Idea to Startup: A Live Idea Test - AI for Parenting

Podcast | Youtube

Sponsor: Tacklebox

20% off monthly, 6-mo and year-long subscriptions to the Self-Paced Membership. If you’re struggling finding the path to follow to start your idea, this is the way.

code: MuchAdoAboutStuffing

Why This Episode Exists + Nerdy Stuff Not In The Pod 💡

I love exploring ideas live on the pod, and this one’s got a bunch of promise. The broad idea is AI + Parenting, but we’ll go through the process of narrowing in on problem customer, running intent tests and a concierge MVP, getting into pricing and then deciding if what we’ve got makes sense.

One idea we touch on are inflection points - moments where people change behavior. This idea comes partially from BJ Fogg and his Behavior Model. The graph looks super complex (below), but the idea is simple:

“Behavior happens when Motivation, Ability, and a Prompt come together at the same time. When a behavior does not occur, at least one of those three elements is missing.”

If customers aren’t changing their behavior, one of those components is missing. By starting with people who already change their behavior, we don’t need to worry about lining up the three inputs.

Also, we touch on how my son dances to Bruno Mars. His favorite song, by far, is:

Have a great week!

Pod References

• Tacklebox 

• Granola 

00:30 Intro - Testing a Startup Idea Live
03:01 The Three Questions for Any Startup
04:40 Where Magic Comes From
07:44 Smooth Jazz
08:16 Who’s it For + What’ll it Help Them Do?
12:32 The Four Potential Problems
13:52 Problem Selection

Transcript - Feel Free to Read it Like a Long-form Article:

Today, we’re going to thrash around a bit on an idea.

Based on the emails I’m getting from listeners and people interested in Tacklebox these days, I have a feeling this is the way a bunch of you are thinking. AI plus something big and broad you assume AI can help with but aren’t entirely sure how. AI for diet, AI for curing loneliness, AI for housing, AI for dating, AI for elder care, AI for writing books, AI for farming, AI for whatever you do at your job that annoys you, AI for figuring out if the tree in your back yard is going to fall or not.

That last one I actually like. There are four trees in my back yard that are big and tall and ominous and sway in the wind more aggressively than the little guy when we put on Bruno Mars. I don’t know if these trees are dangerous or if the swaying is normal. A friend who pretends to know a lot about these things said the swaying is good, like how skyscrapers sway. The stiff trees are the ones you need to worry about, he said.

When I bring tree guys out to take a look and get a quote they all say yeah sure that things gonna come down any minute, and when I ask why they cite the wind position or the lack of roots or the abundance of roots or the leaf shape or because mercury is in retrograde. Then, they quote me anywhere from 750 bucks to four grand and when I ask for a little more information they say they’ll take off 20% if I pay cash and they can take the tree down tomorrow. When I say no, they leave and never reach out again and I’m left watching my trees sway like bruno mars is on, wondering if they’d reach my house if they fell.

We talk about wedge products a lot on the pod and man oh man is the “will the big old oak tree reach your house if it falls” measuring app a nice little wedge product for a tree service.

Anyway, I won’t think up a corny pun for the AI for if a tree will fall app because despite that ramble, we aren’t talking about trees today.

Although i do know some of you caught it - acorny pun… a corn… sorry.

Ok, we’re back.

My two cents on people chasing AI for X thing is that it’s a good thing despite lots of people thinking it’s a bad one. But if the promise of AI making the product easier is what you needed to go tackle big, hairy, difficult, intimidating problems, great. I”m all for AI as the permission structure to go after hard, important stuff.

So, today, we’re going to leap into the big, broad, difficult parenting and AI idea space. Because parenting is hard and important and complicated and nuanced, and AI could theoretically make it easier. Plus, I get like 10 emails a week with various AI for parenting ideas.

So, let’s get to it.

—

The Three Questions for Any Startup, AI or Not

The point of this episode, and any episode where we talk through ideas, is to make the process approachable. Top humanize it. Because while startups are hard, I promise you a bunch of people less capable than you are making it work. All you need is a process, focus, discipline, a secret and a helping of hutzpah. I can’t help you with the last one, but I can help with the first few.

So, whenever you come across a new idea, or are searching for a new idea, or are inspired by something like AI - you want to anchor yourself with three simple questions:

• Who’s it for?

• What’ll it help them do?

• What do you know about this person that everyone else is missing?

In Tacklebox lingo, that’s the Frank - or our first customer segment, Wild Success - or the state you’ll help them reach after you solve their problem, and the Secret - or, the thing you know no that no one else does that’ll create contrast against any competitor. The thing that anchors our strategy.

Most people who want to start a startup think you need to have those things lined up before you start a business, but that’s the secret of entrepreneurship. That fear of needing your ducks in a row is the scary bouncer that keeps most normal people out of the club. The people inside know all you need to start are the questions - entrepreneurship is the act of finding the answers. You start with the questions, not the answers.

