Artificial intelligence has well and truly arrived for ambitious entrepreneurs and it’s going to irreversibly change the way businesses operate in the coming decades. However, after the initial buzz of the ChatGPT launch in November 2022, and all the promise and overhype, how are entrepreneurs actually using the programme in their day-to-day to enhance their productivity and grow their business?
I asked entrepreneurs to tell me their everyday tips and tricks, and their responses split into four categories.
1. For inspiration and ideas
No longer does an entrepreneur need to hold mind-mapping sessions and get a change of scenery for new ideas. With the right prompts, ChatGPT can be your ideation partner. Noel Andrews from JobRack.eu is using ChatGPT to improve remote team culture, and it’s helping him “move faster, reduce procrastination, and build a better remote team by giving me tons of ideas and options when I’m first starting a project or dealing with a challenge.” Andrews is using prompts like, “Suggest ten fun question I can ask in our team meeting to help us to get to know each other,” and says he is seeing “great results that save me time and energy and make our team meetings way more engaging.”
Brice Gump, founder of Major Impact Media, is using ChatGPT to come up with new ideas for his company’s newsletters. “We have trained ChatGPT on our customer avatar and top performing emails, now we’re having it come up with new angles for our weekly emails,” he said. “It’s really sped up our ability to create engaging emails while maintaining the same engagement metrics.” Olly Richards, bestselling author and founder of ollyrichards.co, is using ChatGPT to summarise and document his ideas, incorporating time away from the screen. “When on a walk, I record an iPhone audio note of everything in my head at that time.” Back in front of his computer, he gets the transcript using Otter AI, adds the text into ChatGPT and asks for a list of the main concepts. Richards said, “this massively increases my creative output, because my best ideas arrive when I’m outside.”
2. To improve or repurpose content
Entrepreneurs that have been creating content for years have a massive advantage in the AI resolution. It’s never been easier to repurpose this content into new formats. Francis Dierick from climbing company Chalk Rebels is using ChatGPT to turn the book he wrote on skincare for climbers into video scripts, to provide the same valuable information in a different way. “Most climbers don’t read books these days,” he said, “but the same advice delivered via video has been instrumental in securing more sales.” Daniel Wilczyinski from Australian Bitcoin exchange, Hardblock.com.au, has been making FAQs and technical guides simple, asking ChatGPT to, “avoid using technical jargon or complex language, and instead use clear and concise language that is easier for a target audience to understand.”
Repurposing content for a different platform extends to social media posts and website content, with Michaela Light, CEO of TeraTech, using ChatGPT 4 every week to add humour and storytelling to her LinkedIn posts. “My posts used to be full of industry tech jargon, now ChatGPT edits my post to make them fun to read. We add Lord of the Rings-style humour, and tell stories where my prospects are heroes who can solve their tech problems with our help,” she said. For Light, it has resulted in more engagement and a marked increase in sales. Leon Bennetts from Thermosoft Australia uses ChatGPT to create website content from technical specifications. “We sell wall mounted electric radiators online,” he said. “We input technical specifications from our manufacturer, along with existing content, and use it to generate blog posts, nurture emails and other marketing content.” Bennetts has also used ChatGPT to “create code for automations, build spreadsheet formulae and improve internal systems to increase team productivity and capability.”
3. To ramp up content output
Some optimise for quality; some are simply looking for quantity. Jamie Gemmell from Searchjam.com.au has been using ChatGPT to help create content for a portfolio of content sites, specifically to, “analyse existing content and suggest how it can be improved, which leads to new ideas for new pieces of content” he said. “I also prompt it to rewrite content with a specific audience in mind or ask it to break down big chunks of text into a step-by-step process.” Gemmell says it’s not always perfect, and entrepreneurs edit and check the content before publishing, but it has definitely helped his agency ramp up content production and generate more output.
On a similar note, Julian Goldie from Goldie Agency is using ChatGPT to publish new articles every day, with the goal of them ranking on Google. “I have doubled my Google traffic within a month and documented the whole process on YouTube,” he said. “ChatGPT makes your writing team superhuman and improves their productivity tenfold. If you “build a simple and repeatable system, and have a strong editing team, there’s almost no limit to the amount of customers you can get to your website from Google by using ChatGPT.” Could you publish every day, and what difference might it make?
4. To improve their processes
Content aside, ChatGPT can be used simply to improve processes. Relieve a human of the need to carry out menial tasks by automating and eliminating what AI can do for you. Davis Nguyen from My Consulting Offer is having ChatGPT act as a note taker for meetings, and asking it to summarize the action items for each team member. “Before ChatGPT, we would have a notetaker at a lot of meetings to make sure action items were assigned and completed.” Now, they skip this step and save time while retaining the same output. “After a meeting, someone will load the meeting transcription from Otter AI and ask ChatGPT to summarize the actions by attendee,” he said. “If we assigned deadlines for action items, we ask ChatGPT to put them in order of deadline. This makes accountability easy because everyone knows what they need to do and when.”
Dr. Alex Barker from The Happy PharmD likes that ChatGPT makes him feel, “like I can finally empty my head of ideas.” He uses the platform to create standard operating procedures (SOPs) and strategic plans for his team, which is said is useful for any leader. “ChatGPT can create an SOP from a simple description as well as finding gaps and improving your existing processes and documentation. Barker records himself talking about a business problem for ten minutes, transforms it into a transcription, feeds in to ChatGPT and asks the program to “create an action plan from the transcript.”
Entrepreneurs are using ChatGPT as their mind map buddy, content assistant, prolific production pal and strategic second opinion. Weaving artificial intelligence into your processes has never been easier and more beneficial. It’s like hiring a multi-talented team member for a few dollars per day.
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