Leveraging AI to Jumpstart A Business

My Practical Experiment to Make Chat GPT AI My Business Partner

Day 1:

My journey started like so many others, the motivated, yet indifferent among us. "I should try and make more money, but with minimal effort". Since selling drugs or my body aren't viable options, one of which I do not have the stomach for, and the other for which I have too much stomach for, I had to consider my available alternatives.

In today's fast-paced world, identifying the right business opportunity can feel overwhelming, and leads to many giving up before they start. My quest to generate extra income quickly shifted into intrigue and fascination when I found myself asking: "Is it possible to offload the heavy lifting of business ideation to Artificial Intelligence?" With advancements in AI, there appears to be immense potential for this task to become significantly more manageable. The concerns around AI are very real, and many industries are facing potential changes that will be life altering for both the better and the worse. I wanted to put the notion to the test and decided to turn to ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language model based on the GPT-4 architecture, for assistance. Maybe even more so than assistance, as a collaborator or business partner.

Setting the Stage:

ChatGPT Welcome Screen

My initial prompt to the platform was simple:

"Can you help me generate extra income?"

ChatGPT's response was vast, vague and pretty much what I would get had I gone to Google, but in a more succinct response with less scrolling. I was presented with a diverse array of business opportunities, each somewhat feasible, but extremely generic. A smorgasbord of possibilities, most of which you've heard about from the uncle that is always busy, but hasn’t held down a job in 20 years. Freelancing, Content Creation, Photographer, Etsy handmade crafting, Investments, Pet sitting, driving an Uber, the list went on and on. As with any other digital platform that speaks in 0's and 1’s, the output was only as good as the input received.

Criteria: What Was Important to Me

Diving into the project, I had to set my non-negotiables based on where I was in my life:

• The business should align with my current skills enough for me to not feel out of depth.

• It needed to fit around my full time job, my lifestyle and children.

• Minimal manual labor or overwhelming time investment should be involved.

• No storage space or additional workforce should be required in the immediacy.

• ChatGPT could be my first, and potentially only employee

In other words, a possible unicorn. The criteria did narrow my choices considerably and steered me inevitably towards e-commerce.

It was time for me to do some actual work after considering the options provided by ChatGPT. I identified an opportunity in e-commerce that seemed promising. To validate this, I turned to SEMRush to investigate search volumes and trends in the industry. Armed with that data, I returned to ChatGPT to explore potential niche markets.

Back to ChatGPT: Navigating Niche Markets

Armed with SEMRush insights, I circled back to ChatGPT to explore niche market options.

"I'd like to start an e-commerce site that allows me to target niche markets. Based on these *** analytics, what are some of the least featured topics with the highest potential reach" The AI laid out a series of niches such as sustainable products, specialised diet foods, and telehealth equipment, among others. The platform is data-rich, providing valuable, factual information the more data you feed it, but it doesn't replace strategic thinking.

It was time for me to again, do my own research, and after another venture into SEMRush, some Googling, reading up on a few sites and investigating a few of the potential markets I was presented with, I found something I believed I could build on. The next step was market analysis. ChatGPT was a solid resource in offering analytical approaches like keyword research, social media sentiment analysis, and competitor analysis. It offered no actual analysis, or solutions, but again pointed me to the tools and techniques I could use to attain the analysis I needed and what I should be looking for.

The Nurse and The Doctor

While ChatGPT presented hard facts, it couldn't piece together a creative business opportunity for me. It had no information on market trends or under serviced areas. It’s akin to a nurse who is excellent at assessing vitals. They may be amazing at their job and can gather all the critical information required on a patient, but often relies on a doctor's expertise for an accurate diagnosis, and remedy. I needed to figure out what the right industry, market and opportunity was for me. But it provided just enough information to at least lead me to identifying an industry, or at the least made me think about something, a market and approach I had not considered before today.

My initial experiment with ChatGPT revealed its potential as a step in business exploration. It's nowhere close to being sophisticated enough to replace the need for human creativity, intuition or strategic thinking, but it does offer a robust platform for brainstorming and initial research. Utilising the GPT-4 engine for this experiment, I found that while AI can do a lot of the heavy lifting, the human touch is still required to piece everything together effectively.

I also saw my own prompts improve over time in order for the platform to provide me the information that I needed. So I suppose in some way as I trained it, the platform was also training me. Next I was ready to see how well it does writing a full business plan for a fictional company that will one day… put real money into my account.