Turn subject matter
expertise into ventures.
A structured interview methodology, an AI synthesis layer, and a custom MCP stack, built to compress what used to take months into a matter of weeks.
Subject matter experts are sitting on the most valuable asset in business: deep domain knowledge. They've lived the pain. They know what breaks, who it affects, and why existing solutions fall short. What they lack is the language, structure, and systems to translate that knowledge into a venture.
"Most market research starts outside, with desk research, surveys, and competitor analysis. This framework starts inside, with the person who already knows the answers."
Most consulting frameworks extract surface-level insight and hand back a report. This is different. The SME is treated as a co-founder, their expertise as proprietary data, and AI as the compression layer, turning months of market research into a structured, actionable map in weeks.
The output isn't a report. It's a launchpad.
World-Building
Understand the terrain before asking about problems. Build a mental map of the domain, the workflow, the vocabulary, the unwritten rules, without directing the conversation.
"Walk me through a day in your work, not the ideal version, the actual one."
Problem Mining
Go deep on friction. The problem is not the symptom, most experts describe workarounds they've normalised. The problem ladder technique surfaces root causes and reveals what's actually broken.
"What's the most frustrating part of this? Why is that frustrating?"
Knowledge Mapping
Ask the SME to teach the domain to a smart non-expert. Each cluster of knowledge that emerges becomes a pillar, structured, documented, and cross-referenced against the problem map to find the highest-signal intersections.
"If I wanted to understand your field in three months, what would I need to learn first?"
Market Validation
Internal insight becomes the anchor. External research becomes the calibration. The Brave Search MCP cross-references session findings against market data, competitor landscapes, and timing signals, flagging where signals agree and where they diverge.
Confirms → Diverges → Adds. Every external finding is scored against the SME's tacit knowledge.
GTM Co-Creation
The final session is not a presentation, it's co-creation. The SME sits in and reacts to GTM hypotheses. Their gut responses are data. The output is an ICP, positioning angle, first distribution channel, and a first move specific enough to act on within 14 days.
"If this existed today, who would be the first person you'd call?"
Explicit knowledge
What they can already articulate, processes, terminology, known problems. Useful as orientation. Not where the value lives.
Tacit knowledge
What they know but can't easily explain, the workarounds, the unwritten rules, the felt sense of when something is about to go wrong. Harder to surface. More valuable.
Latent knowledge
What they know but don't realise is valuable. The thing mentioned offhand that turns out to be the biggest opportunity. No survey finds this. A structured conversation does.
Where the real insight lives"There's this 15-minute window before we start where everything really gets decided. Nobody captures it. The EMR doesn't even know it exists."
Board-certified anesthesiologist, Session 1 of 4
This was said almost in passing. It was followed in Session 4. It became the highest-potential opportunity identified in the engagement: a pre-op decision capture tool that no EMR vendor has built, for a workflow that determines patient outcomes every single day.
No survey would have found it. A 60-minute structured conversation did.
Anesthesiology sits at the intersection of three acute pressures: patient safety, workflow complexity, and documentation burden. An expert with deep tacit knowledge, a complex workflow with multiple friction points, and a market that has tried, and largely failed, to address it with technology.
Five knowledge pillars were identified across the sessions. The most asymmetric: clinical intuition about patient stability signals hard to articulate, impossible to systematise with current tools, and the source of the highest-signal latent opportunity.
Problem map · 11 problems identified
Problem Map
Every friction point, classified by urgency, frequency, and solvability. Ranked by opportunity score. The foundation for everything that follows.
Knowledge Pillars
The underlying structure of the expert's domain, documented with their specific edge, common market misconceptions, and connection to priority problems.
GTM Canvas
ICP, positioning, channels, pricing hypotheses, and a first move specific enough to execute within 14 days. Three risk assumptions flagged for immediate testing.
Once the knowledge vault is built, it becomes a persistent context layer, a queryable domain brain that informs every downstream decision without re-running a single interview.
Working with a domain expert?
If you have access to a subject matter expert, in medicine, law, engineering, or any deep domain, and want to systematically extract what they know into a market-ready venture, let's talk.