One approach I like to consider, a Gedankenexperiment, is thinking about your local square mile and how were X number of dollars spent in this region on Y time frame, perhaps today, last year, this decade and their why. The square mile isn't a hard metric, it can be bigger if you're more rural or smaller if urban but one question I think is how were a million dollars moved in this region and how quickly? Who is spending money and why? Can these costs be improved and so on. It helps going on google maps and scouting out your area for businesses and figuring out how they stay afloat and their why. If you want to integrate AI into the mix, you can bounce ideas off GPT-4 to play as devil advocate to see if the movement here makes sense and how it might play out in the future.
