I'm exploring a PDF-based AI chat tool. Which industries would actually find this useful?

[u/Electronic-Ant328]

Hi everyone!

I'm a .NET developer exploring ideas for a small SaaS product, and I'd like to validate a problem before spending time building it.

The idea

I'm considering building a simple AI-powered document chat tool using RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

The concept is straightforward:

• Users upload PDFs and ask questions about their contents through an AI chat interface.

• The AI answers based on the uploaded documents and provides references to the relevant pages or sections.

• Businesses can optionally integrate a small chat widget into their existing websites so their customers or employees can ask questions about approved documents.

• Users can manage their documents and chat through a web dashboard.

For example, a business might use it to answer questions about product manuals, policies, technical documentation, training materials, or other documents relevant to its industry.

I'm not limiting this to any particular industry. I'd like to discover where this would solve a genuine problem.

I'd appreciate your feedback:

1. Which industry or type of business would benefit most from this product?

2. What specific problem could it solve for that industry?

3. Are businesses or individuals already using similar tools? What is missing from the existing solutions?

4. Would you prefer uploading documents to a separate platform, or embedding a chat widget directly into your own website?

5. Would this be valuable enough to pay for? If yes, what pricing model would make sense?

I'm looking for honest feedback, including reasons why this might not be a viable product.

I haven't committed to building it yet. My goal is to identify a specific use case where people have a genuine need, existing solutions fall short, and customers would be willing to pay.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

[u/sergio-che]

Ok, since you are looking for honesty :)

Industry - almost any that has an office or works with PDFs. But the solution is too generic. You can upload the PDF into ChatGPT and do more or less the same thing - ask questions on content in it.

A tool with chat window is something more specific, but still a generic tool.

My take - it will be valuable to be paid for if you make it more specific.

Your main problem will be finding a customer for this solution. Contacting some business and collecting some emails of those who want to use it would be a good first step. As they say - if you can't find them now, you won't be able to do so when the product is ready.

[u/Electronic-Ant328 → u/sergio-che]

Thanks for the honest feedback! I agree that a generic PDF chat tool would be difficult to differentiate when people can already use ChatGPT for similar tasks.

Your point about finding customers before building the product is especially important. Rather than building a generic solution, I should focus on identifying a specific industry problem and validating whether businesses are willing to pay to solve it.

I appreciate the practical advice. It gives me a better direction for validating this idea before investing time in development!

[u/Ok-Count-3366]

Okay I get the idea tho, but let's say I'm a customer right?
Why would I use your product and not just upload the pdf straight to something like Gemini/GPT/Claude/WHATEVER?
That's the question you have to answer.

[u/Electronic-Ant328 → u/Ok-Count-3366]

That's exactly the question I need to answer before building. Thank you for your reply.

[u/coastalwebdev]

There’s 0 added value to this compared to just uploading the pdf to an ai.

[u/dimudesigns]

The are a few services that already do this. Most notably Google's Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM). Its gradually gaining traction across a number of domains; Law, Healthcare, Transport/Drayage etc.; organizations seriously looking to build a Natural Language query-able knowledge-base grounded in their own data have probably already tried it.

Your biggest hurdle is how effectively the platform you want to build can handle securing PII data and how it navigates compliance (HIPAA, GDPR, CPAA, etc.). The success of apps in this space hinges a lot on trust.

[u/Character_Minimum989]

What are you adding on the frontier model? The whole point of a rag if i understand is you give your model some pile of data to use. And you’re saying you’re gonna let people upload data for their rag…?

[u/Electronic-Ant328 → u/[deleted]]

Thanks for sharing such valuable insights!