Don’t Start a Business Until You’ve Done This First ⏐ Ep. #211

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 looked like an idiot to all your friends? Well, that's exactly what I'm gonna 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 wanna 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 gonna show you all of the tools that I use on a daily basis to validate these business ideas before ever launching. So let's dive in. Also, if you're just now meeting me for the first time, my name's Chris Kerner. I'm a married dad of four living in Dallas, four 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. Chat GPT, Claude, perplexity, and then Manus. 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 gonna see that my prompts are very specific and I'm gonna tell them to go look at specific websites that are key to this whole thing working. Okay, now the non-AI tools I plan to use will be PickFoo, GummySearch, 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 gonna 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 zero, slash FreshBooks, 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. All right, let's start with a prompt that I plan to use across some of these AI tools. Now, whether you're listening to this or watching this, I'm gonna go ahead and paste this exact prompt in the show notes below. So you don't need to subscribe or anything to see it. All right, here's the prompt. Your job is to act like a research assistant with agentic browsing and scraping powers. I want you to investigate public review sites, Captera, G2, Git App, Trust Radius, and similar, and extract real user pain points and can't live without features for QuickBooks, both online and desktop and zero. Steps, one, scrape reviews across multiple platforms and then it lists out all the platforms. Two, collect at least 200 plus recent reviews past two years, three, parse and cluster feedback into two categories. One, pain points, things users hate, churn reasons, frustrations, broken features, cost complaints. Two, must have the specific features or outcomes users rave about and would never give up. For each cluster include direct sample quotes from real users, frequency, as in the number of times that it appeared across reviews, sentiment strength, light annoyance, or deal breaker, or whatever in between, and then summarize it into a ranked list. Top 10 pain points across both platforms. Top 10 must have features across both platforms. Call out any hidden gems or recurring insights from smaller groups that big competitors might be missing. Bank feed stability, reconciliations, multi currency, customer support, deliver a final opportunity map, three to five areas where a slim down competitor would wedge in based on high frustration/low satisfaction. Pain points paired with still high demand for core features. Output format, clear tables, pain points must have, ranked list with numbers, a concise final summary, with the best three to five wedge opportunities. Make sure all insights are backed with real review data, not generic summaries. At the end of your report, give me your unfiltered unbiased take on whether or not I should start this business. Be brutally honest for me and assume I have a 10X developer on my team because I do. And if you've never heard that phrase 10X developer, it basically means a software engineer that is 10X better than your average software engineer. And it just so happens my brother-in-law Justin is exactly that. I've worked with him on projects in the past and he is just incredible. Okay, now I could pace this prompt across all of the AI tools out there, including Grock and Gemini. But I think I'm just gonna get a lot of redundant responses here. I want to use Manus because it does a great job of acting as an agent for me. It's agentic. I want to use ChatGPT5 for the same reason. Now I am a little let down by ChatGPT5, but I've noticed when I ask it to employ its ChatGPT agentic features, it does. If I don't, then it won't, because OpenAI is driving the save money on their processing costs. I'm gonna use Claude Opus 4.1 because I honestly think it is the best model in the world right now. And I'm gonna 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 gonna use Deep Research. I'm gonna 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 gonna paste in the prompt and then move on to Manus. It says it's gonna take 11 minutes. You can see that I'm choosing the agent feature on Manus. And I am using the free Manus 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, Manus 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 dropdown checked and I have the Deep Research button checked. Boom. All right, last but not least, chat GPT-5. I'm gonna hit agent mode and I'm gonna 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 I asked. I should have included that in the prompt. Businesses with zero 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 for simple core features only. It just never breaks. If you've used QuickBooks, you probably have noticed that the connection with your bank account 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 gonna 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 Manus is cranking along as well. So, while these cook, we're gonna go use these non AI tools. You're gonna 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 gonna 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 outscraper, apify, scrape box, gummy search, that makes this 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 gonna go ahead and activate one of my two day passes and then I'm gonna go to the audience tab, make a new audience and I'm gonna 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 gonna choose. R/smallbusiness, small business Canada, business, entrepreneur, small business owners, business ideas, R/sideproject, 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 gonna search QuickBooks and then I'm gonna 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. credits. 