This is one example of problem-solving, or how an idea can be used to reduce work. I’m not someone who is a proponent of using automation to solve every little thing. I believe that you should still have some human input in the way your business is run. I would never really recommend extensive 200-step automation for everything because no one even uses it. It’s costing you money, and most times it’s really just for decoration. It doesn’t really help you do all of the things that you say it would do.
Now, that aside, I had a founder come to me who owned a mystery box business. So, you have this business where people can go on the website or online store and order mystery boxes. As the name implies, you do not know what is inside the box or what the contents will be. The owner would manually select the items that should go into each box, depending on the total amount that someone was willing to spend. You would have $100 boxes, $200 boxes, $300 boxes, and different categories, whether it was electronics, sporting gear, devices, footwear, or whatever the customer wanted to see in the box. It could also be a special order or a mixed box.
Each category had its own price range attached. The owner or a member of their team would manually select what should go into these boxes based on the pricing tier, while still making sure that the total value was fair enough for the customer, fair enough for the owner, and that the business would still make a profit after covering delivery and the other logistics involved. The founder was also releasing new boxes constantly. It was a very fast-moving business, and when you’re operating with a small team, you can only add so many products or so many options manually.
So, I had another solution. When we interacted, I had this idea that, although product selection is partly a matter of taste, there were still certain patterns that connected with the kinds of boxes customers wanted. This wasn’t something that used AI or automation. It was created a few years ago, before AI tools became as good as they are now. It was built in a few days just as a proof of concept. The tool would go through the site based on what the founder wanted to create.
For example, they could say, “I need a sports mystery box with items totaling about $100,” or $80, $50, or $200. The tool would search through the product catalog, combine items that added up to that amount, and suggest reasonably high-quality products based on reviews, customer feedback, and proximity to delivery. It would then present all of those options. I don’t want to go into all of the logistics behind it, but this was something that significantly reduced the amount of manual work because it generated multiple combinations, and we could simply shuffle through and pick the best ones.