Open questions
I treat operating work like a research lab. These are the hypotheses I’m testing right now. If you have evidence either way, I’d like to see it.
Agents don't sell ancillary services because it breaks their flow. The system needs to capture it automatically.
Broker owners with >40% capture rates.
Traditional therapy requires sessions to build trust. When there's no human, no memory, no judgment risk—people skip straight to honesty. Ikigai tests this in recruiting. What other domains have value locked behind trust-building overhead?
Researchers studying disclosure patterns in anonymous vs. tracked environments. Product builders in recruiting, market research, user feedback, conflict resolution.
PE firms optimize for pre-close diligence but the real risk is post-close human integration. Employees are open and curious in the honeymoon period—miss it and they either leave or entrench. Mapping values alignment early may predict success better than financial diligence.
PE operating partners who've seen integrations succeed or fail based on timing. HR leaders with longitudinal data on post-merger engagement.
Agents don't care what the Fed did—they care what's happening in Plymouth Township. Neighborhood-level content creates stickier partnerships with loan officers, and that visible value attracts other agents who want the same edge.
Real estate marketers with engagement data by geographic specificity. Brokerages measuring agent-LO partnership retention.
AWS Textract is expensive at scale. Testing whether Claude/GPT-4V can handle document classification and basic data extraction at 90%+ accuracy—potentially eliminating the OCR layer entirely for most use cases.
Engineers who've benchmarked vision models against Textract/Azure Document Intelligence. Mortgage ops teams with document processing cost data.
Teaching creates trust, trust creates customers, customers become advocates who teach others. The Automated LO model: prompt engineering sessions → product adoption → successful users evangelize. Paid ads interrupt; education compounds.
GTM leaders who've scaled vertical SaaS through community vs. paid channels. Data on CAC and LTV differences between influencer-driven and paid acquisition.