So, let’s get started on AI for parenting with those questions as our guide.

But… one caveat before we do. It’s about magic.

—

AI isn’t the thing that creates the magic

We’re using an AI example because that’s what people are coming to us with and that’s the toolset that most non-technical entrepreneurs are going to leverage to build businesses in the coming months and years. It makes tons of things possible for non-technical folks that simply weren’t months or years ago.

But, the best way to build a startup with AI is to forget about AI. It’s very fight club that way.

AI matters to your customer as much as the programming language used to make grand theft auto matters to the teenagers who play it. AI has changed how problems are solved for the people solving them, but the most interesting - and difficult - part of entrepreneurship has always been - and will always be - the relationship between the problems and the customers who have them. Products are easy if you understand problem and customer.

An extraordinary AI solution with a bad problem or no customer is useless. It’s actually worse than useless, because you might get a few early adopters who try it out because they’re interested in AI, not the problem you’re solving, and give you a false positive.

So, our goal is to never mention AI to customers unless they’re expressly looking for it. Unless not having AI is the problem. And that’ll be very rare.

The real magic, the magic we’ll need to create, comes from removing something. Ideally, a really hard, painful thing.

It’ll never not be hard for me or most people to wrap our heads around this.

Startups are about removing, not adding.

Find a hard, important process. Remove the hardest step. And that’s your successful startup. It’ll feel like magic for the customer and they’ll pay you lots of money and tell all their friends and you’ll grow.

Your instincts will be to add to the situation, but your instincts are wrong.

So, how do you balance your insatiable interest for AI with me saying to forget all about it?

You live in the ebb and flow of startups. Your first priority, as our friend kent beck says, is to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback. Which means we need to speak with lots of customers and get feedback on their current problems, process, frustrations, goals, and dreams. But, that feedback loop is choppy. You’ll reach out to customers, they’ll take their time getting back to you, they’ll schedule an interview in a week, they’ll cancel, and on and on.

During the downtime, knock yourself out looking at AI stuff. Focus your research on AI being used as a tool to solve the problems that are popping up in interviews. Ways to remove steps from your customer’s process. Look at how successful companies are using AI - try to back into the customer and the problem. But, remember, this is secondary. Customer is first.

Ok, cool. We’re on the same page.

So, let’s pick a parenting idea and work through the first steps. After…. a little smooth jazz, and a request for Tacklebox members.

Hey!

Two quick ones today. If you’re interested in pursuing your idea with the self-paced program, muchadoabout stuffing or turkeyday are each working for 20% off still. Get going today.

And second, I’m looking to bring a few founders interested in AI for parenting startups into the small group program - the one with bi weekly 1x1s with me. If that’s you, or you know someone doing it, apply at gettacklebox dot com or email team at get tacklebox dot com and let us know.

Back to it

Who’s it For and What’ll it Help Them Do.

I am, as you might know, a parent. We have one little person running wobbly circles around our house and are expecting another one soon. That gives me both a bit of domain expertise and a network of parents to tap into.

Kids create inflection points for startups.

When parents first find out they're pregnant, when their first kid is born, the first sickness - these are all moments where behavior naturally changes. Parents face moments that create all sorts of predictable emotions - urgency, fear, status level gaps, competition with other parents. Problems arise and lots of parents will pay anything to solve them.

That's what we look for in new markets:

1. First, customers already trying to solve the problem, willing to overpay for solutions

2. And second, natural triggers that cause behavior change we can latch onto

Parents check both boxes emphatically. There are problems to be solved and customers already looking to solve them.

Now, it’s time for some depth. It’s time to go problem hunting and learn more about the specific inflection points associated with those problems.

The best way to do this, still, is to speak with customers. There are a lot of products popping up that are AI driven customer interview tools - these let you interview the AI rather than a person and avoid reaching out to anyone. this lets you move forward without actually interacting with people. These are a disaster for two reasons.

First, your first customer segment will be about nuance - specifically, a secret. Something you know about them that others don’t. That’s what a niche really is. AI guarantees you’ll have the opposite - it’ll aggregate information and give answers that people already know.

And second, a massive part about customer interviews is the “finding people to speak with” part of them. This is a dress rehearsal for customer acquisition. If it’s impossible to find customers to speak with, it ain’t gonna get any easier to sell to them. So, don’t use those tools. Sometimes the old way is the better way.

For the AI for parents idea, I started the way you should for your idea - in my network. An email to 25 friends with kids asking if they’d chat about parenting, with a calendly link to my schedule. My calendar filled up immediately. People love talking about their kids - another data point you get from running through this process - enthusiasm.

Second, I messaged a few closer friends and asked if they’d intro me to their friends so that I’d have some cold conversations, too. I got five interviews from that.

