Codie Sanchez's RRT test: the 3 questions every business idea has to pass
Codie Sanchez went through 500+ AI tools to build a real business from scratch. The actual gold isn't the tool list — it's the 5-minute filter she uses before she'll touch any idea.
Codie Sanchez tested over 500 AI tools to go from zero to a paying customer on camera. The headline story is the build — Exploding Topics to find a hands-free dog leash trending on TikTok with 30K monthly sales, Perplexity plus ChatGPT plus Claude to define the avatar, Lovable to spin up a landing page in four minutes. But the real takeaway is the filter she runs before any of that.
The RRT test
She calls it Resist, Raise, Technology. Three questions, five minutes:
- Resist — Does this business resist a recession? Garbage collection. Pet care. Healthcare. Things people don't stop spending on when their portfolio drops 30%.
- Raise — Can you raise prices without losing customers? That's the cleanest way to instantly make more money.
- Technology — Can technology meaningfully improve the margins or the output? You don't need the product itself to be AI. You just need AI to compress the build, the marketing, or the fulfillment.
If all three answers are yes, you have a business worth building. If even one is a maybe, kill it before you fall in love with it.
The three-tool research stack
Sanchez's pattern for any new idea: Perplexity for sourced research (no hallucinations because every claim has a citation), ChatGPT for the fast first draft of the avatar profile, Claude for the deep reasoning pass that reconciles the two. Each tool plays the role it's actually good at instead of asking one model to do everything.
What to steal today
Take whatever idea you've been kicking around for six months and run it through RRT this afternoon. Most ideas die at "raise" — you can't charge more without buyers walking. That's not a marketing problem. That's a wrong-business problem. Better to find out in five minutes than five quarters.