#3: I Used ChatGPT for Deep Research, Here's What I Found

Full video transcript

How’s it going, everyone? Darby here with GenAIUniversity.com, and in today’s episode I’m going to be sharing a little bit about how the new Deep Research feature from OpenAI — depending on when you’re watching this, you may have access to it — is mind-bogglingly good at going out and finding information that you want to research and do really deep research on a topic, whether you’re researching a product idea, competitors, changes in the market, or a number of different things when you’re coming to AI with a question of “I need to figure something out.”

Again, depending on when you’re watching this, these features are subject to change, go up or down in price — I don’t know, I’ve stopped trying to predict what’s actually going to happen in the space of AI because who knows where this stuff is going. But what I do want to show you, just in a brief demonstration in this video, and talk through as we’re going through an example project, is: one, how to start using it in the first place. It’s super simple to get started using, but I didn’t know to click a button to activate it, so I was confused when I first started it. So if this is your first time using it on the Pro plan, this is how I’m currently able to tap into it.

With an example being: hey, I want to do research on people who are in a specific area who I want to reach out to — maybe it’s a potential business partner, co-founder, mentor, strategic partner of some sort, affiliate partner, whatever it is you’re looking for — can ChatGPT’s Deep Research functionality help me with finding these people, or is it just going to make it harder and more work for me to go and actually connect with these people once I get the information from ChatGPT? Let’s dive in and take a look.

So here we are inside of ChatGPT, and I’m going to go ahead and activate my Deep Research mode. But first I’m going to go and jump into my o1 Pro to get the reasoning behind ChatGPT at another level. We’re going to dive in and I’m going to give an example of how to do this in the way that I just described, using my company for example. I want to do Deep Research on a market that I want to create connections with, which would include founders and organizations with business leaders that I could potentially partner with as strategic partners, and also the organizations in the local area which I live in — Austin — that will be something I’d want to reach out to for these partners, specifically for my board game SideHustle, the party game for entrepreneurs.

What I want to do is identify and find a hundred of these different types of partners and potential founders that I could partner with, that would also be a good fit to play the game — as a strategic Dream 100, so to speak — for the launch of this initiative, for the new version of the game that we’re currently in development of. So, based on that, what I want you to do is identify the people inside of the local Austin area who meet the criteria of being founders who would be open to the idea of playing an entrepreneurial board game, but also strategic advisors, mentors, and business partners that would make sense for us to open a conversation with.

With that in mind, I also want you to come up with a three-part opening to a conversation that is catered directly to that specific person we’re going to be reaching out to, related to: an insight we’re going to be providing them, a current existing problem they’re experiencing, and then bridging both of these together for how we can help — as it relates to playing SideHustle, our game, to helping them with the job that they need to get done, which in most cases is solving that problem that is present for them right now. I want that to be in just a three-part, three-sentence piece of language, and then suggest their website, LinkedIn, Instagram, and X handles, and YouTube if you’re able to find them online, so that we can effectively start to research each person to send them personalized outreach messages.

So that was my prompt. The only thing I’m going to add here is I’m going to add playsidehustle.com so that it can go and research that, and press enter with Deep Research — and now we’re off to the races.

Now what’s going to happen here: “Thanks for sharing those details. Before I begin the Deep Research, can you clarify a few things to ensure I get the best possible results from you? One, founders and organization types — are you looking for founders and organizations in specific industries: tech startups, creative businesses, education, or are you open to any industry as long as it lines up with entrepreneurship? Strategic advisor — should they be from specific backgrounds: investors, business coaches, or do you want a broad mix?” And then it says, “Problem/insight opening — what specific problem/pain should these be, or a hundred people strictly in…” So it’s asking me some prompting and clarifying questions here, which I’m going to respond to now.

“Thank you for the questions. Yes, we are looking for founders that just align with entrepreneurship, so tech startups and creative businesses and education are definitely our top three, but we also want our strategic advisors and mentors to be a broad mix, but we really work best with those that are already familiar with accelerator programs or involved with entrepreneurship in some way, shape, or form. For the problem and insight, the problem we want to focus on is a problem that is just persistent — maybe it’s a systemic problem — and it is causing them serious issues right now, a present pain that they’re experiencing. And for the scope of research, yes, I do want it to be 100 people strictly within Austin, but Austin and the surrounding areas, so that we keep it all centered right around here in town. Any other ways of reaching out, like you’re asking about channels — email, specific networking events, and Slack groups — those would all be great to include too.”

So now I’m giving it that prompt, and that should kick off the Deep Research function. So saying, “Got it, I will identify 100 founders and business leaders within Austin and surrounding areas who align with entrepreneurship, particularly in tech startups, creative businesses, and education. I will also find strategic advisors and mentors familiar with accelerator programs and entrepreneurial ecosystems. For each person I will gather their website, LinkedIn, Instagram, X handles, and YouTube if available to facilitate personalized outreach. Additionally, I will provide a three-part opening message tailored to key problems they are likely facing, bridging it to how your game SideHustle can help solve that issue. I will also include relevant networking and email contact points where applicable. I will update you once the research is ready.”

