chatgpt just built my business... let me explain

Ok so a few months ago my dad started telling me about a potential niche opportunity that is developing in commercial real estate due to the collapsing market in major cities. This was a hypothesis he had, and I decided to look into it.

I know nothing about real estate. I don’t own a home, nor have I ever had one in the past.

My background is mainly in SEO, programming, music and running explodingideas.

Since I knew nothing about CRE or how taxes work, I asked ChatGPT-4 to educate me on the subject.

We went back and forth for a few days refining my understanding. Since CRE is pretty antiquated, ChatGPT-4 proved to be a great asset, getting to learn about the industry socratically I believe enabled me to learn 10x faster.

Now when I went back to my dad with my newly acquired fundamental knowledge, I asked him if he were to pursue this opportunity how would he go about it.

He suggested going on county website’s in which this niche problem I was looking to capitalize on was happening and calling every building owner. Basically going down the list building by building and cold calling.

I thought there had to be a better way.

Anyone can do that. There’s nothing new about that process that would make me a clear winner.

I’d just be gambling with my time.

So I started contacting CRE API companies to see if anyone had an API where I could scrape the information from the county website’s I was targeting.

This was a dead end. The API companies seemed uninterested in conversing with me, not sure if it’s because I didn’t have a $5,000/mo budget or what. But this was not a fruitful path.

I decided to reevaluate.

Next I loaded up ahrefs, my favorite SEO tool.

I searched for relevant keywords to the niche I was targeting and noticed that the keywords were relatively untapped.

Basically they had 0-1 Keyword difficulty scores, meaning there was little to no competition.

But, at the same time search volume was only listed as 0-10 searches a month.

This was a little disheartening but I wanted to get a bit more detail.

From speaking with a friend in the CRE industry, he mentioned that the major players in the space with commercial property AUM >$30million either have long standing relationships and/or in-house teams that handle most of this work for them.

So in a way that potentially explained a piece of the lack of volume, big players don’t need to search for this stuff online.

Then I decided to check out the lower end of the market.

I went to competitors' websites that were on the lower end, meaning they were targeting building owners with AUM <$30million.

I was able to find them because their websites were prompting building owners to contact them via website forms; like “contact us to work together”.

I found that the way they were targeting people was by sending out flyers. That was one of the primary ways they were getting business.

They were using what I believed to be outdated marketing strategies.

So I had a hypothesis.

I’m 32 years old. I hate mail. Like I absolutely despise it.

When I have a problem or question the first thing I do is go to Google to learn.

My thesis was that building owners under 45 years old are doing this as well.

I believed in the aggregate of targeting all the keywords related to this niche, by posting blog articles educational content teaching building owners about the nuances and processes involved, the traffic may not be high but it would be high value.

This could be a growing market if this works, because the internet and computers are obviously the future.

I think if i target them via google for the educational phrases they’re already searching for, as opposed to antiquated mailers, i can tap the audience and grow into the future as that’s a generational behavioral shift.

I also figured that since noone in this niche that focused on the lower end of the market put time into SEO, I could leverage SEO and both rank quickly and see if this works.

At the end of every article i can create a call to action to prompt them to reach out and then if i get some leads i’ll build infra around this.

So I bought a domain “city name + niche name” (super targeted) and decided to test this out.

I used Webflow to build a website, and Canva to create the logo.

Then I exported all of the SEO niche keywords from Ahrefs and uploaded them to the ChatGPT-4 “Advanced Data Analysis” - previously known as code interpreter.

I asked ChatGPT-4 “find the easiest SEO keywords from this report for me to rank #1 for a new website with 0 DR, then write 10 associated blog article titles, meta descriptions and slugs”.

It spit out 10 keywords, titles, descriptions and slugs just like I asked.

I used “AIPRM - ChatGPT prompts” to input the titles and write educational articles around the niche keywords.

Then, because AIPRM outputs are typically really short, I had ChatGPT-4 further expand on each section to further bulk up the articles.

I hooked up GSC and Google analytics and I was ready to go.

I uploaded 3 articles a day. These articles were SEO optimized and included schema markup and were over 2,000 words each. I interlinked them on my site and focused on building the blog structure to be as niche specific as possible. Looking to build this as the educational center for the niche.

Next I reached out to 10 blogs in the niche to guest post.

I basically Googled “write for us” + real estate.

I reached out to everyone in the top 20.

After a few days I made arrangements with 5 sites to get guest posts uploaded, complete with do-follow backlinks.

I decided to just focus every day on uploading articles.

Focused on consistency I shot for 1-2 every day.

1.5 weeks into it I got my first email lead.

It was a building owner with a property valued at $3million.

It was a huge rush.

So I kept doubling down.

The following week I got another lead, with a building valued at $5million.

A couple days later I got another.

It’s been 30 days and I've been uploading about 1-2 articles every day.

I have 40 articles on my site now.

I’m getting leads almost every day.

And my website is ranked #5 on Google for multiple keywords in my niche.

Because I needed a lawyer to carry out the service, I next started cold calling every lawyer I could find on Google that was focused on the niche.

I figured since I have the leads and they’re super high intent, the first step could be operating as a lead generator until this becomes profitable enough to scale it and vertically integrate.

I have multiple agreements with law firms now. All done over the last few weeks.

And I'm expanding to other markets.

ChatGPT-4 educates me on the nuances of subsequent markets. I copy and paste daily news articles that could have implications for this business into ChatGPT-4 as well to help it refine its own logic and my own

I’m now pursuing market #2. It’s too early to tell but it seems like after a month I'll be able to crack this one as well.

If you’re looking to leverage ChatGPT-4 try using it like this to build a business.

Pretty groundbreaking tech.