5 Ways A.I. Can Help Your Startup Win

Use LLMs to extend your runway, personalize products & more

Author

Brian Bourque
April 22, 2023

Happy Saturday to all 9,456 of you.

It seems like every time I check Twitter there are 1,000 new A.I. products I need to know about.

It’s overwhelming.

I had a meeting this week with a well-known financial services company and was shocked to learn they’ve been collaborating with OpenAI for a few years to build internal tools across their company.

If you’ve been put off by the hype or tucking your head in the sand, consider this your warning.

This technology is a once-in-a-lifetime innovation.

But you don’t need to be an A.I. startup to benefit from it.

Generative A.I. and Large Language Models can accelerate growth and extend your startup’s runway dramatically, regardless of what vertical you’re in.

Today’s growth strategy is: 5 ways LLMs can help your startup win.

Growth stage: Any

Difficulty level: Medium

Fortunes require leverage. Business leverage comes from capital, people, and products with no marginal cost of replication (code and media).

An army of robots is freely available - it's just packed in data centers for heat and space efficiency. Use it.

🦄 Rank Higher on Google 🦄

I’m hard at work on my A.I. SEO tools for startups.

The pre-launch pre-sale is over but I’m offering companies a chance to see how well the tech works.

Respond to this email with your URL and a keyword phrase you want to rank for and I’ll send you drafts of A.I.-generated content outlines to beat your competitors.

Need to Know

🦄 Ahrefs reminds us of 10 awesomely free SEO tools they offer.

🦄 How to use “Experience” as explained in the new Google quality guidelines

🦄 5 python scripts for automating SEO tasks.

🦄 This startup is making programmatic SEO approachable for folks with limited tech skills.

🦄 Lemon.io founder breaks down the importance of second-order questions in Masterclass’s SEO strategy.

🦄 Google released new guidelines for writing high quality product reviews.

🦄 Check out this simple tutorial for integrating ChatGPT with Google Sheets.

5 Ways A.I. Can Help Your Startup Succeed

Whether you’re building A.I. tech or operating in a more traditional space, applying large language model technology can help your startup win.

  • Established companies are carving out competitive advantages with LLMs in every area of their business

  • Late-stage startups are scrambling to integrate the tech

  • Early stage startups can use it to gain advantage and extend their runway

Here are 5 ways you can use LLMs today:

1) Personalize Your Products

If part of your offering involves providing information to customers, LLMs are a fantastic way to personalize bland, templatized reports with far more nuanced and relevant information.

For example, an analytics platform could transform complex data into automated insights waiting in your customers’ inboxes each morning. A service business could transform an order sheet into a detailed description of the specific services provided and the long-term benefits they’ll provide, backed with scientific data.

In my opinion, this is a great opportunity to reinforce the value of your business at scale by translating work done into benefits for the customer.

2) Surface Proprietary Insights

How does a company maintain internal knowledge, document it and transmit it among employees?

Until now, most companies memorialize stuff in obscure PDF manuals or static webpages and HR software.

No one can find anything and it’s dreadfully boring to sift through.

LLMs can devour the entire body of information your company has created and give you a single access point through a Q&A-style chat interface.

The company I met with this week had taken thousands of documents and trained a model on them.

What were once obscure research papers languishing in hard drives are now instantly accessible insights through their internal chat interface.

Turning obscure internal information into accessible insights can be invaluable.

3) Move Faster

It’s a cliche with startups but execution is everything.

Using LLMs can greatly accelerate many activities:

Content production: not just SEO content. Any written work that can be standardized and templatized can be accelerated with LLMs.

Writing software: multiply your engineers by 2-10x with the guidance of an AI copilot. I’m using it myself daily to write better, well-documented code.

Customer service: LLMs can analyze sentiment and be trained to answer customer service tasks.

Compliance: LLMs can be trained on internal compliance rules and scan documents for potential issues faster and more tirelessly than a human.

4) Cut Costs

Cutting costs is a great way to extend your runway. Everyone from Facebook to well-funded startups are scrambling to find ways to weather the economic downturn by reducing costs.

Everything listed above that can be done more quickly will likely result in cost savings from having machines, rather than employees, doing the heavy lifting.

5) Screen Job Applicants

Filtering through hundreds of resumes for a few qualified applicants can be slow and tedious.

Overwhelmed and under-trained recruiters have been scanning resumes for keywords - often with shallow understanding of the skills they’re searching for.

Instead, build detailed prompts around the qualifications and experience you’re looking for and have A.I. score resumes for you.

Now you can have LLMs uncover the semantic relevance of candidates to your job description in a way that simple keyword searches may not uncover.

In summary, most businesses stand to benefit from A.I. tech, regardless of their industry.

Here are five ways your startup can increase its chances of winning with LLMs:

  1. Personalize your products

  2. Surface proprietary insights

  3. Move faster

  4. Cut costs

  5. Screen job applicants

One More Question:

How important is A.I. to your company's success?

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Shout-Outs

Most people don’t realize that a Shout-Out is an easy way to get a free backlink.

I love to meet new people from the unicorn community and showcase their work.

If you want a shout-out in an upcoming newsletter just reply to this email with your name, company URL and what you’re working on.

✨ That’s it for today!

I hope this helps you in your growth journey.

-Brian 🦄 

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