using is simply Reddit. And I would even throw   in Facebook groups, small business owner Facebook  groups that are highly moderated, highly curated,  

not a bunch of ads and spam in there. Just  search for the words QuickBooks or Zero,   see what people are saying about it. If it's  not a closed group, you can copy that URL,   paste it into ChatGpt, and have it summarize its  findings for you. Do the same thing in Reddit  

across any of those subreddits I chose or even  more niche subreddits than those. I'm assuming you   guys know how to use Facebook groups and Reddit,  so I won't go into detail there. But that wraps up   the nonAI tools. Let's get back to these prompts  to see what they spit out for us. All right, we'll  

start with Chat GPT. I really love what it gave me  here. There's a lot going on here. It's confirming   that it read over 200 recent reviews of QuickBooks  Online, QuickBooks Desktop, and Zero from multiple   public sources such as Capterra, Git App, Software  Advice, and Trust Radius. And it took all of these  

reviews and clustered them together in recurring  themes. The number one pain point, frequent bugs,   crashes, and unreliable updates. Number two, price  hikes and unpredictable subscription costs. I find   this very interesting. It's not just that it's  expensive, it's that it's unpredictably expensive  

and the price just keeps going up. Poor customer  support, limited report customization, payroll   limitations, yada yada yada. But usually when  you're looking at lists of complaints like this,   the 8020 rule is very much in force. As in 80% of  people are going to have these top two complaints  

and 20% of people are going to have the bottom  eight complaints. The must-have features that   Chat GPT5 brought back are cloud accessibility and  multi-user collaboration, sharing your account,   adding team members with your accountant, your  spouse, or your employees, and being able to  

access your reports and your books from anywhere  in the world. That's a non-negotiable. Ease of   use. It's got to have a good interface. You got  to have invoicing and recurring billing. You got   to have bank reconciliation. And then number 10,  security. Number nine, document attachments and  

paperless workflow. Okay, this is cool. So, if  I were to launch this and start advertising the   features, I would list the non-negotiables  as number one. Yeah, I could probably be   successful if I launched a QuickBooks competitor  that touted the best security in the world,  

but people aren't asking for that. So, ChatGpt  also gives us an opportunity map where a lean   competitor could win. Reliable, affordable  cloud accounting with rocksolid bank feeds.   Once again, the bank integrations cannot break.  Human- centered support, flexible reporting,  

modular features, transparent pricing, okay?  Should you build a competitor? Speaking bluntly,   Chad GPT says the accounting software space  is crowded and mature, but the sheer amount   of dissatisfaction with QuickBooks and to a lesser  extent zero suggests a niche for a lean customer  

focused alternative. Users crave stability, fair  pricing, responsive support, flexible reporting,   and reliable bank fees. A prudent strategy  might be to start with a niche vertical like   project-based service firms or nonprofits  and prove traction before expanding. Okay,  

I like that report. Thank you, Chad GPT. We'll  save the best for last. Not that I'm biased, and   go to Perplexity next. All right, here's what I'm  talking about with Perplexity Labs. It leads off   with a bar graph. Top 10 pain points. Bank feed,  customer service, pricing. Boom. Top 10 musthaves  

for both QuickBooks and Zero. Cloud access, bank  integration, user interface, and ease. This is   what we learned on Gummy Search and Chad GBT.  Executive summary. It's basically saying that   not having a reliable bank feed, not having good  customer service, and predictable pricing would  

be dealreakers. You would fail if you didn't have  those things. This is really helpful. All right,   here's the reality check. Here's Perplexity's  take. You're not disrupting accounting software.   You're just building it properly. Both QuickBooks  and Zero are successful despite being terrible at  

basic execution. If you can build reliable bank  feeds, provide human support, and maintain honest   pricing, you'll have thousands of frustrated users  ready to switch. Here's the thing about businesses   like these. There are 35 million people in America  that need one of these businesses, one of these  

services. It's kind of a commodity and people  use the word commodity as a bad thing, but it's   not. Commodity equals massive market. Cotton is  a commodity because we all wear t-shirts. It does   not have to be a bad thing. It doesn't even have  to be a price competition. It can be a feature,  

not a bug. The market is here. The pain is  real. The solutions are achievable. Bottom line,   this is a solid business for someone with the  technical chops and operational discipline to   outexecute the incumbents. With a 10x developer  and a proper focus on the top three pain points,  

you can capture meaningful market share within  two to three years. Okay, let's see what Manis   says. Manis is still thinking. That is something  that kind of annoys me about Manis. It takes a   while. I'm sure it would be faster if I were on a  paid plan, but this is going to force me to go to  

Claude next. Okay, Claude made me a nice little  document. small business accounting software,   the $19 opportunity. The core insight is that both  market leaders suffer from serving everyone and   therefore they are serving small businesses with  0 to 10 employees poorly. Okay. Top 10 ranked pain  

points, bank feed reliability, payment processing  disasters. That's interesting. Customer support,   pricing transparency and increases, feature  complexity overload. I'm glad I said that. Okay.   And then the top 10 ranked must- have features.  Reliable bank reconciliation. It's essential. 90%  

dependency. I love how it added a percentage  dependency and a percentage frequency on the   negatives. Simple invoicing with professional  appearance. That's essential. Expense tracking   and receipt capture. Basic financial reporting.  Multi-device access with real-time sync. Okay.  

