AI is Not Only for the Big Boys - Solopreneur Guide to AI Tools and Automation

The impact of AI on solopreneurs

It´s important to stay efficient as a solopreneur. This way, even if you have more responsibilities from running a course or consulting clients, you can still keep most of the profit for yourself.

You see, solopreneurship isn´t freelancing. You shouldn´t be trading time for money, (at least not all of it).

But how do you achieve this?

By creating repeatable processes/systems and automating their moving parts.

It´s the same as with any business. There are hundreds if not thousands processes. And many of them can be completely automated.

Ultimately, you could go from working 30 hours a week to 25 hours a week. Or even less.

Let´s look at automation tips in communication that you can implement to save at least 1 hour a day.

You are communicating the whole day, why not save some time while doing it?

Every day, solopreneurs communicate with potential and current clients, assistants, or answer customer support questions. Depending on your type of business, it takes a significant amount of time.

The development of Large Language Models has allowed us to automate a lot of the text-based work. It can understand, reason, and write similarly to how you would.

This means there are incredible opportunities to delegate a lot of admin work to the machines. The only issue is we are a little bit too early, so it´s difficult to choose which automation to pick first.

Welcome E-mails

When someone new reaches out to you to either buy your services or simply ask for help, you want them to understand what you can and can´t do for them, right?

Automating Welcome E-mails that explain YOU in detail is very powerful, as this can filter out people who don´t fit well with your ideal customer profile.

This is a very simple automation:

1. If you have their E-mail in CRM, create a new pipeline stage for “Welcome E-mail sent”

2. Go to Zapier.com and create a Zap that sends an E-mail every time you move someone into this stage.

3. The E-mail could contain:

   1. Your name

   2. Your Story

   3. Your services

   4. Some frequently asked questions

   5. Places people can reach out to you

Answering E-mails

Let´s look at e-mails as they take the most time to go through.

The idea behind this automation is that it takes e-mails you don´t want to personally read, summarizes them for you, and notifies you in the app of your choice.

Based on the amount of lengthy E-mails you are getting, this could save you 15+ minutes a day.

The automation will look something like this:

1. You tag an E-mail so you know it´s one you don´t want to spend time reading but rather just knowing what´s it about so you can take action based on that.

2. ChatGPT takes the tagged e-mail and summarizes it

3. The automation platform sends the chatGPT answer to your messenger app of choice.

Here is a great video from Matt Wolfe explaining this workflow in detail

Auto answers

We can´t trust AI to answer on our behalf yet. But what you can do is automate answers to e-mails that are repetitive or very simple. I bet this takes you at least 20 minutes a day.

The workflow:

1. Create a “Knowledge base” with the types of your emails and your answers to them, also include some information that would be needed to answer customer support questions.

2. Set up an Automation Platform such as Make.com to use this knowledge base to draft an answer to your E-mail

3. Send the draft to Gmail, so when you start reading your E-mails, they have drafts already created for them.

I found you a guide from not very well-known creator Techfrend here.

Creating custom Quotes/Offers

Although creating quotes and offers seems custom every time you do it, it rarely is. You just adjust the quote to each type of client - and this is what AI can do.

If you are offering coaching services, you will adjust the quote to each client based on their situation, needs, and pain points you find out.

Here is a workflow you can try to make this as automated as possible:

1. Gather your past quotes and put them in a text document. This will show the AI how you are structuring the quote, what language you are using, and what services you offer to them. Also, include your detailed pricing and reasoning behind it.

2. Create honest and detailed instructions you will be using as a prompt for the Agent. This will make the AI understand what it should do.

3. All of this information is fed to an AI Agent which is capable of using it as input for creating new questions based on a few predefined questions. The agent will ask you what type of client it is if you want to give a discount, and what services/payment options will be offered.

4. The agent will then go and write a structured draft of the e-mail right into your Gmail account. Saving you time with thinking, formatting, and structuring. You will just check and correct. The best part? Chatbot will learn from your correction and the next time it will be able to do it right.

As this is a more custom solution if you feel this could help you, answer this e-mail and we can arrange a free build.

Customer Onboarding

Before having a first discovery call with your client - whether it´s a freelancing or coaching client, you want to gather as much information as possible.

What if you both could come to the discovery call/sales call prepared? Wouldn´t it save both of your time?

This is what I mean:

1. Before booking a call with you, it would be required for the prospect to go and talk with a chatbot, answering some important questions so you can understand whether you can help them. Think of this as a sign-up form, but more interactive, with your voice, reacting to your prospect’s answers.

2. This way, the prospect would understand the whole process better and you would already know what he struggles with. It´s a win-win potentially saving you time on the call and helping you make the sale easier.

3. You can then even input all the information from the conversation into LLM and get recommendations on how to approach the client. You would have a much better understanding of what the client needs than when you just go into the call with no preparation.

As this is also a pretty specific solution being custom on different services, I can´t give you a detailed guide for this. The biggest part of building a chatbot like this one is to program the chatbot in a way that it asks the prospect the right questions to help them and if eligible, make them book a call with you.

Customer Support Chatbot

If you are running a course or a cohort, you probably know how hard it is to keep up with all the customer support questions. Because most of these questions are repetitive and easy to solve, you can have an AI Agent solve these for you.

Let´s say some of your users need an invoice or they can´t log in. The AI Agent will act as a gatekeeper so most of the queries will be solved by him and you will only need to solve the most important ones.

If you build it out through a tool like voiceflow.com - you will be able to connect to various external services such as your CRM, LMS, or messaging apps.

Automating customer support has been discussed a lot in this Newsletter, but having a customer support chatbot as a solopreneur gives you so much free time that it is similar to hiring a VA - although much cheaper.

Best Solopreneur Tools

Most of the tools that you can build custom solutions with require a bit of tech-savinness. Here are some of my favorites for you to explore:

• Zapier.com - Very user-friendly tool for automating connections between apps

• Chatnode.ai - A Chatbot tool without advanced logic. This chatbot works more like a custom GPT trained on your data. It works with any type of information.

• Voiceflow.com - As mentioned above, it is a powerful tool for building AI Agents for your solopreneur business.

• Chaindesk.ai - Similar to Chatnode, but more focused on Customer support, they also have an e-mail support bot.

• Youai.ai - Mindstudio, a powerful platform allowing you to build any AI for your solopreneur business

The Future

Solopreneur role may be soon shifting from working alone or with independent contractors to a more tech-focused role that uses multiple AI agents to do their work for them.

A typical Life/Sales coach might be able to train a chatbot as their double and this way, save time on consulting clients who can´t afford one-on-one coaching or simply don´t want to.

This could also open new revenue streams for coaches - where these AI Doubles would be a low-ticket offer - suiting various target groups. Think of Relationship coach, performance coach, productivity coach,… Then, if the customer has bigger issues, he can speak with the coach directly.

Another big shift in the future of solopreneurship and AI technology I see is having AI Agents as full Virtual assistants. Answering emails, sending quotes, creating content, posting,.. all of this will be soon managed by an AI agent - allowing you to focus on what is important and what you do best.

Wrapping up

First, I wanted to write about all the AI use cases for solopreneurs, but when I discovered how many there are, I decided to only focus this edition on using AI for communication.

I will go deep on AI-solopreneurship in the future, as I feel this is a very useful place to implement these solutions. The biggest reason is that solopreneurs often need to hire someone after a certain amount of customers - which cuts their profit.

If you have any feedback, don´t forget to answer this e-mail, I am curious to know your outlook on this as well as which automation you liked the most.

See you soon!