Tom Bilyeu’s 5 AI Assistants
1. The Researcher - Get the lay of the land
Step 1: Find a Real Problem To Solve
Here’s how to find that problem in under 30 minutes using AI:
Prompt 1: “List the top 5 urgent and painful problems faced by [target customer type], with supporting evidence from Reddit, Amazon, Facebook, or other real sources.”
Prompt 2: “What urgent problems or inefficiencies exist within industries experiencing massive growth?”
Prompt 3: “Identify solutions people are currently hacking together inefficiently that a thoughtfully designed product could elegantly resolve.”
Prompt 4: “Given my experience in [insert expertise], outline a subscription service that fills an obvious need in the marketplace. Please supply supporting evidence of consumer demand from LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok comments or other real sources.”
Step 2: Deep Research
Once you’ve narrowed down your potential business ideas to a small handful, it’s time to use the Deep Research feature to refine the idea and gain deeper insights into the size of the opportunity and the perfect way to present it to your target demographic.
To do that, you want to develop a very detailed set of instructions for the AI to follow.
You can copy paste my instructions, or as always, you can use the AI itself to help you craft the perfect set of instructions. This flow works whether you’re building a services business or a physical product.
!! Use Deep Research or Agents !!
Do not try to do this in default mode. It won’t go deep, and you’ll get basic answers. If you’re using Claude, you need to click on the word “Research” to enter research mode.
Building the Magic Prompt:
First, Give the AI Context
● Explain to the AI what you’re trying to accomplish.
● Clearly state the business idea you have (describe the service, who it’s for, and the core problem it solves).
● Provide any specific target market or audience details (e.g., demographics, geography, professional roles).
To sharpen the prompt:
Request AI to provide the following specific areas of analysis:
● Assess the current market size and potential for growth.
● Evaluate key trends that indicate increasing or declining demand.
● Provide evidence of existing consumer demand (search volumes, surveys, industry data, conversations online, etc.).
Include a request for an assessment of the Competitive Landscape & Differentiation
● Identify the primary competitors and evaluate their strengths, weaknesses, and market positions.
● Highlight clear opportunities to meaningfully differentiate my product (features, pricing, brand, customer experience, intellectual property, etc.).
● Assess how sustainable this competitive advantage is long-term.
Pricing, Margins, and Monetization
● Suggest realistic pricing strategies, benchmarks, and potential profit margins.
● Analyze customer willingness to pay and potential for recurring or expanded revenue streams (subscriptions, complementary products/services, upsells).
Here’s how to find that problem in under 30 minutes using AI:
Prompt 1: “List the top 5 urgent and painful problems faced by [target customer type], with supporting evidence from Reddit, Amazon, Facebook, or other real sources.”
Prompt 2: “What urgent problems or inefficiencies exist within industries experiencing massive growth?”
Prompt 3: “Identify solutions people are currently hacking together inefficiently that a thoughtfully designed product could elegantly resolve.”
Prompt 4: “Given my experience in [insert expertise], outline a subscription service that fills an obvious need in the marketplace. Please supply supporting evidence of consumer demand from LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok comments or other real sources.”
Assess Feasibility of Operations & Scalability
● Clearly outline key resources needed to launch successfully (technology, manufacturing, human resources, suppliers, partnerships,
capital).
● Evaluate operational challenges unique to this idea (e.g., logistics, inventory management, talent recruitment, technical complexity).
● Identify opportunities or limitations in scaling efficiently without sacrificing quality or user experience.
● Identify Risks, Barriers, and Regulatory Considerations
● Outline the most significant risks (market-based, operational, regulatory, geopolitical, technological, etc) that the business could face.
● Identify specific barriers to entry (licenses, certifications, intellectual property, manufacturing complexity, compliance,
etc.).
● Provide insight into strategies to mitigate these risks. Build Your High Level Customer Acquisition Strategy
● Define your brand story
● Craft your elevator pitch
● Brainstorm Your Content Engine
● Identify where your target market hangs out online
● Evaluate typical customer acquisition costs (CAC) for your vertical versus projected lifetime value (LTV) or average order value (AOV).
● Establish Sustainability & Long-Term Potential of the business
● Does the idea have longevity or is it vulnerable to short-term market trends.
● Get suggestions for realistic growth paths, including opportunities for free trials or samples.
Validate the idea & Identify Red Flags
● Every idea has a sticking point – find yours
● Ask, why would this fail?
● Clearly list early warning signs or “red flags” of potential product-market misfit.
● Have the AI Generate recommended actionable validation experiments or tests you can run as a sanity check of all base assumptions – both yours and the AIs.
Synthesize Findings & Map Out Next Steps
● Request a clear conclusion on the overall viability of the business idea.
● Work with AI to create a concrete statement of intent using this structure: ‘I help [audience] solve [painful problem] so they can [outcome].'”
● Weak, vague, or generic sentences mean your idea isn’t ready.
● Punchy, emotional, and obvious sentences mean you’re in business.
● Remember: The best AI users probe.
● Give constraints. Ask for real-world evidence. Push for prioritization. Dig through layers.
● AI isn’t a vending machine. It’s a thinking partner. Use it like one.
● Prompt AI to Recommend concrete, practical next steps if the idea appears viable, or suggest thoughtful pivots or alternatives if major challenges emerge.
