Opening a café in Penang: what a research assistant found in 90 seconds

One real run, written up as a story. On 24 October 2026 we asked LinkDigest's Research assistant the question a café owner-to-be in George Town would ask. Everything below — the searches, the posts, the table, the steps — is what came back, unedited except for length. Nobody is named; the shop in the story could be yours.

The boss, and the question

Say you have found a shophouse off Lebuh Chulia, you have a lease in front of you, and you have one week to decide. You know the competition by walking past it. What you do not know is what Chinese visitors — the people who will fill the place at the weekend — actually say about the cafés already there, and which of their needs nobody is meeting.

You could spend an evening scrolling 小红书. Instead you open Research, pick the job 开店前看同行 (look at the competition before you open), fill in two blanks — 槟城, 咖啡馆 — and press Ask.

What the assistant did

It searched 小红书 twice, the way its users search — 「槟城 咖啡馆 推荐」 and the complaint-shaped 「槟城 咖啡馆 踩雷」 — found twenty posts, and read the ten that mattered: café guides, a brunch note, a four-day food itinerary, a George Town cheap-eats list, dated November 2025 to May 2026. Then it wrote the analysis a market analyst would, following the job's own brief: group the competition by type, record what customers praise and complain about in their own words, and find the gaps.

What came back

Competitor types, from the posts:

Every row carried the number of the post it came from, so the owner could open the source and read the sentence herself.

The gaps the table left — the part that matters:

1. A cheap breakfast café. Most cafés in the posts open at noon (Coco Nana 12–9, Komichi 1–6), while readers explicitly look for "where locals go for breakfast".
2. A quiet place to work. The sea-view cafés are loud and full, the viral ones are for photos, and the one quiet room closes at six.
3. Savoury food. Dessert everywhere; the courtyard café is praised precisely because its menu has more than cake.
4. A café that is not a photo stop. The posts are all 打卡; the comments keep asking for somewhere to just sit.

这周就做 — this week's steps:

1. Open at 8 am with a breakfast set — toast or nasi lemak with coffee — into the slot nobody serves before noon. The RM10–15 price here was the assistant's own suggestion, and it said so; the posts never state one.
2. Put three to five savoury dishes on the menu; the one café praised for its savoury plates is the exception, not the rule.
3. Run a quiet "work hours" block on weekday mornings, with sockets and Wi-Fi, since the only quiet room in town shuts at six.

The whole run took about ninety seconds and cost twelve credits — roughly the price of a kopi.

Why it reads like a specialist, not a chatbot

The job carries a brief: group competitors by positioning rather than listing names, read the opening hours and 人均 that posts let slip, tell loyalty ("回购", "locals come") from tourism ("打卡"), and treat a complaint that recurs across two types as a gap. The assistant follows it, cites a post for every claim, and marks anything that is its own idea — a price, a street — as a suggestion rather than a finding. When the posts are thin it says so in the first sentence.

Do it for your own shop

Sign in, open Research, pick the job, fill in your city and your kind of shop. Ask a follow-up the way you would ask a colleague — "what do they charge?", "which one has the best reviews?" — and it continues from the posts it already read. There are jobs for pricing, stocking, watching a competitor, finding creators, reading your own launch, bad reviews, menus and locations; and you can write your own job with its own brief in Skills. It works in 中文 or English. The rest of what shipped this month — search before read, top comments, comparison pages — is in What's new in October.