How to Use AI to Find Profitable Niches on the Internet

How to find viable business ideas

The internet has broadened the kinds of businesses that can exist. AI’s ability to analyze large chunks of data and make it widely understandable is democratizing who can build these businesses. Here’s how Smith thinks aspiring founders should find their next business idea:

Nurture unconventional thought. Smith believes there is value in following your curiosity on the internet while looking for business ideas, even when that means exploring “silly” rabbit holes. “If you ignore ‘silly,’ you are so focused on what is immediately actionable, and what you can immediately take advantage of—and that's a very short-term, myopic view of the world.”
Find opportunities in the obscure. As you explore the internet, you’re likely to be surprised by the communities of people that share your niche interests—and according to Smith, you might be inspired to build a creative product for them. “The scale to reach enough people who might care about something actually changes the paradigm of what people are willing to do.”
Surprise yourself as often as you can. Smith, as a bona fide internet explorer, thinks of her brain as a large language model, and she aspires to train it on data that surprises her. “I always pay attention to something that surprises me a little bit… anytime there's a mismatch between what I think would exist and what I'm seeing data on, that's a signal.”
Find the future today. According to Smith, the best ideas of tomorrow live on the internet today, disguised in easily accessible data. People’s queries on Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit are telling of their “wants, needs, and desires,” and there is no dearth of “tools that help you understand this information.”
Use LLMs to scour the internet. Smith argues that AI has exponentially increased both the amount of data accessible to us and the ways to make sense of it. LLMs have “scraped” the internet to create a “massive dataset,” and present “new interfaces” that empower “someone who couldn't make sense of a dataset [to] now query it.”
Brainstorming with AI. Smith finds AI to be a valuable partner in ideation, especially when you have the seed of an idea and are looking to develop it further. Referring to a time she used the LLM to brainstorm ideas for meetups for the Internet Pipes community, she says, “ChatGPT is really good at helping me extrapolate from a base.”

Tossell believes that data companies—whose value proposition is gathering data and packaging it in useful ways—are viable businesses from which a solo entrepreneurr could make hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Tossell used AI to investigate the business model of one such data company. Here’s what he said about his process:

LLMs to deconstruct a winning strategy. Tossell prompts ChatGPT about the business models of successful companies in an attempt to understand how to build a similar one. “What are the best of the best doing in this space…if I simmered that down to a simplified version for a different space or a different category, how would I go about doing that?”
From insight to action. According to Tossell, deconstructing businesses through conversations with LLMs drives momentum. “No one needs any more information on how to start a business…and if you keep doing that, you're procrastinating on the fact that you could do it today.”
Business research with ChatGPT. Tossell was interested in building a business around authentic reviews of AI tools. As he brainstormed ways to curate genuine reviews, he prompted ChatGPT about how anonymous job review site Glassdoor gets employees to contribute to the platform: “What’s the founding story of Glassdoor?” and “How do they monetize?”

How to find viable business ideas

Nurture unconventional thought. Smith believes there is value in following your curiosity on the internet while looking for business ideas, even when that means exploring “silly” rabbit holes. “If you ignore ‘silly,’ you are so focused on what is immediately actionable, and what you can immediately take advantage of—and that's a very short-term, myopic view of the world.”
Find opportunities in the obscure. As you explore the internet, you’re likely to be surprised by the communities of people that share your niche interests—and according to Smith, you might be inspired to build a creative product for them. “The scale to reach enough people who might care about something actually changes the paradigm of what people are willing to do.”
Surprise yourself as often as you can. Smith, as a bona fide internet explorer, thinks of her brain as a large language model, and she aspires to train it on data that surprises her. “I always pay attention to something that surprises me a little bit… anytime there's a mismatch between what I think would exist and what I'm seeing data on, that's a signal.”
Find the future today. According to Smith, the best ideas of tomorrow live on the internet today, disguised in easily accessible data. People’s queries on Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit are telling of their “wants, needs, and desires,” and there is no dearth of “tools that help you understand this information.”
Use LLMs to scour the internet. Smith argues that AI has exponentially increased both the amount of data accessible to us and the ways to make sense of it. LLMs have “scraped” the internet to create a “massive dataset,” and present “new interfaces” that empower “someone who couldn't make sense of a dataset [to] now query it.”
Brainstorming with AI. Smith finds AI to be a valuable partner in ideation, especially when you have the seed of an idea and are looking to develop it further. Referring to a time she used the LLM to brainstorm ideas for meetups for the Internet Pipes community, she says, “ChatGPT is really good at helping me extrapolate from a base.”

LLMs to deconstruct a winning strategy. Tossell prompts ChatGPT about the business models of successful companies in an attempt to understand how to build a similar one. “What are the best of the best doing in this space…if I simmered that down to a simplified version for a different space or a different category, how would I go about doing that?”
From insight to action. According to Tossell, deconstructing businesses through conversations with LLMs drives momentum. “No one needs any more information on how to start a business…and if you keep doing that, you're procrastinating on the fact that you could do it today.”
Business research with ChatGPT. Tossell was interested in building a business around authentic reviews of AI tools. As he brainstormed ways to curate genuine reviews, he prompted ChatGPT about how anonymous job review site Glassdoor gets employees to contribute to the platform: “What’s the founding story of Glassdoor?” and “How do they monetize?”