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 for 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 toward 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 and 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 three to four minutes. It's so easy and it cost about two dollars 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 80/20 of it let's move on to the next tool. PICFU 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 PICFU. 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 PICFU 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 PICFU knows if these people are American, international, how old they are they're 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 non AI 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 chat GPT 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 non AI 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 Captera, GitApp, Software Advice and Trust Radius. And it took all of these reviews and cluster 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, yadda yadda yadda. But usually when you're looking at lists of complaints like this, the 80/20 rule is very much enforced. 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 GPT-5 brought back are cloud accessibility and multi-user collaboration sharing your account, adding team members with your accountant or 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've got to have invoicing and recurring billing. You've 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 chat GPT also gives us an opportunity map where a lean competitor could win, reliable, affordable cloud accounting with rock solid 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, chat 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 proof traction before expanding. Okay, I like that report. Thank you, chat GPT. We'll save the best for the 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 must haves for both QuickBooks and zero. Cloud access, bank integration, user interface, and ease. This is what we learned on Gummy Search and chat GPT. Executive summary, it's basically saying that not having a reliable bank feed, not having good customer service and predictable pricing would be dealbreakers. You would fail if you didn't have those things. This is really helpful. All right, here's the reality check. Here's perplexities 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 a 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 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 out execute 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 Manus says. Manus is still thinking. That is something that kind of annoys me about Manus. It takes a while. I'm sure it would be faster if I were on a paid plan, but this is gonna 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 zero 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 process or hostage situation. So users want the ability to use different payment process. There's not only the one that QuickBooks are zero, uses in-house. Same to human support, transparent pricing forever, small business only. Is this opportunity viable? It 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, Manus is still going. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you how to build a very quick landing page with an email flow. It is 408 PM right now, let my watch be the proof. Let's see how long this takes. I use card, card.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 gonna do. I'm gonna literally copy and paste a landing page. I have a landing page here for busyjuice.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. Grow up here, there it is. I'm gonna click on the site to edit it. I'm gonna click floppy disk title. Let's think of a name for this. Bauer to launch this business. Let's call it lazy books instead of quick books. And we'll call it bookkeeping or people who hate bookkeeping. Okay, I don't wanna do a card domain. I wanna do a custom domain 'cause I'm a domain junkie. And let's go ahead and say lazybooks.com. Is it available? Yep, okay. Now, what do you know? As luck would have it, if we go into my name cheap 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 registrar, be it name cheap, go daddy, cloud flare, whatever. All right, I go into manage on my lazybooks.com domain. I'm gonna click on name cheap 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, cname, www, that, add new record. Cname, www, that, click the green check box, 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 gonna change this because this is irrelevant to this. I'm gonna write quickbooks, sucks, lazybooks, doesn't. Be notified below when it goes live. Not the best copywriting 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 lazybooks, copy, publication ID. Right there, boom, boom, on completion. I just wanna say thank you. I'm gonna 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 lazybooks 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 eight 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 tkaoners.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's per week, one with me, one with someone else that knows a lot about cool business stuff. Just come join us at tkaoners.com. Okay, now 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. You can 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 gonna 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, this says thank you. We go on a 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 gonna 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 cookbooks 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 gonna do this stuff that people hate about cookbooks and zero. And it is gonna do this stuff that people love about cookbooks and zero. And it's gonna be AI enabled so you can ask questions about your business, about your financials. I'm gonna have a simple toggle button to change the language from account to human 'cause I don't speak accountant. I don't know what a chart of account is, but my accountant wants to know. He wants to see stuff like that. So it's gonna have some cool little features but not any more than you really need to run your business. It's gonna be built for businesses with zero to 10 employees. So check out lazybooks.com. And thanks for watching the corner office. Please share with a friend and we'll see you next time.