A six-page ChatGPT prompt does the first pass on businesses for sale
Buying small e-commerce brands, they codified everything they look for into a six page prompt. Given a listing's screenshots and financials, ChatGPT takes a first pass to decide whether a seller call is worth taking.
Done withChatGPTSpotted· by HN user idopmstuff· Oct 22, 2026
Result Still manual: screenshot, download, upload, then prompt
“current SOTA models have more than enough intelligence to take a first pass at listings + financials to determine whether I should take a call with the seller”
Spotted: found in the wild. Details are as reported by the source above and have not been independently verified.
What they did
They buy small e-commerce brands and are handing off chunks of that evaluation work to AI. They wrote a prompt, now six pages long, that codifies every single thing they look at when sizing up a business for sale.
How it went
Given a listing’s screenshots and financial files, ChatGPT takes a first pass to determine whether the business is worth a call with the seller. The exercise convinced them that for most work like this, there’s a ceiling to how much raw model intelligence matters; what drives results is the scaffolding, like their six page prompt, that lets the model actually do the job.
Try it yourself with ChatGPT
Evaluate this business listing for acquisition using the following criteria: [paste your full evaluation checklist/prompt covering financials, listing quality, red flags, growth signals, etc.]. Based on the attached listing screenshots and financial files, tell me whether this is worth a call with the seller and why.
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