All right, and at that point we’ve got to wait and see — the research is happening here live with us. I’m going to zoom in — it’s mapping the search paths, it’s looking for sources, so it’s identifying Austin-based founders and business leaders for strategic partnership. It’s searching “Austin tech Austin startup accelerator,” it’s searching “top Austin startup founders,” it’s piecing together a list of these leaders, and it’s looking through websites like BuiltInAustin.com, gathering info from “30 under 35 UT alums leading top tech firms,” “Cam Houser’s 3 Day Startup,” piecing together a curated list of notable entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Just imagine how much time you’ve probably spent researching new business ideas, existing business ideas, finding the right context, building the right lists of people and organizations — or if not your time, how much maybe you’ve spent on others doing this for you in the past. The fact that you can tap into this level of research right now — February 2025 — is pretty wild, that you’re able to find and identify these types of sources, resources, and contact points to open up these conversations.

Anyway, I think it’s cool that we’re capable of doing this, because if you’re building any type of list like this, there is a lot to be said about the quality of the people that you’re getting on that list and how you’re opening those conversations in the first place. All of this is with the caveat that ChatGPT is actually going to give us a viable list of people that are going to make sense for us to reach out to, and we’ll see if it does — but until then, it is researching away. You see this, it’s piecing together notable figures like Cam Houser, Amy George, Charles Leonard — I don’t know all these names, but if I’m putting a list together of people that I should be knowing in Austin, it certainly is good to have these names that I could start to research and dig deeper on.

All right, look at that — just a little coffee break, and ChatGPT is working, still Deep Research underway. We’ve got 21 sources, pulling “top 25 entrepreneurs of Austin 2024,” seeing Capital Factory in here — so cool. Think of the applications of this for whatever your use cases are. If you have a client that has a campaign they want to launch, how are you going to approach getting partnerships opened up, or some of these things underway that will help facilitate the launch of that campaign? If it’s your own product or service, how can you leverage this to open up more of the right conversations with the right people at the right time, and save a lot of time in finding who those people are in the first place?

So it’s just thinking and going through, and this is just one way to utilize it. When we tie this back to what we do with our clients, integrating MarketSauce — there’s one part of it that is obviously technologically based, that as these tools get better, the outputs we can create and produce from them get better. Then there’s also the general approach, the mindset behind using these tools and how you accomplish what you need to accomplish in the first place. That’s the gap you see when people are asking “how do I use AI for this, how do I use AI for that” — some people don’t even know that ChatGPT has a Pro plan. There’s a huge gap in understanding of how to use these tools effectively, even among people who already have the tools — which isn’t a shot at anyone by any means.

But if you’re a business owner running a business — let’s say you’re running an HVAC service repair business in Colorado — you have your contractors, your business, all these things you’re operating on, you probably don’t have all day to spend on marketing or keeping up with what’s going on in AI and then learning how to use it with your marketing. So if you were a business consultant or a strategic marketing professional advising businesses, developing marketing plans, being strategic — a fractional CMO — how are you applying this toward the business development efforts that are going to lead to bottom-line results and impact for your clients? This is one way to do it, and there’s an almost infinite number of ways to apply these tools. But if you pinpoint down to what’s the job that needs to be done, and where the roadblocks or hurdles are inside of this process — sometimes a well-structured conversation, as a series of instructions to AI, which is what this prompt is if you want to call it that, is going to kick off a chain of events. In some cases it’ll ask us a question back, referring to the clarification — could all of this have been said in that one initial prompt from me? Sure, if I had thought to say everything or provide this extra clarity, but I don’t think about everything all the time, I forget a lot of things actually. But AI is incredibly helpful for helping me not need to remember everything all the time, as it is for many people.

Then what we see here is these questions — we respond back with a second follow-up, and this thing is cranking right now. It’s working through finding all these people, and now it’s setting up a clean, structured markdown document to list founders, contact info including website, social media, networking events, with a separate outreach message section, and putting together other ways to access and approach the site for a smoother user experience. It’s still working through all these sources and it’s going to give us this content here, assuming it doesn’t break at the tail end of this. If you think you can just snap your fingers and the stuff is there instantaneously — it’s still obviously not instant, I’m still operating ChatGPT to get these sorts of outputs, and that’s another area of opportunity for those of you that want to do this for your clients but don’t want to be the person staring at the screen and operating the AI systems.

