Barriers to Starting a New Business that can be Overcome with AI
April 22, 2024
Starting a new business is an all-consuming whirlwind. From creating the product itself to setting up company banking, there’s a whole host of tasks to complete before you even make your first sale. When you do so, it’s incredibly rewarding, but the hard work at the start can often feel off-putting, and many people feel tempted to stop before they’ve even really begun.
Luckily, technology is here to help. Advancements like artificial intelligence (AI) can allow you to smash through these barriers to starting your dream business and focus your energy on establishing your vision. In this guide, we explore three areas where entrepreneurs may struggle, and outline how AI can assist.
Key Takeaways on Starting a Business Amidst AI Advancements
- Audience Insights: Utilise AI to gain comprehensive insights into your target market, enhancing your understanding of customer preferences and behaviour. AI can analyse vast amounts of data quickly, helping you tailor your marketing strategies effectively.
- Sales Material Creation: Leverage AI tools to generate initial marketing assets, pitches, and even basic website content. While AI can provide inspiration and streamline content creation, it's essential to review and refine outputs to ensure relevance and accuracy.
- Diary and Task Management: Employ AI as a diary management tool to schedule appointments, manage tasks, and communicate availability to clients. AI-powered task management systems can enhance organisation, reduce errors, and optimise time allocation for essential business activities.
- Efficiency Enhancement: Embrace AI technology to streamline administrative tasks and minimise time spent on non-core activities. By automating repetitive tasks and organising workflows, entrepreneurs can focus their energy on product development and sales strategies.
- Decision-Making Empowerment: Delegate administrative burdens to AI systems, allowing entrepreneurs to concentrate on critical business decisions and fostering innovation and growth.
- Resource Optimisation: Maximise the efficiency of your business operations by leveraging AI for data analysis, customer management, and administrative tasks. This optimisation enables entrepreneurs to allocate resources more effectively and drive business success.
- Future Readiness: Embrace AI technologies early in your entrepreneurial journey to position your business for future growth and scalability. By integrating AI solutions into your operations, you can adapt to changing market dynamics and stay ahead of competitors.
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START NOWAudience insights
To sell a product or service, you first need to understand your target market. You may already have an idea in your head of who your ideal customer is, but it never hurts to do some more research. Then, when you launch, you can be really sure you’re serving your customer base, and create your brand identity around this demographic.
Manual research is useful, but AI can offer far wider insights to add to your information portfolio, as well as speeding up the process. It can even tell you which marketing strategies your audience is likely to respond to, meaning you don’t waste money on ineffective campaigns.
Sales material creation
Got a great product idea, but not so great at creating compelling pitches, marketing assets or emails? Then you may benefit from a boost of inspiration, courtesy of AI. Whilst ultimately you’ll need to work with a graphic designer and a copywriter to get a polished final product when you grow, AI can help get you started when funds and time are tight. You can even create a basic website using AI prompts, which can get you up and running.
As with all AI-generated content, you’ll need to double-check any output. AI models are trained on existing data, so you’ll want to make sure that all the information is still relevant to your business, and confirm any statistics before putting them in your pitches.
Diary and task management
With so much going on, it’s easy to lose track of appointments and calls, or struggle to make time in your day to complete essential paperwork. Additionally, if you’re going to be offering a service, rather than a physical product, you may be concerned that people will find it hard to know when you’re available to meet, and subsequently will get frustrated and go elsewhere.
AI can act as a diary management tool, scheduling your appointments and letting customers know when you have free time. You’ll be able to set up rules so that you don’t become overbooked, and can even sync it with a personal calendar to ensure you can still get the kids from school, or meet up with friends.
As well as managing your diary, AI can upgrade your to-do list, creating automatic reminders, categorising tasks and providing deadlines based on service level agreements (SLAs). This can help free up your time, reduce errors and missed deadlines, and allow you to minimise the amount of information you need to hold in your head – an essential for any busy founder.
Jumpstart your future business
If you’re sitting on a business idea, but are overwhelmed by the amount of work it will take to launch, then lean on technology to help. As the founder, you are best placed to make decisions about the product, and be energised when selling it – your time shouldn’t be bogged down unnecessarily with administrative tasks.
