šŸ”“ AI Report 1 - AI x Entrepreneurship

šŸ‘‰ 0 to $25M in a basement

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āš”ļø Entrepreneurship + AI āš”ļø

The past is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future.

Stephen Ambrose

Today in your AI Report:

  • šŸ’» Case Study: Going From $0 to $25M in a Basement

  • šŸ¤– 3 Ways to Use AI to Win

    • Learn Anything Faster

    • Make AI Your Personal Consultant

    • Use AI Assisted Automations 

  • šŸ“š Further Reading and Supplemental Resources

Read Time: 11 Minutes

Together with Hubspot

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CASE STUDY

šŸ’» From $0 to $25M in a Basement

David Park was the ultimate underdog. Not long ago, he was working from his parentā€™s house, day and night, and had no money.

That all changed in 2020, when David and his co-founder Henry were experimenting with GPT-2. "We realized that people wanted to have a friendly AI-assisted writing journey,ā€ David explains.

They started with a minimal product. Just LLM-powered auto-complete while typing. "You write, Jenni completes" was their early slogan.

AI Autocomplete, explained by Jenni

As the AI landscape evolved, so did Jenni.ai. They adapted their pricing model when API costs dropped, integrated chat features as LLMs advanced, and added document uploading capabilities as context windows expanded.

By staying at the forefront of AI developments, Jenni.ai was able to continuously provide cutting-edge value to its users.

The journey was not without challenges, as David persevered through years of failure and even a cancer diagnosis. "I really only got any semblance of success in the last 18 months so it's 9 yearsā€¦ almost a decade of just gut punches," he shares. But his conviction in the potential of AI never wavered.

After decades of effort, Davidā€™s belief paid off when Jenni.ai's valuation skyrocketed from $3 million to an estimated $10-30 million in just 6 months.

šŸ”‘ Key Takeaways for Your Business

  1. Timing matters ā€“ Jenni was the right product at the right time. And you can only do that if youā€™re up-to-date. Being subscribed to us is a great start šŸ˜‰

  2. Experiment, experiment, experiment ā€“ David was always on top of the newest tools, and trying out GPT-2 is what eventually sparked the idea for his startup with 2.5 million users.

  3. Always be adapting ā€“ AI moves at lightning speed. If your products donā€™t keep up, your customers will leave for the latest and greatest.

THREE STRATEGIES TO WIN

1) Learn Anything Faster šŸ§ 

For entrepreneurs, the ability to learn quickly and efficiently is more important than ever.

Bill Gates predicts that within the next decade, nearly everyone will have access to a personalized AI tutor that can deliver lessons tailored to their individual learning style.

However, with these techniques, you don't have to wait 10 years to start leveraging the power of AI to accelerate your learning.

Here are some practical ways you can use AI to learn anything faster:

Instantly summarize massive amounts of information šŸ“š

One of AI's most powerful capabilities is its ability to condense vast amounts of information into concise summaries in mere seconds.

Using BookAI.chat, you can chat with full books.

Here are some questions to try with BookAI:

I run a [briefly describe your business].

What advice would the author give me?

What are 10 ideas from this book I could implement today?

Using AI To Apply Ideas From Books Without Needing To Read Them

Explain the main points in this book to me in 10 bullet points, at a 5th grade reading level.

Using AI To ā€œSpeed Readā€ New Books

Iā€™m facing [x problem in my business].

Based on the contents of the book, what are some strategies and principles from the book that would help me overcome this challenge?

Using AI To Apply Ideas From Books Without Needing To Read Them

And with Consensus, you can quickly grasp the academic literature about your industry within minutes.

Referencing published, reputable studies can greatly boost the persuasiveness of your marketing messaging.

Here are some questions to try with Consensus:

What are some authoritative studies that support my [business/marketing claim].

Using AI To Improve Your Messaging and Copy

I just found this academic study related to my business.

[paste the name and contents of the study]

Summarize the key information from the study and provide me with statistics related to [aspect of your business that would benefit from scientific support].

Using AI To Improve Your Messaging and Copy

Tools like these can save you days of reading, help bulldoze obstacles, and build your confidence in your strategies.

Use AI to create study aids and practice tests šŸ“ 

Entrepreneurship often requires gaining brand-new skills on tight timelines and developing familiarity with foreign topics overnight.

In these situations, AI can be an invaluable study buddy by helping you create flashcards, quizzes, and practice exams based on the material you're learning.

Tools like Revisely helps you create a quiz on any topic in just seconds.

By testing your knowledge and identifying areas where you need improvement, you can focus your studying efforts and retain information more effectively.

Additional Tutorials

āš” AI can accelerate learning by summarizing information and providing insights to overcome business challenges.

2) Make AI Your Personal Consultant šŸ’¼

A typical consulting fee is anywhere upwards of $100 / hour. What if you could reduce that to close to $0? Well, you can. If you use AI. 

šŸ’” If you want to explore using AI as a consultant, you need Claude Pro.

The new Claude 3 Opus model beats GPT-4 in intelligence. It also has a massive context window and lets you upload documents, PDFs, and images to give context about your business.

AI can analyze data, make predictions based on previous patterns, and recommend strategies to tackle business problems ā€” all tasks commonly completed by (overpaid) consultants.

Claude Pro costs $20/month, but you can get started with a free account.

Example: Picking the best CRM to use

This is a prompt you could use if you want consulting on what CRM to use for your business.

I'm considering implementing a new CRM for my organization and would like consulting on whether or not it's the right decision as well as which tools would best fit my needs.

