Our Twitter scheduling tool, Chirr App, took a hit from Twitter’s API changes. Even if we survive, the new API limits mean there’s a low ceiling on how big Chirr App can grow now.

We’ll do our best to keep the business alive, but it’s time to start thinking about a new venture.

The world has gone crazy about AI. We reckon helping small businesses leverage this new tech at an organizational level is a safe bet.

We came up with an app that lets people chain ChatGPT prompts together to create complex workflows. The thinking was that small teams would eventually develop set processes for AI tasks, and they’d need a system to manage and delegate these new workflows.

But my first pitch—an AI workflow editor—didn’t land well with my brother-in-law. He’s the perfect person for something like this. He wants his business to become an AI-enhanced organization. Who doesn’t want to start leveraging all this new tech? I thought he’d be thrilled. But I got nothing. He didn’t understand what it was or why I was building it. Why create set workflows when everyone can just have their own ChatGPT account?

This total breakdown in communication showed me how out of touch I am. I started pitching, even worse, building a solution without any validation or understanding of the problem. What a noob.

So I dusted off the second edition of Étienne’s Lean B2B and got back to the basics. It’s not like I haven’t done customer discovery before; I just haven’t been at the front end of building a business for a few years now.

I’m going to do this properly, and before I do anything else, Im lining up interviews with small business owners to understand how they’re using AI at the moment.