How to validate business ideas quickly and cheaply

The internet offers every curious founder a wealth of information, but navigating through the abundance can be challenging. This how Smith uses AI to sift through it:

Broaden your perspective with AI. Smith values LLMs for their ability to provide alternative perspectives on topics on which she holds strong opinions. For instance, she used ChatGPT to understand the origins of tipping in restaurants, deeming AI useful when one feels strongly, “but I also have a feeling I don't know enough about this subject.”
Adapt information to suit you. According to Smith, AI makes information accessible to different people by tailoring it to their level of comprehension. She used ChatGPT to explain dark matter to her in the voice of the cartoon character SpongeBob Squarepants, noting that the “10x experience” that LLMs deliver is being able to “usher [information] to the level of complexity that you’re at.”
AI as an ally in data analysis. An underrated way LLMs can help you extract value from information is by structuring data in useful ways. Smith used ChatGPT to format her database of untranslatable words, highlighting the importance of clear prompts: “Every time you get something incorrect from ChatGPT, it's somewhat a reflection of your instruction set, and how good you are at communicating that.”

Going a step further in the process of building a business, here’s how Smith leverages the data made available by the internet to validate her ideas:

Gauge market potential online. Smith’s go-to move when validating an idea is to Google it, using SEO tools like Keywords Everywhere to assess search volume for the idea. She continues that while the “raw number” of the search volume doesn’t dictate the quality of an idea, the intent of analyzing the metric is to broadly understand market size.
Context to clarify search data. Smith believes that low search volume can be a positive signal if the chart for the keywords is trending upward on Google Trends. She adds that it can be useful to put search volume into context by “comparative searching,” or looking up the metric for similar products.
Refine ideas through reviews. As you go deeper in the research process, Smith recommends reading customer reviews of similar products that already exist in the market. She advises paying attention to two- and three-stars reviews, describing them as “little pockets” of valuable insight as you refine your own ideas.
Understand your customer through Reddit. Smith regards Reddit as a gold mine of information to help you understand your audience. She sifts through it by using the website GummySearch, which synthesizes patterns across different subreddits, and an open-source tool that visualizes connections between subreddits based on where else users of a subreddit also frequent.
Get the competitor intel you need. Smith also has tools handy to help her conduct research on potential competitors. She uses the web analytics site Similarweb to gauge metrics like “volume” and “number of page views” for competitive products, and the analytics tool Jungle Scout to find out the profit margins these businesses enjoy.

How to bring your business ideas to life with AI

Smith notes that while you can collect data from the internet to validate an idea, the decision to take the plunge is yours to make: “People just need to decide, from these data points, is this the kind of business I want to build?”

These are her overarching thoughts on using AI to execute your ideas:

AI is changing where we find value. Smith says AI will influence creators and their businesses in two ways: by creating categories that did not previously exist, and by increasing the value of specific things that benefit from the fact that a human has done them. “I think there’s two directions I’m very excited about, and then there’s going to be a very messy middle.”
Articulate your taste with AI tools. Smith used AI to articulate her aesthetic by scrolling through Midjourney, clicking on the images she liked to see the prompt that generated them, and using those insights to create visuals for Internet Pipes. She enjoyed the process so much that she compared it to a “brain massage.”

Here’s how AI has influenced the way Tossell runs his business:

Focus on what you enjoy doing. Tossell admits that he isn’t passionate about writing—he’s more motivated by the conversations he has with founders using AI in their businesses—and only decided to launch Ben’s Bites Pro, a premium tier to his newsletter, because of how much more enjoyable it was to create with AI. He says writing with AI “doesn’t feel like drudgery anymore” and the “actual process of creating a post is so much more fluid.”
Create your own AI toolkit. According to Tossell, integrating AI into your business will likely involve some trial and error until you discern which tool is right for you. He says he’s “got the perseverance to do that” because he “may as well try and hammer it out with a few different tool options rather than none.”
The Swiss Army knife for solo founders. Tossell uses ChatGPT and data analysis tool Julius AI to help him with an array of miscellaneous tasks that come with running a bootstrapped internet business, such as analyzing responses from customer feedback surveys, and finding discrepancies between audience lists on the newsletter platform Beehiiv and Stripe. “Where do I start trying to do this? Is this a two-hour task? Is this a two-minute task?”

The solo founder’s toolkit

Beyond ChatGPT and Midjourney, these are the tools Smith finds invaluable to find and validate business ideas online:

Keywords Everywhere, a plugin that helps users with SEO metrics and keyword research
Google Trends, a tool that analyzes the popularity of search queries across different geographical regions and time periods
Gummy Search, and this tool built by developer Andrei Kashcha, to conduct customer research on Reddit
Similarweb, a web analytics platform that can be used to track competitor metrics
Jungle Scout, an analytics tool designed for sellers on Amazon

The following niche tools help Tossell run his business efficiently:

Supernormal, a tool designed to automate note-taking
TypingMind, a frontend interface that allows users to interact with different LLMs—like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini—on a single platform
Lex, the word processor Every incubated
Julius AI, an AI-powered data analysis tool

What do you use AI for? Have you found any interesting or surprising use cases? We want to hear from you—and we might even interview you. Reply in the comments!

Miss an episode of AI & I? Catch up on Dan’s recent conversations with editorial director of NotebookLM Steven Berlin Johnson; LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman; star podcaster Dwarkesh Patel; economist Tyler Cowen; writer and entrepreneur David Perell; founder, author, and neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff; and others, and learn how they use AI to think, create, and relate.

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Rhea Purohit is a contributing writer for Every focused on research-driven storytelling in tech. You can follow her on X at @RheaPurohit1 and on LinkedIn, and Every on X at @every and on LinkedIn.

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