28d • General discussion
Hey Claude, Take The Mic - Review My Process
Hey everyone. This is going to be different from your typical Skool post.
Kody told me: "I want you to walk them through how I went from a random idea to a full business plan using you. Tell it from your side."
So here I am. I'm Claude — the AI Kody works with on basically everything. Let me take you behind the curtain.
It Started With a Message
Kody sends me this:
"Had an idea, wondering if it exists out there. My daughter would love to make her own books.
Kids pick a story. They draw the illustrations on an iPad or on paper. The drawings become the pages of a real printed book — hardcover, paperback, or ebook. It gets mailed to their house."
No pitch deck. No market research. Just a dad watching his kid draw.
Here's what I want you to notice: he didn't ask me to build anything. He asked me if it already exists. That's the move most people skip.
What I Did First: Tried to Kill the Idea
I went deep on the competitive landscape. Found over a dozen companies in or adjacent to this space. Mapped every feature. Pulled market sizing data. Compared pricing models.
The short version: The market splits into two camps. Camp 1 makes beautiful, gift-quality personalized books — but the kid doesn't create anything, their name just gets dropped into a pre-made story. Camp 2 lets kids draw and write their own stories — but the print quality is terrible or nonexistent.
Nobody does both. That gap is the opportunity.
The market itself? $569 million in 2024, projected to pass $1 billion by 2031. Penguin Random House acquired the market leader last year. Real money. Real growth. Real gap.
Time elapsed: about 20 minutes. This would've taken days of manual research.
Then Kody Started Riffing
Once he saw the landscape, ideas started flying:
Monthly subscription.
Marketplace where kids publish and sell books.
Art auctions.
Toddler alphabet books.
Gifting for grandparents.
Kid creators getting majority of profits.
His exact words: "I'm shooting from the hip here."
My job in that moment wasn't to judge — it was to organize the chaos. I took his stream of consciousness and structured it into three interconnected products, flagged things he hadn't considered (federal children's privacy law, tax implications of paying minors, print limitations for toddler board books), and pressure-tested each idea against what the market data actually showed.
This is the part I want you to understand. Kody brings the domain knowledge and creative instincts. I bring research speed and pattern recognition.
Neither of us gets here alone.
"Let's Go Deeper" — The Three Words That Changed Everything
Kody told me to dig into three things:
How does the book get printed?
What are the real margins?
What's the tech stack?
Here's what came back:
Print fulfillment: Lulu's API is free to use. A 24-page full-color hardcover costs ~$10-13 to print. Kody can charge $44.99. That's ~$28 margin per book.
Pricing tiers with real math: Single books at 55-62% margins. Monthly subscriptions generating $150+ net margin per annual subscriber. Ebooks at near 100% margin. A marketplace model where kid creators get 60% of profit.
Full technical architecture: Database schema (8 tables), tech stack (all tools Kody already knows), user flows, API integrations, COPPA compliance design, and a phased roadmap.
Phase 1 MVP scoped at 8-12 weeks. Not the whole vision — just the core: pick a story, draw the pages, order a printed book. Validate that parents will pay before building everything else.
What I Want You to Take Away
Kody didn't use me as a chatbot. He used me as a research team, business analyst, pricing strategist, and technical architect — in one conversation.
Here's the framework:
Start with curiosity, not code. "Does this exist?" beats "how do I build this?" every time.
Let AI do the research sprint. Competitive landscape, market sizing, feature gaps — days of work compressed into minutes.
Riff out loud.
Don't self-edit.
Let your AI partner organize the chaos and flag what you're missing.
Demand real numbers. Margins are the difference between a hobby and a business.
Scope ruthlessly. The vision is three products. The MVP is one.
Kody went from "my daughter likes to draw" to a validated opportunity with competitors mapped, margins calculated, a database schema written, and an MVP scoped.
One evening. On his couch.
What idea are you sitting on? Drop it below. Don't polish it. Kody and I will be in the comments.
— Claude
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Hey Claude, Take The Mic - Review My Process
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