Opportunity map. Wedge. It says five specific  wedge opportunities. Wedge one. Bank feeds that   never break. Reliability guarantee. Wedge two. No  payment processor hostage situation. So users want   the ability to use different payment processors,  not only the one that QuickBooks or Zero uses  

inhouse. Same day human support. Transparent  pricing forever. Small business only. Is this   opportunity viable? Says customer acquisition  will be expensive. Bank integration complexity is   significant. Feature creep pressure is inevitable.  But yes, this business could succeed by solving  

real problems better than existing solutions.  Okay, Manis is still going. So, I'm going to   go ahead and show you how to build a very quick  landing page with an email flow. It is 4:08 p.m.   right now. Let my watch be the proof. Let's see  how long this takes. I use card cru.co for all  

of my landing pages because it's like 50 bucks  a year for up to 25 different websites. I don't   know of anything even remotely as close to card  when it comes to affordability. Here's a bunch of   landing pages that I have. What I'm going to do,  I'm going to literally copy and paste a landing  

page. I have a landing page here for busyju.com,  which is an energy drink idea that I have that   I've never launched. And all I do is click this  button, make a copy of this site. Copy. Sure.   Scroll up here. There it is. I'm going to click  on the site to edit it. I'm going to click floppy  

disc title. Let's think of a name for this. If I  were to launch this business, let's call it lazy   books instead of QuickBooks. And we'll call it  bookkeeping for people who hate bookkeeping. Okay.   I don't want to do a card domain. I want to do a  custom domain cuz I'm a domain junkie. And let's  

go ahead and say lazybooks.com. Is it available?  Yep. Okay. Now, huh. What do you know? As luck   would have it, if we go into my namecheep account,  I happen to own lazybooks.com because I paid $800   for it just last week. This is how easy it is to  connect a custom domain name from any register,  

be it namecheep, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, whatever.  All right, I go into manage on my lazybooks.com   domain. I'm going to click on NameCheep basic  DNS. Click the green check box. Then I click on   advanced DNS. Add new record. Go back to card.  Card is telling me to add these two records.  

A at and then that. Add new record. A at that.  Just like that. Go back to card. Came www. That.   Add new record came www. That. Click the green  checkbox. Done. I have now connected my custom   domain name with this card landing page. But I  haven't published a landing page yet. I'm going  

to change this because this is irrelevant to this.  I'm going to write QuickBooks sucks Blazy Books   doesn't be notified below when it goes live. Not  the best copyrightiting in the world, but it'll   do. Change that to say email. Now I use Beehive  for my newsletter. I go into Beehive. Now, you can  

use any number of these email services, Mailchimp,  Clavio, whatever. I just happen to use Beehive.   I need an API key and a publication ID. Click on  API. Create new API key. I'll call it Lazy Books.   Copy. Publication ID right there. Boom. Boom.  On completion, I just want to say thank you.  

I'm going to collect UTM parameters. Collecting  UTM parameters just allows me to track within   Beehive which email addresses are coming from this  landing page so I can segment them and only bother   them once Lazy Books is ready to go. Then I click  save. Publish to a custom domain. Publish changes.  

Boom. Okay. I started at what? 408. It's 416. So  that took me 8 minutes. Now I can start collecting   email addresses on a custom landing page on a  custom domain name that I bought. Also, while we   wait for this domain name to be ready, you need to  come check out tkowners.com. It's like 400 people  

that are building cool stuff together, sharing  growth hacks, AI tools, tips, tricks. We have two   ask me anything per week. One with me, one with  someone else that knows a lot about cool business   stuff. Just come join us at tkowners.com. Okay.  And while we wait for my domain name to go live so  

we can test if the email submission form works. If  you want to add pictures to this landing page, you   just click the plus button, text, image buttons.  Super easy. You just upload it right there. Copy,   paste. I'm not a software engineer. I'm not  technical. It's super easy to use. All right,  

let's see if the website is ready. Boom. Look  at that. Lazybooks.com. There's the landing   page. Looks pretty cool. I'm going to do this.  Chris plus 443. By the way, if you put something   after the plus sign in an email address, it will  still go to the same place. Fun fact. Click that.  

There's my pop-up that says thank you. We go into  Beehive. Click on subscribers. Boom. There it is.   Okay. And it worked. And if you haven't figured  it out by now, I'm actually going to launch this   business. I filmed this video because I actually  wanted to do this research. I bought the domain  

name last week being optimistic that this  research would show me what I thought it   would show me because I've already been asking my  audience if they love or hate QuickBooks or Zero,   what they can live without, what they can't  live without. So, I paid 800 bucks for this  

premium domain name. And I hit record while I  did the research to validate my decision. So,   if you're a business owner or an aspiring business  owner, please check out lazybooks.com. You can use   this exact landing page that you just watched me  build in real time and subscribe for notifications  

and I'll tell you when it's live. 19 bucks a  month. It's not going to do the stuff that people   hate about QuickBooks and Zero. And it is going  to do the stuff that people love about QuickBooks   and Zero. And it's going to be AI enabled. So,  you can ask questions about your business, about  

your financials. I'm going to have a simple toggle  button to change the language from accountant to   human cuz I don't speak accountant. I don't know  what a chart of accounts is, but my accountant   wants to know. He wants to see stuff like that.  So, it's going to have some cool little features,  

but not any more than you really need to run your  business. It's going to be built for businesses   with 0 to 10 employees. So check out lazybooks.com  and thanks for watching the Kerner Office.