Here is how you start a business with the help of generative AI

Starting a business with AI vs without AI

When you are starting a business, it´s very important to:

• Understand the niche

• Understand business/entrepreneurship

• Spend a lot of time crafting the things to be able to sell your services/products

With AI, all of these have changed dramatically. If you use the vast knowledge AI possesses when creating a new business, you are more likely to succeed.

Let´s look at some of the best use cases of AI at the beginning of your business.

The absolute beginning

At the absolute beginning, AI acts as your consultant. It will answer any questions and introduce you to how things are done.

Validating the Business Idea

Use chat-based AI tools to find out whether your business idea can be successful.

With AI tools like Gemini from Google, you can go step by step and define your target audience, analyze competitors, do proper market research, and also validate any of your business assumptions.

This saves you countless amount of hours.

Here is a complete prompt to do this:

I have a business idea for [brief description of your idea]. My target audience is [describe your ideal customer]. To validate my concept, I'd like to:

• Analyze my competitors: Can you help me identify the key players in this market and their strengths and weaknesses?

• Conduct market research: Can you help me find relevant market research data on the size, trends, and growth potential of my target market?

• Validate my assumptions: I believe that [state your key assumptions about your business and target market]. Can you help me find information to validate or challenge these assumptions?

Additionally, I'd love your help with:

• Identifying potential problems or challenges I may not have considered.

• Brainstorming creative marketing strategies to reach my target audience.

• Developing a plan to test my minimum viable product (MVP) with real customers.

Coming up with Strategy/Out-of-the-box ideas

Once you have your business strategy and some rough idea of who are you going to serve, you will need to assess 2 things:

• How are your competitors conducting business?

• How can you differentiate yourself?

Experiment and ask ChatGPT for out-of-the-box ideas on business, marketing, and sales strategy.

I guarantee you that it will provide you with ideas you would never come up with yourself.

Brand/Offering Creation

Another great way to get the burden of creative work off your shoulders. Before, you needed to think very hard to come up with ideas for your branding, colors, naming, etc..

Now, AI tools such as ChatGPT can do this for you. After explaining your business strategy and target market, it is capable of coming up with tens of ideas for the whole brand including the name.

Now, all you have to do is either choose directly or tweak it so it matches your expectations.

Website copy and images

With landing page builders such as Carrd, Webflow, and Framer,.. you can have a website set up in hours. However, without ChatGPT, you still need to find images and write text for the website.

With generative AI tools, you can ask for an ideal website structure for your project. This will help you in the building process.

Then, explain/show the LLM what blocks are you using and it will generate the website copy for you. Make sure to tweak it and give it your unique twist. You just saved another few hours of creative work. If you want to take it further, brainstorm creative ideas for your buttons, headlines, and images based on the market research done by Gemini in the first use case.

Getting First Sales

Now you can start getting sales, this part can be improved with AI even more.

Writing Outreach messages

In the beginning, you might need to do some amount of cold outreach to get your business off the ground.

This includes writing a lot of messages that could be personalized.

As with anything including writing, ChatGPT can be of extreme help here. Especially with its access to the internet. You can give it input in the form of prospects language, latest posts, your conversations, etc.

It will be able to generate a structured and formatted message with all of the required parts. What would take you 15 minutes, ChatGPT can have done in 3 minutes.

Creating Lead Magnets

When you are doing first sales and need leads coming in, a lead magnet is a great way to attract them. This can be either in the form of an e-book, guide, mini-course, or some database…

Normally, you would spend days creating a 7-page e-book. but with the power of AI, you can go to Canva.com, find a template for an ebook, and write the content with the help of ChatGPT. Always think of unique structure and valuable information, however, let ChatGPT do the heavy lifting and write the content based on the instructions you provide.

Always check grammar and spelling, and make sure to instruct ChatGPT to adjust the structure to your Canva template.

Follow up

After writing the outreach message, people often don´t respond the first time.

To save time when creating follow-up messages, make sure to input the first message into an AI assistant such as Copilot and make it create a follow-up based on the first message.

Do this on a scale and watch how you save hours every day.

Hiring help

One of the best ways to use AI in bigger companies is in HR departments. However, text-based tasks can be automated in your start-up easily as well.

Generating a job posting

When you have your first customers, you might need to start hiring. Creating a job posting is often a hassle and time-consuming task.

With AI, you can just ask it to “Ask me all questions necessary for you to create an engaging and original job posting for my employee”.

Answer all questions regarding the role, requirements, etc. AI will generate a complete job posting with the correct structure, grammar, and spelling.

Training your Team

Now you need to train the team to do the work with high quality. One way to do this is creating SOPs or Standard Operating Procedures. These explain individual processes in your company in detail and ensure others can go step-by-step when executing a task.

Creating a guide like this requires a lot of time. When writing it, people who understand the process well often forget important details because it´s already so straightforward for them.

ChatGPT can help you by being specific, not forgetting any steps, and even linking relevant articles if applicable.

Just explain the process in your words to the AI and it will write a very clear guide that will be structured as it should be.

Useful tools for a new business:

• Create an AI-Powered Business Plan with Upmetrics

• Cheap Access to GPT-4 and other AI models in GlobalGPT

• Midday.ai to run your business smarter and more efficiently

• Sanebox.com to organize your E-mail like a PRO

• Decktopus.com will make creating a presentation take 80% less time

The Future

Everyone knows this by now, AI WILL remove a lot of jobs across all industries. This is both a threat and an opportunity.

Not everyone is suited to become an entrepreneur. However, I see people starting their own small 1 person businesses in addition to their day jobs to secure their income.

In the future, it will be completely normal to have both a job and also run a successful business providing services or products to a small group of people.

AI plays a big role in this, as it will allow people who would otherwise not even consider it - to start their own business.

Wrapping up

This week´s ShakeUp is at the end. I hope the tips I gathered will allow you to start your own business or new service with more clarity.

The reason I write these tips is simple: I want to impact as many people as possible to start using AI in their daily lives. Whether you are a solopreneur who wants to save time or a founder who wants their team to implement AI.

It´s getting more serious every day and 2024 is the year you need to start implementing it.

So let´s shake up your business.

See you!

Alan

P.S. As always, if you have any feedback or suggestions, the answer to this E-mail, I read them all.