The beginning of a new year can be a good time to make life changes and get a fresh start. For many people that will mean new jobs and even something more bold, like launching a business. They won’t be alone. A record 5.5 million new businesses were started in 2023, according to the latest US Census Bureau data, with four out of five of them started by solopreneurs.
For those who might be daunted by the prospect of starting a business from scratch, technology can help. There are numerous free AI-based tools that can help people who lack the financial resources to invest in expensive software and the expertise needed to get a business up and running. These are particularly helpful for solopreneurs — founders who are doing it all on their own.
Stretched thin, cash poor
While solopreneurs may not have every skill locked down, the drive and focus to succeed is their defining trait. This means they’re investing in themselves: late nights and weekends drafting a marketing plan, and sourcing suppliers, among other things.
I recently spoke with Jackson Flores, co-founder and Executive Director of DishRoulette Kitchen, a nonprofit that supports BIPOC and women solopreneurs in launching their businesses. She said many of them are bootstrapping their ventures and relying on personal funds. They also often lack access to bank accounts, technical skills, and the time needed to develop a website or engage in digital marketing.
“As an entrepreneur, your role is to stay informed about your industry while delivering the best possible product,” she says. “You need time to focus on refining your operation, and leveraging free AI tools makes that possible. Time is an entrepreneur’s most expensive commodity.”
AI in the founder’s toolkit
The emergence of generative AI is changing the future for solopreneurs. They’re using it to write emails, build websites, create marketing content, and automate time-consuming tasks needed to run their business. One Venture Capitalist who teaches a business class at Carnegie Mellon even tells his students to “Think of generative AI as your co-founder.” By having AI take on some of the basic responsibilities off their hands, solopreneurs can free themselves up to focus on things that technology isn’t equipped for — like relationship building and customer retention.
Nearly 68% of solopreneurs in a recent survey of solopreneurs said they believed AI could benefit their businesses. Entrepreneurs feel empowered and more confident when using AI to help them with tasks they aren’t skilled at, Jackson says. “AI levels the playing field for them and makes technology accessible.”
To help get you started, here are five business tasks that free AI tools can do for you.
Market Analysis and Competitive Intelligence. Before launching a business, founders need to understand their market and audience. Research using free AI tools can provide insights on: competitors, the target audience, product trends, and what marketing and messaging are working in the industry. ChatGPT can be used to get research and insights on industry trends and competitive strategies that bigger companies utilize, or even provide suggestions on the best sales channels for a particular industry. It also can help you turn research and data into materials to be shared with potential investors.
Website Creation. One of the most critical steps to starting a business is launching a website. For the majority of solopreneurs who don’t know HTML coding, website building tools are not easy to use, and hiring people to build them for you gets expensive fast. Fees for web hosting, domain name customization, and business tool plugins like Google Analytics can cost as much up to hundreds of dollars a month. Meanwhile, Solo — the free website builder from Mozilla used to build Jackson’s site and those of solopreneurs she works with — does the coding for you, for free. There’s no charge for hosting existing domains and custom domains are steeply discounted.
Content Generation. Once you’ve got the website live and social accounts opened, you need to create content to share with the public. There are a variety of AI content generators, including Jasper, which lets you create blog content and social posts, as well as emails and ads. Lately is an AI-powered content repurposing tool that turns blog posts, video and other long-form content into social posts. For custom art, Canva offers an AI text-to-image generator that lets you create images with simple text prompts. And Synthesia is an AI-powered tool that can create videos from plain text.
Marketing Automation. Another area where AI can help is marketing, which can be a significant hurdle for solopreneurs from an experience and time investment perspective. Tools like Mailchimp can be used to automate email marketing and offer insights to identify customer segments so you can create better sales strategies and tailored offerings. It has a user-friendly interface and a suite of free features that are particularly accessible for founders who are just starting out or operating with limited resources.
Customer Relationship Management. Reaching customers isn’t enough, you’ve got to keep them coming back. Hubspot’s free CRM offering helps track and analyze sales activity in real time. Comprehensive contact management and sales pipeline visibility mean customer interactions are streamlined.
Generative AI can’t tell you what product to build or how to do your job as a founder, but it can help you get your business launched, reach customers and increase sales. With AI, solopreneurs can leave the business operations to technology and focus on the big picture.