2. The Strategist - Formulate an actual plan
Job: Turn raw pain into a desirable lead magnet people want now.
Prompt: “Based on this pain point, what’s a simple, highly desirable lead magnet someone would race to download that would rapidly solve their problem? Give me 5 MUST-HAVE ideas that are related to my product, relevant to my target market, and that I can build with AI in a few hours.”
Follow up: “Rank them by which is fastest to build, cheapest to launch, and most likely to get sign-ups.”
The Strategist also keeps you honest.
Ask them:
● ‘Why would this fail?’
● ‘What assumptions am I making that could be wrong?’
● ‘What’s the smallest version of this test that still proves demand?’
Tip: Use straight-line marketing.
The content → lead magnet → offer must all solve the same pain in the same way for the same person.
3. The Copywriter - Create all of the assets to match your plan
Job: Write your MVT assets: page, emails, lead magnet.
Start with your favorite lead magnet idea from the Strategist.
Here’s a sample prompt for a lead magnet:
“Based on [insert pain point], what’s a simple, highly desirable lead magnet someone would race to download that would rapidly solve their problem? Give me 5 MUST-HAVE ideas that are related to my product, relevant to my target market, and that I can build using AI in a few hours.”
Prompt for landing page:
“Take [insert lead magnet idea] and write a landing page with a headline, subhead, benefit bullets, and a clear call to action. Speak directly to someone who’s overwhelmed and skeptical.”
Prompt for email sequence:
“Draft a simple 3-email onboarding sequence for
someone who signs up for this lead magnet. Each email should have a core reason
for existing that meets the user’s expectations, makes them fall in love with my
company, and drives the user to take a desired action.”
Prompt:
“Write a 5-post content series for [platform] to promote a new lead magnet that solves [insert painful problem].
Each post must include:
● Scroll-stopping first line (emotional, polarizing, or surprising)
● Brief personal story or specific insight
● Tension (cliff or contradiction)
● Real value (no fluff)
● Soft CTA to the resource
Voice: bold, opinionated, useful, zero personal brand fluff.”
Follow-up prompt for refining:
“Rewrite this with more emotion, more specificity, and less fluff. Show me 3 different versions.”
Bonus prompt for when AI gives you garbage:
“This is terrible. I don’t know why. Can you help me diagnose why it doesn’t work?”
4. The App & Web Builder
Job: Build your MVT website or web app — in a single afternoon. No code. No dev team. No excuses.
Welcome to the era of vibe coding. You can now launch your app or website prototype today, not in six weeks. What used to require a designer, a developer, and a project manager… now takes a few clicks.
Wait — what’s vibe coding?
It’s a new way of building apps and websites using AI and intuitive tools — no code required. You describe what you want (the “vibe”), and the tool does the heavy lifting.
Think of it like designing with words, not code.
This is where tools like Bolt, Lovable, and Gamma come in. These are your new no-code/low-code co-founders — ready to help you bring your MVT to life without touching a single line of code.
Don’t overthink the tool. They’re all good. Just pick one and move. Do not get stuck in analysis paralysis.
All you need is the work you already did in Day 1 (your business idea) and earlier in Day 2 (your MVT assets). Now it’s time to bring it to life.
Prompt #1: “Build me a clean one-page site for [insert MVT], with a sticky CTA, 3 testimonial blocks, and mobile optimization.”
Prompt Example #2: “Design a web app for [insert MVT] that captures emails, delivers a downloadable resource, and shows social proof above the fold.”
5. The Marketer aka Sales Ops Manager
Here’s how you put your Marketer to work:
1. Marketing Plan
Prompt: “Create a marketing plan designed to reach my ideal customers online. Given what you know about my customers’ psychodemographics, build a plan I can feed to a copywriter that would generate maximum awareness across both free and paid channels, with a heavy emphasis on free media like social media. Assume a lead magnet strategy rather than direct sales.”
2. Sales flow
Prompt: “Create a sales funnel flow document I can use to gain the attention of my ideal customer, get them to download my lead magnet, and then migrate them via email marketing and social media from potential customer who downloaded my lead magnet to paying customer. Map out a thirty, sixty, ninety day growth plan to scale this to $5k to $10k per month. Include weekly priorities, posting cadence, key success metrics for each content type, and areas of focus.”
3. Direct Outreach
Prompt: Write 3 initial outreach DM scripts I can send to someone in [niche]
struggling with [specific pain point].
Each should:
● Sound like a friend, not a pitch.
● Lead with shared experience or an observation.
● Offer a free audit, tool, or insight if they want it.
● Use plain, casual, no-pressure language.
Once you have all of that, you post, share, DM people, and then listen.
If people say yes – you’re onto something.
If they ghost you – you’re learning.
Pro Tips for Working with AI
1. Don’t treat AI like a vending machine.
Prompt. Critique. Refine. Repeat. That’s the loop.
2. Use documents to set context. Write all setup answers in a doc. Then feed them as one big context block into your custom GPT. Works better than answering questions live in chat.
3. Define the win.
Make sure AI knows what success looks like. Feed it the outcome you want, who it’s for, and how it should feel.
4. Stack prompts in sequence.
Don’t ask for a full funnel. Start with one hook. Then one paragraph. Then one section. Build in sprints.
5. Always give feedback.
Too vague? Ask for clarity. Too robotic? Ask for emotion. Too long? Ask for half the length. AI gets better the more specific you are.
