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In the two months since starting my business, I've talked with dozens of business owners about AI and automation. Despite their different industries and challenges, I keep hearing variations of the same question: "What's actually possible with these tools?"
It's a great question and the answer is changing almost daily. Keeping up can feel like drinking from a firehose. So I’ll challenge you not to chase every new tool and instead focus on what can actually save us the most time right now.
As I’m building my business, I want to take you behind the scenes of how I'm actually implementing AI and automation in my day-to-day. This week alone, I built a simple automation to reduce no-shows, used ChatGPT to practice for a sales call, and weighed the pros and cons of NotebookLM vs a custom GPT. I'll share each of these experiences, including the exact steps I took.
This Week's 5-Minute Automation Win: Tackling No-Shows
I had a no-show for a meeting this week. It happens! People lose track of time and life gets in the way. But I was thinking about what I could have done better to prevent this from happening. It is a well-known practice in sales to always send a reminder before a meeting and I failed to do this. Do I want to send a reminder before every meeting? No. Am I going to remember to send a reminder before every meeting? No.
My Calendly Automation:
OK, so that tells me that I need to automate this. Luckily, I use Calendly for most of my calls, and they have this nifty built-in feature called Workflows. I’ll show you how I set this up in about 5 minutes.
For every call, send a reminder email 24 hours before
For any reschedules, send me a text message immediately.
Total setup time: 5 minutes
Pro Tip: This feature is included in the $12/month Standard Calendly plan. When you’re thinking about if a paid plan is worth it, I like to consider a couple things.
How much time will this save me each month? And how much is 1 hour worth?
Will this help me bring in more clients? i.e. preventing a no-show
Will this reduce my costs in some way? i.e. I wouldn’t need a virtual assistant to manage my calendar
My Week with ChatGPT: 2 Conversations
I use ChatGPT or a similar chatbot(like Claude) every single day for my business. I had the opportunity to teach a group of entrepreneurs this past week about using ChatGPT for their businesses. Most had already used it extensively, but there were still so many lightbulb moments when we discussed the variety of use cases. It occurred to me that you can know how to use something without knowing when to use it. So I’m going to share two ways I used ChatGPT this week and I hope that it may spark some ideas for you.
*I want to include a note that I have data sharing turned OFF for all of my accounts. This allows me more freedom in sharing information about my business. You should not be sharing sensitive or proprietary information with ChatGPT.
1. Sales Call Practice
As a solopreneur, I don’t have coworkers. So when I need to practice making a pitch, I turn to ChatGPT. This week, I practiced for a sales pitch by role playing with ChatGPT. This is the prompt I used, in addition to uploading my proposal file.
Let's role play. I am presenting a proposal to you, my client. Take on the role of the client. Let's say I've already presented the proposed solution and pricing. Let's have a back and forth dialogue and do objection handling. At the end, give me feedback on how I did.
Notice this is not polished. You don’t always need to create the perfect prompt in order to get what you need. If you spend 10 minutes following a magic prompt framework every time you talk to AI, you will very quickly give up. I often go back and forth with ChatGPT to get the exact output I’m looking for.
2. Website Feedback
This one is simple. I didn’t like my ‘About Me’ page on my website. So I took a screenshot of the page, loaded it into ChatGPT, then asked for some general feedback. Here’s what I said.
Here is a screenshot of the About Me page for my website. Give me feedback on what could be improved. I have a varied audience, from solo entrepreneurs to corporate partners. Also, here is a bunch of information about my business: [XYZ].
A key aspect of this exercise is that ChatGPT already knows a fair amount about my business. I highly suggest taking 10 minutes to tell ChatGPT about your business. It will store that information for future conversations, so you never need to do it again.
Real Client Question: Document Search Solutions
A client of mine had multiple lengthy documents that they wanted to be able to search and ask questions about. They asked me if I could recommend the best tool to do this. They were considering setting up a custom GPT or using NotebookLM. We ended up settling on NotebookLM for its reliability and citations feature. But I wanted to take you through the pros and cons that we considered for each.
Perfect for: when you want to ask questions about a very specific set of content. You can feed it audio files, YouTube videos, websites, or text documents. It will chat with you about only that information. It will also add a citation to where in your content it is drawing information from
Standout Feature: It can create a podcast-style synopsis of your content, if you like to get a conversational, audio overview of your data.
Limitation: It does not analyze numerical data(think Excel). It also is not very creative and doesn’t allow for nice formatting like ChatGPT. It almost always uses bullets. If your sources do not contain the information you’re looking for, it will not answer your question.
Cost: Free
Perfect for: when you want to use ChatGPT for a very specific purpose and you don’t want to have to prompt it with that same information every time. For example, creating social media captions with the same format each time. You can also share the link to this bot with others(like a marketing assistant), without giving them access to make changes.
Standout Feature: Add text and data files for contextual knowledge. It will combine that information with the information that the model was trained on to create any type of content in the exact style that you want.
Limitation: A lower limit on the number of documents you can attach compared to NotebookLM. It will also pull in information from its general knowledge base(i.e. the internet), making it less reliable than NotebookLM. It will not provide citations.
Cost: Included in ChatGPT Pro - $19/mo
This Week’s Subscription Roundup
There are SO many tools out there. Not all of them are good, and not all of them are free. I’m going to save you all some time and money and tell you which tools I’ve opted to pay for this week. (For the sake of my wallet, I hope I don’t have more purchases to report every week, but I will keep you updated if I do.) These are 100% my authentic purchases— no paid partnerships.
Loom - I create a lot of video walk-throughs and demos for clients[i.e. the Calendly tutorial from earlier in this article]. You can create free video and screen recordings with Loom and then share them with a link. I upgraded to the $24/month plan because it uses AI to edit your video to remove awkward pauses, filler words, and I can also SO easily edit the video just by deleting sections in the transcript.
Secret - Secret has consolidated deals for software that a typical start-up needs. I guess you could compare it to Groupon. I paid $120 for a one-year subscription(with a coupon code 25SECRET) to access deals for hundreds of subscriptions. Below are the deals that I’ve already used.
For example, I was already paying $24/month for Typeform. This got me 6 months for free.
Quick Action Items for You This Week
Set up that Calendly automation (5 minutes)
Try one of the ChatGPT prompts I shared
Reply to this email and let me know what you want to see in the next edition of the newsletter
I am so excited for the future of this newsletter and all the information I have to share with you. Next time, I’ll tell you a little more about my friend Claude and why he might be an even better tool than ChatGPT. Stay tuned…