I'm Transforming My Startup Into An A.I. Startup – Here's Why.
It simply makes sense.
🕒 Here’s a TLDR summary:
🤔 It didn’t make sense to me to transform my line of business into AI.
📄 In case you don’t know, my startup works in dealing with business documents.
🤖 AI bots, like ChatGPT and Claude, release quite inadequate documents.
🚀 But they have one thing that can’t be ignored — speed.
🧭 The secret lies in guidance — AI must be guided and used properly.
Someone told me that everyone is just adding .ai to their domain.
I was recently in a discussion with a group of people that I met. It was time for me to tell them what I do for a living. I wanted to say that I’m working in an AI startup. But before saying that, they started saying that everyone nowadays is working in AI.
Everyone just adds .ai to their domain and raises investments. So I thought this wasn’t the right time to tell them I’m working on an AI product. Can’t handle the internal judgments.
Oh, so in case you don’t know, I work in business documents. For over ten years, I have written investment documents like pitch decks, business plans, etc.
My startup was built based on that and has been growing accordingly.
For instance, we would help clients with their investment documents.
We would create templates that can be used by startups or businesses.
We would write guides for suitable fundraising and so on.
I started a project within my startup to create 100 “real-content” templates. That is something in between a template you would buy and a real business document you would create. Think of it like a real business document of an unreal business.
That took around three months, and a team of 3-4 designers and two writers were working on a daily basis. It was quite a success. To this day, we have over 450 downloads and uses of our work. I’m very satisfied with this project at this stage. It’s helping many startups out there.
But then I heard of ChatGPT, Claude, and all those bots that could write business documents. So, I thought I’d give them a shot.
ChatGPT writing business documents is like McDonald’s making Pizza.
There was a McPizza once, which was discontinued.
Some things are meant to be done by others. Business documents written by ChatGPT are simply quite basic and not at the level that any business actually needs to use them.
It’s fun to see it work on a pitch deck in a few seconds. But it’s still an unusable pitch deck. Many would argue, “But it will get better.”
I disagree, and let me tell you why.
Yes, it’ll improve in terms of quality. But not in terms of delivering good business documents. Delivering such documents requires a few things:
Knowledge of the market.
Forecast and prediction.
Good designs.
The only problem with these three is that two of them are subjective.
A business consultant might produce a document that an investor would deem “good.”
The same document might be deemed “horrible” by another investor.
AI bots are doing a good job of creating an almost average business document. But the truth of that industry is that you either use a good document or you don’t use any.
So, all those bots right now can’t create a document of value. But there is an edge that I undervalued above—speed.
Imagine having a fast-learning team member with no experience who is available 24/7 and has superhuman powers.
Even with the lack of knowledge and experience, time could be saved drastically. Let me give you the simplest example.
I needed to conduct a small market research for a specific market industry in Switzerland.
I downloaded around 40 documents and was looking for something specific.
Instead of reading each document and using CNTRL+F, I dragged them into GPT-4 and asked specific questions.
The answers were 10X better than a CNTRL+F and much faster than the hours I would’ve consumed looking into the documents.
I always verify after I see the results, and they are all accurate.
This is a use case of ChatGPT being useful. Now my startup and I are convinced that it does not stop here. With specific guidance and very specific examples, GPT-4 can potentially co-create documents of value.
The key here is in the word “co-create.”
We’re creating, and the AI is assisting, and that’s how we think it should be. I’m building an accurate b2b model for everyone to try in 2-4 months. I’ll showcase our findings and let you test that AI tool then.
Till then, feel free to comment with your opinion in regards to this – Do you think AI has to be more of an assistant? Do you agree that it doesn’t release good business documents? Let’s discuss; it’ll be fun.