We currently operate in [briefly describe your industry and organization], and the CRM would need to [briefly describe the most important features youā€™d need].

My company has [x employees].

My maximum budget is [x/month].

Can you provide your top five recommendations, with pros and cons for each?

Using AI To Select CRM Software

Notice, with slight modifications you could reuse that same prompt for selecting any tool such as the best Project Management Software, Website Hosting Platform, or Payroll Solution.

For best results, more information is better. Make sure to give the AI enough context about your situation, to be hyper-clear in your ask, and to be thorough in your prompting.

Claude AI also makes an incredible technical consultant šŸ¤“

Letā€™s say you need to learn to use a new software for some aspect of your business.

Whether itā€™s an unfamiliar email marketing tool, graphic design app, accounting software, domain registrar, or even a common tool like Excel, models like Claude and GPT-4 are remarkably proficient at providing step-by-step tutorials for both troubleshooting and best practices.

Consider these hypothetical examples.

Using an email marketing tool for the first time?

Try questions like these:

Iā€™m setting up [your email marketing tool] to do email marketing for my new [briefly describe your business] where I sell [x product to y demographic].

Iā€™m a total beginner with both [your email marketing tool] and email marketing in general.

What are the most important settings I should pay attention to? I want to be sure that my account is set up correctly.

Using AI To Setup An Email Marketing Tool

Iā€™m setting up [your email marketing tool] to do email marketing for my new [briefly describe your business] where I sell [x product to y demographic].

Iā€™m a total beginner with both [your email marketing tool] and email marketing in general.

Give me step-by-step instructions showing me how to set up a welcome email automation for new subscribers.

Also provide me with copy to use for my welcome emails.

Using AI To Setup An Email Marketing Welcome Sequence

Having trouble in Excel or Google Sheets?

Try questions like these:

Iā€™m trying to accomplish [your goal] inside of Google Sheets.

Iā€™m a total beginner with Spreadsheets and Formulas.

Give me step-by-step instructions showing me how to achieve my goal.

Using AI To Set Up Spreadsheets

Iā€™m having trouble accomplishing [your goal] inside of Google Sheets.

Iā€™m a total beginner with Spreadsheets and Formulas.

This is the formula Iā€™m trying [describe what you already tried].

Give me step-by-step instructions showing me fix my mistake or a similar strategy for achieving the same end goal.

Using AI To Debug Spreadsheets

Received a confusing email from your domain registrar?

Try a prompt like this:

I received this email from my domain host. I donā€™t know what it means.

[paste the emailā€™s content]

Is this something I need to do anything about?

If so, provide me with step-by-step instructions inside of my registration platform for solving the problem.

Iā€™m a complete beginner when it comes to websites and hosting. Please be extremely thorough and donā€™t assume I have any background information.

Using AI To Understand Domains and Web-Hosting

āš”AI can provide expert advice on various business topics and technical support for software tools.

3) Use AI Assisted Automations šŸŽ

A study by MIT shows that the use of AI can increase a skilled workerā€™s productivity by a whopping 40%. How? Automation.

Unilever cut the time customer support agents spent writing customer responses by 90% using a custom AI tool. With tools like SiteGPT, you can do the same.

šŸ’” If you want to start automating your business using AI, the mix of Zapier and GPT-4 is incredibly powerful. 

Zapier lets you automatically retrieve data from all your applications, run it through an AI prompt, and then send the results back out to any destination.

Itā€™s free to get started with Zapier. You can create an account here.

Before you get started, itā€™s important to know that a Zap (Zapier automation) consists of two main elements:

Trigger: This sets off the automation. Example: Receiving an email.

Action: This is what happens in response to the trigger (can be multiple actions). Example: GPT-4 drafts a reply to all new emails.

Setting up your first Zap is surprisingly easy. Zapier wrote a step-by-step beginnerā€™s guide to help you get started, and we provide a few examples below.

Sample Automations from Zapierā€™s Community

Here are some sample automations to try:

How to instantly draft a reply to new Customer Support emails

These are the 5 steps in Zapier and Gmail:

  1. Inside of Gmail, create a label called ā€œCustomer Supportā€

  2. Trigger: Anytime this label is applied to an email in Gmail

  3. Action: Open a conversation in ChatGPT

  4. Action: Format data in Zapierā€™s Formatter

  5. Action: Create a draft in Gmail

You can use this template link to copy this automation.

How to instantly send new Facebook Lead Ads to Google Sheets.

These are the 2 steps to set it up in Zapier:

  1. Trigger: Anytime a new lead comes in on Facebook

  2. Action: Create new spreadsheet row in Google Sheets

For more guidance, use this detailed tutorial.

The possibilities with Zapier are endless.

Even if youā€™ve never automated anything before, with AI as your free consultant, we are confident you can be up and running within a few hours.

If you need some help getting started, Zapier has tons of templates and tutorials ready for you to implement.

If you need more specifically with how to combine AI and Zapier, their team wrote this article to get you started.

āš” Zapier and GPT-4 can automate tasks, boosting productivity by up to 40%.

FURTHER READING

šŸŽ§ļø Podcasts & Talks

šŸ“– Books

šŸ“² Influencers

  • Dr. Fei-Fei Li ā€” Dr. Li is the co-director of Stanfordā€™s human-centered AI institute and co-founder of AI4ALL. On her Twitter page, she talks about the human impact of AI.

šŸ“ƒ Articles

šŸ“¹ļø YouTube Tutorials

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Until next time, Martin & Liam.