How to Find Your Next Big Idea Hiding on the Internet - Ep. 10 with Steph Smith

Steph Smith is the host of the a16z podcast and a prolific online creator. 

Steph sees the internet through a high-definition lens that gives her a deep understanding of what people want. 

She can isolate a clear signal from the noise, which she uses to build wonderfully creative, useful things.  

In this episode, I dive deep with Steph on how she uses the internet and AI to unearth emerging trends and validate business ideas.

I pitch Steph two potential companies on the show, and we use an arsenal of tools and strategies to vet them live. 

We get into:

• How she leverages ChatPT to generate great ideas 
• Why ChatGPT is ideal for understanding complex concepts 
• How she uses ChatGPT to organize huge swaths of data
• Tips on using SEO tools to vet business ideas
• How to surface useful insights from Reddit 
• What to look for while reading customer reviews
• Ways to gather more data on a market just from Google 

This is a must-watch for anyone who spends time online and wants to discover the next big idea hiding on the internet.

If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! 

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Timestamps:

1. Introduction 01:12
2. Leveraging ChatGPT to generate great ideas 22:11
3. Why ChatGPT is ideal for understanding complex concepts 29:29
4. How to use ChatGPT to organize huge datasets 48:00
5. Shark tank! Dan pitches Steph business ideas 1:00:41
6. Steph’s first move while validating a business idea on the internet 1:07:51
7. What to look for in a customer review 1:11:09
8. Tips on secondary keyword searches 1:17:45
9. How to gather market data from a simple Google search 1:26:24
10. What type of trend charts depict a good market 1:31:55
11. Using SEO tools to find useful insights from Reddit: 1:34:11
12. How to gather data about competitors: 1:42:37
13. Lightning-round questions from X 1:55:51

Links to resources mentioned in the episode:

• Steph Smith: https://twitter.com/stephsmithio
• Internet Pipes: https://internetpipes.com/
• Doing Content Right: https://doingcontentright.com/#features
• Steph's database of untranslatable words: https://eunoia.world/
• Dan’s piece on the Allocation Economy: https://every.to/chain-of-thought/the-knowledge-economy-is-over-welcome-to-the-allocation-economy 
• Neal Agarwal: http://neal.fun
• Keywords Everywhere: https://keywordseverywhere.com/
• Reddit tools: https://anvaka.github.io/sayit/?query=, https://gummysearch.com/
• SEO tools for market analysis: https://www.similarweb.com/,  https://www.junglescout.com/, https://answerthepublic.com/