This came out of a workshop we ran at SDU Startup Station. Five founders sat down with their startup ideas and walked out with curated research libraries, source audits, and audio briefings about their own assumptions. The tool they used is what you see below.
The framework has six stages: describe your idea, generate multi-angled research queries, fire them into NotebookLM's Deep Research agent, audit what comes back for freshness and bias, set a critical lens that turns the notebook into a rigorous analyst rather than a cheerful assistant, and interrogate your sources with targeted questions. At the end, you generate a takeaway — an audio briefing or slide deck tailored to whoever needs to hear it.
The interesting part is what happens during the source audit. Most people have never actually checked the quality of their "research." They Google something, read what confirms what they believe, and call it validated. The three-step audit — check dates, check data types, check bias — usually surfaces that their evidence base is thinner than they thought. That realization alone changes how they approach the rest of the session.
If you have a Claude API key, the tool will generate custom research queries from your input. Without one, you get templates you can fill in yourself. Either way, the method is the same.