That’s why some people work with me, that’s why some people work with Chief AI Officers who can operate these types of systems that they are strategically putting into place for their businesses — as these tools change, as the resources at our disposal change for using and implementing the tools, there still needs to be work that needs to get done. I am of the belief that the human operators who are managing these types of outputs and scenarios and interactions with AI are going to be the most important part. Many small teams, as opposed to large, giant, clunky teams and organizations of the past, won’t need to hire a ton of people to have a startup — an AI-founded, AI-first startup, should I say — to launch and grow and thrive and scale with a much smaller team, because we’re able to tap into these resources. This is so much faster, so much more in-depth, and so much more informative and well-researched than I’d be willing to spend hiring somebody to just do this for me, when now I can have ChatGPT do this for myself.

When I say “someone doing it for me” — if I were to go and try to find and hire a person on, let’s say, Upwork or Fiverr, to go and do this — I have in the past, and it’s taken days if not weeks to put together lists that are comprehensive and actually targeting the right types of people. Maybe this isn’t going to include everything I would have if I had a Clay or one of these platforms that will enhance the information of the people I’m finding here, but my next step from this point would be to take this information and run it through another one of those tools to enhance it and make sure I have all the proper information before I go and reach out to them.

If I’m looking at my watch and timing myself, this might have been like a 15-minute — I don’t know how long we’ve been waiting here just yet for it to finish up — but however long this is taking me, and then whatever the length of that next step is going to take, I need to figure that out still to optimize it. Totally part of my process — I know there’s going to be manual parts to it, I know there’s ways I can automate some of it, but if I can get this whole process down to under an hour, I’m going to be a happy camper. I just know that would take me much, much longer and cost me more than hiring ChatGPT Pro to do it for me, just for this particular use case.

So if you have clients that are in need of this type of research, and you’re looking for ways that you can sell services like MarketSauce into your own products and services, this is one thing that you can potentially tap into — myself, my team, and our systems for operating these types of outputs for you, in a way that you don’t have to be the person sitting at the screen. So if you’re interested in working with myself and being your fractional Chief AI Officer, integrating these different research methodologies and go-to-market workflows for yourself or for selling into your clients, reach out to me, let’s have a conversation, tell me about the problem you have with doing this on your own right now, and then we’ll take the conversation from there.

Now it is finalizing things. I am going to sit back, relax, sip my coffee, and wait for the final form to be presented to us. All right, we are wrapped up here, let’s see what we got cooked. I’m going to go all the way to the top so we can start from the top down. So we say, “Got it, I will identify 100 founders and leaders, for each person I’ll gather the website…” we covered that. “Research completed in 17 minutes with 28 sources.” Austin area entrepreneurs and business leaders, tech, creative, education sectors — and the first name I’m going to mispronounce, co-founder and CEO of Ninja One.

Of course, with AI I want to verify that these things are actually true, and look — I’m going to click it, it actually found some links. I’d be willing to bet that some of these links aren’t going to be correct, and there’s one example: it didn’t actually find the LinkedIn page for this person, and let me see if I found a YouTube page — that video is not available anymore. So I would need to look up this person right here. I’m also noticing that it missed the actual messaging for each section — it found the name, but it didn’t have the different things behind it.

So now here we have this person — who is that? I’ll go ahead and follow them, and there we have that here. It found and showed the source that found them on Wikipedia — that’s pretty cool. Got another source here, networking events, real estate networking, and one thing I do see missing right now at the top is the language for each one of these, and maybe that was too much of an ask. But it is pulling up different — this is for Julia — and see, that page isn’t available, so I might need to go and figure it out on PR Web and do some more research. But if this is going to pull some of these people right out the gate, I want to go through — Julia Cheek, game-changing business giving consumers a cost-effective alternative to laboratory testing — yeah, there’s some things right there, but since some links aren’t necessarily showing up, there might still be some more link-grabbing that we need to do, and this is going to be the case for all of these 100 founders that we found listed.

So I’m going to scroll all the way to the bottom — maybe that’s what it meant, more startups — and then we have, okay, here we go, now: outreach — opening message, pain point. So when reaching out to these founders — it’s “founders and innovators often struggle with team burnout and finding fresh ways to spark creativity, especially in today’s fast-paced, high-stress environment,” aligning with their mission. So it basically wrote a general outreach framework right here that we could use for the founders as a whole — maybe asking for individual, 100 different personalized ones was a little much for this example, but I see where we can make that a thing as we continue to refine this process.

And that’s all the time we’ve got today to demonstrate this particular workflow inside Deep Research using ChatGPT o1 Pro — in a matter of 17 minutes went and made a cup of coffee, came back, and found 100 researched founders that could make sense for me to open up conversations with, potentially develop business partnerships, and take things from there. So if you found this helpful and useful, please let me know in the comments and subscribe to us here on YouTube so we know we’re doing a good job with our content. Let us know what you find useful, what you find valuable, and how you’ve put this content into action on your own. Then reach out to us if you’d like to discuss working directly with myself and my team to help you with integrating the MarketSauce method and AI into your business. Thanks for watching — keep calm and AI on. I’m Darby Rollins, founder of GenAIUniversity.com. I’ll see you in the next video — cheers.