Starting a small business is hard work. It can feel intimidating and overwhelming. Two of the top reasons people delay their entrepreneurial journey are a lack of business experience or financial resources. Fortunately, technology now offers solutions, empowering solopreneurs to bring their business ideas to life like never before.
For solopreneurs looking to begin their journey in business, AI solutions can aid in nearly every aspect implemented. We’ll discuss some of the most impactful uses at the beginning stages of business launching: website creation, automation, marketing, content creation, and competitor analysis. Our focus will be on two affordable and accessible tools, Google Workspace and ChatGPT, that help overcome financial and resource constraints.
AI Website Creation
Many of the most popular website builders now use built-in AI features to help creators establish custom, professional websites for their business needs. These services can range from simple AI-powered design assistance to full-service website solutions. Wix, for example, uses a questionnaire to generate a fully built site based on your answers. Most of these AI solutions are much cheaper than paying for a web developer’s service.
For the financially savvy solopreneur, Google Workspace provides a platform for easy website creation through Google Sites. You will find many native assistance functions within Google and endless online tutorials to help with all aspects of site creation. ChatGPT can be your personal assistant, helping you decide what elements your site needs, how to organize them, and what content to include. Once you provide the business idea, the AI model will customize each response tailored to the business and conversationally talk you through the site creation.
Useful AI prompt:
- “Provide a list of recommended website elements along with drafts of the content. Organize the recommended website layout, showing the different pages and how the elements should be organized.”
AI Coding and Automation
As a solopreneur, automation saves time and money while multiplying your overall effectiveness. Google Workspace has various applications that can be linked to create automations through APIs or Google Apps Script. For beginners, extensions and add-ons make automations easy to implement. For more tech-savvy users, custom scripts written in JavaScript make your automation possibilities nearly limitless. If you’re not familiar with coding, AI can assist you along the way. Here are two example automations I have created in Google Workspace:
- A CRM: captures customer information in a Google form embedded on the website, transfers it to a spreadsheet in Google Sheets, and sends customized emails using templates.
Tools used: Google Forms, Google Sheets, Gmail, and Mail Merge
- Booking System: Schedules client meetings, collects payments, sends reminder emails, and populates my calendar in a hands-free system triggered by client actions on the website.
Tools used: Calendly, Gmail, Stripe, and Google Calendar
Take these examples as just door-openers to the possibilities using tools available in Google Workspace. The major advantage of these DIY options for automation is how inexpensive they are compared to purchasing or subscribing to software or hiring people to do these tasks.
AI Market Planning and Strategy
Successful businesses need a solid marketing strategy. Your AI model can help you develop and organize your plan quickly. You can use it like a scratch notepad; it can take your raw, and even bullet-point, notes and formulate it into an organized marketing plan. It can also make suggestions for creative marketing ideas to add to the plan.
Using AI will also serve as a time saver. You can upload pictures, files, or other documents and have AI summarize them. This will help you pull relevant info from large datasets into your marketing plan. It can also search the internet for marketing strategies that may be commonplace in your industry. You can use it to provide cost estimates to help you decide on vendors and platforms to implement your marketing strategy.
AI Content Creation/Social Media
In today’s digital media age, maintaining visibility in your online presence requires consistent, quality content. If you can’t hire a professional marketing firm, don’t let that make you think you can’t still show up on the front page of search engines and get in front of your customers.
Use AI to help you design a digital media strategy and content schedule. Then, allow it to create new content for you that you can simply tailor to your own taste. ChatGPT, for example, can research what is valuable content in the market in your industry and draft social media posts accordingly. You can use it to draft email campaigns, and blog articles, and provide photo/video ideas for you to capture along with the text. This will ensure you have a good SEO foundation working to keep your web presence at the top of the common search engine platforms.
One cautionary note is to not rely so heavily on AI-generated content that you begin to come off as unauthentic and lacking the personality of real human interaction.
AI Competitor Analysis
You must know your competition. Find out what areas you offer similar products or services. This will help you understand the viability of your idea and carve out your differentiating factors. For example, you may discover that you can outcompete through higher quality, better pricing, or niching down your offerings. We start with the competitor analysis because this is where the discovery all begins.
Your AI model can help you search for your competitors, comb through their offerings, discover customer complaints to be gapped, and compare pricing. ChatGPT can even use this info to generate strategic ideas based on all these factors and provide a detailed business plan that you can easily implement into your overall business strategy.
Useful AI prompts:
- “Show me a list of my local competitors, including their products and services and pricing.”
- “Help me write a competitor analysis and develop a business strategy that capitalizes on market opportunities.”
Things to Consider
Avoid relying too heavily on AI without proper human oversight. While AI has the power to do many useful things, it can provide incorrect information and make wrong decisions. Let AI handle as much of the legwork as possible but always monitor the outputs to ensure the information provided is accurate and relevant.
AI also may not grasp the full concept of your business idea. Remember that it cannot read your mind. To fully incorporate the idea you have, you must ensure you are providing a full picture of your business to the model. Once you do this, it will be much more effective at all levels of content generation for you.
What’s Next
If you’ve been sitting on a business idea due to a lack of help or thinking financial resources are holding you back, you can breathe a sigh of relief. You should be more excited than ever to know that there are tools out there to make it easy for solopreneurs to launch their businesses. I encourage you to spend more time investigating these tools. If you’re ready to launch, go ahead and create a Google Workspace and ChatGPT account, and get your website started.
