So this idea’s been bouncing around in my head for a while - just got sparked again watching Every’s latest video about this product Valley that does crowd-sourced voting for headlines and content.

Background:

  • Had this idea brewing for a while
  • There was this YC company doing synthetic surveys back early-chatgpt days
  • Chatted with friends about it - they weren’t super into it
    • Their main pushback: “surveys need real opinions”
    • But I think LLMs can actually be a solid proxy for real opinions

Why I think this could work:

  • LLMs are actually great at throwing ideas back at you
  • They step outside your own thought patterns
  • Kind of like having a conversation partner who can give you fresh perspectives
  • ironically, they’re perfect for prompting us, humans

To productize ideas on the fringes like this, validation is key, and there is not better validation actual data. I love products which can take existing data and show a prospect the benefit they would get with our product. In this case:

  • we could look at past campaigns (narrows to prospects who actually measure)
  • Run LLM synthetic surveys on those campaigns
  • Calculate the delta - how much better would things have been if they’d listened to the LLM’s suggestions?