After some tweaking, I landed on a perfect “lead off the interview” question:

“Walk me through the past week and tell me about the hardest moments with your kid?“

As always, asking about stuff that’s happened in the past will give you real answers - never ask about theoretical things your customer might do in the future.

Here’s a direct quote of one of the responses that was typical. As another note, I recorded these conversations with a tool I really like called Granola. I’ll link to it in the show notes and I get no affiliate or anything - it’s just good.

“Well, the biggest moment was Wednesday. I had a parent teacher conference for my four year old and the teacher said he’s struggling in a few areas. They suggested I practice at home, but that’s overwhelming for me because our childcare is patchwork. I take him Monday after school, one of two grandparents take him Tuesday and Wednesday, a nanny takes him Thursday, and we’re trying to sort out Fridays. Both me and my husband work, so working on stuff becomes really hard.”

I then dug into the moments - asking follow-ups like, “what do you do now to try to keep everyone on the same page?”

As you can probably guess, there were lots of problems from lots of types of parents.

After a bunch of conversations, four problem-customer sets had separated themselves from the pack:

1. Schedules and Logistics for households with two working parents and multiple kids: How to get all the kids to the right spots at the right times.

2. Development Uncertainty: Often for first-time parents with a kid under four - basically, knowing if their progress is normal. Especially if teachers or other parents or the internet might’ve suggested it wasn’t.

3. Sleep training: Parents with infants predictably struggled with this, but, the bigger problems were when the problem came back. So, when a four year old won’t sleep alone or a two year old regresses.

4. Care coordination: This wasn’t logistics based - this was when both parents worked and the childcare was a mix of grandparents plus a nanny or an au pere. Keeping everyone aligned on food, naps, behavior, and screen time.

This will almost certainly happen with your idea, too, so, the question becomes - which do I start with?

Glad you asked. That’s the next section.

And, quick note- if the interviews I just described sound awesome but you’re struggling to get them going… we’re running another customer interview workshops soon. Sign up at gettacklebox dot com backslack workshops.

Problem Selection

When you run interviews with more than five customers, you’ll have a bunch of problems emerge. It’ll be tempting to combine some problems and customers or to go after all the problems simultaneously or to jump from one to the next.

This won’t work.

A core skill you need to build as an entrepreneur is to make a decision based on incomplete information, sprint after that decision for a specific period of time towards a specific goal, then zoom out and reassess.

I think of it like you’re dropped in the middle of the ocean. You spot a buoy and aren’t sure if it’s taking you towards land or not. But, the best strategy is to go as hard as you can towards it to make sure you’re at least going in one direction with purpose. Then, when you get there, reassess.

When you find a few problems, pick one and run at it until you get clarity. Then, reevaluate.

We’ll pick our first problem using our problem characteristics. The best problems are one, or a bunch, of…

• Painful

• Frequent

• Urgent

• Growing

• Expensive

When I go through the four problems we identified, each actually has a pretty compelling case.

They’re all some level of painful, frequent, urgent, growing and expensive, so, I’m just going to pick the one that feels right. Decision by vibes is, unfortunately, another thing you’ll have to get used to as a data driven entrepreneur. Speed to decision is usually the best variable.

We’ve talked about sleep on the pod in the past, so that’s out, and general logistics seem to be more relevant to older kids that are going to practices and school and play dates and things, which means the target has kids older than me or my network have, and I want to solve a problem I’m close to. Finally, development uncertainty feels like I’ll need an actual expert on the team - which isn’t a blocker, but for the sake of the pod, we’ll go with one I can do all on my own and fast. Also development uncertainty will have a ton of emotion, which will lead to customers that act especially irrational. Let’s avoid that for now.

So, that leaves care coordination. For families where both parents work, have one or more kids under, say, six, and cobble together childcare from pre school and grandparents and maybe a nanny or high school kid or cousins or something else.

Wild success for these customers, I think, would be perfect alignment across caregivers. With food, nap schedules, toys, screen time, skills they’re working on, etc.

The stakes here are big. If we can solve a real, hard problem for parents, it doesn’t just make their lives easier—it can free up their time, lower their stress, and create a huge ripple effect in families’ lives.

I’m not really sure of a secret yet, which means I need to go back and have a few more conversations. I need to know exactly how the care coordination happens now.

And that’s what I’ll do over the next week.

Circle back to the parents I spoke with who mentioned this problem and go extremely deep. Figure out what they’ve done to try to solve it, understand who they talk to about it, who the experts in the space are, the influencers, the tools.

I’ll look for a wedge product we can test fast, and, in-between conversations, I’ll try to figure out what role AI could play in a solution.

And while I’m not sure tis is the right direction, just like that buoy in the middle of the ocean, it’s time to swim hard at it and reevaluate once we get there. That begins with speaking to customers to try to zoom in on a Frank, wild success, and, most importantly, a secret.

Exciting stuff. We’re on to something here.

Back at soon. Have a great week.