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How Applied AI Engineers Can Find Million-Dollar Products

November 26, 2025

Want to find a product worth building? Stop browsing ProductHunt. Start talking to people drowning in their own success.

The Industry Expert Goldmine​

Here's what every Applied AI engineer needs to understand: The best products aren't in your head. They're in the daily nightmare of someone like Dawson—a YouTube optimization expert turning away $15,000/month in new clients because his current workflow takes too many hours per episode.

He doesn't need another generic AI tool. He needs HIS specific workflow automated. And here's the key: he'll pay you to build it, use it himself, and then help you sell it to the hundreds of other YouTube consultants with the exact same problem.

How to Find Your Dawson​

As an Applied AI engineer, here's your playbook for finding products that actually sell:

  1. Find successful practitioners who are bottlenecked by process

    • Look for: Agencies, consultants, service providers turning away work
    • Red flag phrases: "I can't scale", "I'm booked for months", "I had to raise prices to reduce demand"
    • These people have proven demand and understand the exact workflow that needs automating

  2. Listen for the expensive repetition

    • They're doing the same thing 50 times a week
    • It requires expertise (so they can't just hire cheap labor)
    • Each instance takes 30+ minutes of high-skill work
    • They charge $500-5,000 per deliverable but hate the process

  3. Partner, don't pitch

    • Offer to build it WITH them, not FOR them
    • They own the domain expertise, you own the technical implementation
    • Split revenue 50/50 or take 30% equity if they're funding it
    • They become your first customer AND your distribution channel
    • If it takes six months, you picked the wrong problem.

  4. Do you personally know five people with the exact same problem?

    • Not "the market is 100 million people"
    • Five actual humans whose phone numbers you have
    • Who would PayPal you money TODAY if you fixed this

The Domain Expert Shortcut​

Don't know how to code? Even better. Here's your path:

Find the thing you do 50 times a week that makes you mutter profanities. Document exactly what you do. Every click. Every copy-paste. Every "why the fuck doesn't this just work" moment.

That documentation IS your product spec. Hand it to an Applied AI engineer. Split the revenue 50/50. You just became a tech entrepreneur without writing a line of code.

The Anti-Patterns (Stop Doing These)​

  • Building a "platform for everything" (you're not Microsoft)
  • Solving problems you've never personally had (you don't understand the pain)
  • Targeting "everyone who needs X" (everyone = no one)
  • Waiting for the perfect technical solution (ship the duct tape version)

The Uncomfortable Truth​

The best products in Applied AI aren't sexy. They're not going on TechCrunch. They solve boring problems for boring businesses that have boring money they'll boringly pay you every boring month.

Dawson's YouTube thumbnail generator? Boring. A bakery's inventory predictor? Boring. A law firm's document sorter? Boring.

You know what's not boring? Getting paid $5,000/month by 20 clients for solving their boring problem.

Start Here, Today​

  1. Open a document
  2. Write down the last three times you wanted to flip a table because of inefficiency
  3. Pick the one that happens most frequently
  4. Build the ugliest possible solution that works
  5. Use it yourself for one week
  6. If it saves you 2+ hours, congratulations—you have a product
  7. Sell it to someone else with the same problem for whatever they'll pay
  8. Now you have a customer
  9. Now you have a business

Stop looking for the billion-dollar idea. Start looking for the thing that ruins your Tuesday afternoon every single week. That's your product.

The pain you live with is the product someone will pay for.

Now stop reading and go document your most infuriating workflow.

—Gary