—By Brice Dondelinger, Co-founder of Balloonary, a generative AI tool giving small businesses the power to stand-out by helping founders, side hustlers and business owners create and launch impactful online adverts with no design or marketing skills necessary—
I’d consider myself a seasoned entrepreneur. As every startup or creative founder would agree, whether you’re launching your first or fifth business, the journey is always challenging, yet rewarding at the same time. It takes perseverance to be an entrepreneur, It’s not for everyone.
The freedom to do what you love is exhilarating. But as empowering as it is to be your own boss, it comes with a lot of responsibilities and uncertainties.
Think less career path and more rollercoaster ride. And it can feel lonely both at the bottom and the top. This loneliness comes with the territory, because you’ll work long hours to build your business, making personal sacrifices along the way. You’ll also face setbacks and failures, and it can be difficult at times to stay motivated when things don’t go according to plan.
Adding to the isolation is the challenge of being responsible for your entire business, which will see you wearing multiple hats and doing jobs above and below your pay grade. In one day, you can be acting as head of finance to head of legal, whilst simultaneously doing content creation and posting or replying on socials.
The onus is on YOU because you are the only one who truly understands your vision.
At times you can feel spread thin, often working out of hours to get things done, when you should be recharging and focusing on the bigger ticket items that are going to move the business forward because you’re fighting fires or unable to tick off the never-ending to-do lists.
Most entrepreneurs, at one point or another, have thought to themselves ‘I wish I had one more ‘me’ to carry some of this load!’ Whilst cloning yourself remains in the realms of science fiction, artificial intelligence or AI has recently jumped out of the sci-fi movie scripts and into the real world, expected to disrupt entire industries, ways of working and what roles in both creative industries and the startup sector look like.
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With science now a reality, AI is just a new tool. Entrepreneurs should think about it like an exceptionally capable personal assistant who knows the entire internet. It can add tremendous value to small businesses and startups, enabling entrepreneurs to do the work of an agency or business at a faster rate than ever before, becoming increasingly more accessible and making it easier for smaller businesses to incorporate AI solutions into their daily operations.
The goal should be to outsource 80% of a task to AI and use your founder creativity and know how on the 20% where you can add real value. For example, every business owner needs to manage and keep a record of its day-to-day financial workings.
Basically, on top of everything else, you’re a bookkeeper as well. Rather than using time on these essential tasks, which take you away from your specialist skills, you can use generative AI tools like Vic.ai, which has been trained on the algorithms of hundreds of millions of invoices, to handle the accounting for you.
Another example is customer service, which is important to get right from the start because your customers are what keeps you in business. As an essential and time-consuming day-to-day aspect of running a business, AI tools like Agent Assist, which uses machine learning to automatically interpret and respond to what a customer needs can be a, time and cost saving option for entrepreneurs.
Finally, there is digital marketing which most entrepreneurs can benefit from. We built the Balloonary tool to outsource most of the time intensive work (and costs) associated with running ad campaigns to AI, so that rather than researching about digital advertising, signing up to the social media platform’s ad accounts, finding images and drafting multiple examples of ad concepts, you simply need to enter your business URL into the tool and spend your valuable time reviewing and picking the best ones based on your inherent understanding of your brand and customers.
We know there are founders and side hustlers out there who want to give online marketing a go – we’ve made it so much more accessible, so there’s no reason not to get started.
Not only does this AI-focused approach have the potential to save first-time entrepreneurs valuable time and resource; but it frees up the space to allow them to maximise their founder-expertise in producing high-quality deliverables and focus on the longer-term goals that will drive their business forward. It even opens up more possibilities for people to flex their entrepreneurial muscle and create the side hustle they’ve been wanting to do for ages but haven’t found the time.
This is when AI can be invaluable to small businesses, because tools exist that can support all of the aspects to launching and running a business, but at a fraction of the cost.
The rewards of being an entrepreneur make the hard work worthwhile. There’s nothing quite like the feeling of creating something that didn’t exist before. And there’s no reason that with the tools existing today that it can’t be easier than ever for entrepreneurs and small businesses to thrive by harnessing the potential of AI.
Small businesses can use AI to better understand their customers, personalise their marketing, and improve customer experiences. Additionally, AI can help small businesses compete with larger corporations by levelling the playing field and providing access to cutting-edge technology.
Understanding how to harness AI and tech tools at your disposal gives smaller businesses the edge they need to compete, succeed, and even enjoy a better work-life balance.
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