Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast - EP 52: How a Solopreneur Can Grow with AI

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

Today we dive into the world of solopreneurship and how it can be transformed with the power of AI. Our guest Gabe Marusca, Founder and Strategist at Digital Finest, joins us as we talk about using AI on everything from task-based work to decision-making for your business.For more details head to our episode page.Join the conversation and ask Gabe any questions you have here!Time Stamps:[00:00:17] Daily AI news[00:04:19] Background on Gabe and his work[00:06:42] The impact AI has on a solopreneur[00:11:00] How AI changes decision making [00:14:01] Will AI-powered agencies become a reality?[00:16:33] How a solopreneur can leverage AI[00:21:10] AI tools that a solopreneur can useTopics Covered in This Episode:- Speaker's journey as a solopreneur and transition from freelancing to partnership- Differentiating solopreneurship from freelancing and emphasizing long-term vision- Exploring how AI technology impacts decision-making for solopreneurs- Comparing decision-making processes with and without AI technology- Recognizing the difficulty of predicting the future of technology- Speculation about potential negative effects of AI pricing changes- Balancing optimism and caution regarding AI's impact on jobs and society- Possibility of moving towards a universal income system- Acknowledging AI's impact on job replacement, particularly in marketing- Idea to use AI for automating podcasting processes- Importance of growing slowly and leveraging AI tools- Example of using AI for competitor research- Advantages of embracing AI for small businesses- Concerns about big companies automating tasks in web design and marketingKeywords:AI, business, solopreneurship, OpenAI, superintelligence, safeguards, Chinese computer researchers, CPU, Intel, US military, task completion, ChatGPT, website traffic, iOS app, Gabe Moruska, Digital Finance, freelancer, solar partnership, web design business, contractors, Discrete, video editing tool, freelancers, trading time for money, branding, podcast, AI movement, GPT, decision-making, solo entrepreneurs, full-time employee, hiring, technology, strategy, marketing tactics, human connection, client relationships, creative marketing agencies, brands, human interaction, future collaborations, third-party partners, automation.Send Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Start Here ▶️Not sure where to start when it comes to AI? Start with our Start Here Series. You can listen to the first drop -- Episode 691 -- or get free access to our Inner Cricle community and all episodes: StartHereSeries.com Also, here's a link to the entire series on a Spotify playlist. 

This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in Adobe Firefly, the All In One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome. The assistant accelerates execution. Can you be a one-person show and use AI to help you run every other part of your business?

We're going to talk about that concept and a lot more today on Everyday AI. This is your daily live stream, podcast, and free newsletter. Helping everyday people like you and me keep up with everything that's going on in the world. of artificial intelligence. You can spend countless hours today trying to keep up, or you can tune in every day live, give us 15 to 20 minutes, read the newsletter, and we'll help you keep up with everything that's going on. So before we talk about how solopreneurs, entrepreneurs can use AI, let's first talk about what's going on in the AI news world. So there's a lot going on, but we're going to keep it brief. So let's talk open AI. So a couple things going on in the open

AI world. So they are keeping an eye on super intelligence. So they just announced this yesterday that they are expecting super intelligence to arrive within a decade and that they are devoting a lot of internal resources to kind of creating safeguards around super intelligence. So it's going to be very interesting. And if you're not sure, super intelligence is essentially when the AI is smarter than the people creating the AI and we can't keep up. So we'll see how that goes. Hopefully they get it figured out. And they say they are expecting superintelligence within the decade. All right. Speaking of very intelligent things, so a new study from a group of Chinese computer researchers show that AI can create a complete CPU from scratch in five hours.

So you might be asking what's newsworthy about that? Well, it takes Intel about four years to build one from scratch. So AI can do it in a couple of hours. It takes one of the largest companies in the world for years. All right. Another kind of interesting story. So the AI is apparently outperforming the U.S. military. So a U.S. Air Force colonel said it took in AI 10 minutes to complete a task that can take humans days. So the Pentagon won't say what large language model that it's testing, but it did say that the models are being fed some top secret level data. So very interesting. and we're going to actually throw in a fourth news story today because I think it's worth talking about. So chat GPT, it was recently reported that their website traffic dipped for the first time since it's launched.

So from May to June, chat GPT's traffic, website traffic was down. Does that mean there's less demand? I'd say probably not. Actually, if I'm throwing my take in there, I think what happened is the app, the iOS app, finally became usable because they introduced the browse with Bing feature. And then, you know, if you tune into our newsletter yesterday, you actually saw that they took that away. So we'll see what happens here in July. But now we're going to transition and we're going to bring on our guests and we're going to talk using AI as a solopreneur. So if you are a solopreneur and if you

are joining us live or if you even just want to know from our guests, please drop us a comment. So this is a live show. So with that, let's bring on our guest for today. Very excited if you use LinkedIn. You've probably seen our guest today. So I'd like to welcome to Everyday AI, Gabe Marushka, who is the founder of Digital Finis. Gabe, thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, Jordan, for having me. It's awesome to be here and super excited to talk about how AI is changing, especially the entrepreneurship environment. Yeah, it should be interesting. So real quick, because I know, Gabe, you wear multiple hats. So, you know, you are the founder of digital finesse, but you also help solopreneurs a lot as well. So tell

everyone just a little bit about what it is that you do. Sure. I'll try to be as short as possible. So as you mentioned, I wear many hats. I started as a freelancer many years ago, about 13 years ago, and I was a freelancer for almost six years. before I pivot into soloprenorship and probably people, my ask, is not the same thing. In my opinion, is not solo entrepreneurship. It's more of a long-term vision. It's exiting, releasing you from your business

and try to work on the most important spot. And even if you run a one-person business, you don't have to do it alone. Now we can do it with AI, but before we use contractors and other non-full-time employees. So in my opinion, that's a solopreneur. And for the past seven years, I was doing that, running a web design business all by myself with the help of contractors. And for the first time, last year, I heard about a tool that basically changed the way I run my web design business.

Probably some of your listener heard about it. It's called Descript, which is a video editing tool that use AI before chat GPT was popular and such. And another thing that I do to jump back and forth, as you mentioned, help freelancers with the Nomad Solopreneur brand in which I try to make them avoid the mistakes that I made by trading time for money and escape that trap. And yeah, with still the help of AI, I was able in the same time as running my one-person business to launch a podcast, thanks to this wonderful thing that happened to us, the AI movement. Yeah. And I think if people are not familiar with AI or maybe if the first thing you heard about AI was chat GPT,

which I think was a lot of people's introduction, is there's Ben, you know, Gabe just mentioned Descript, right? So a great kind of AI power tool that's been out for many years. You know, Gabe, as a solopreneur, right, when you first kind of started to use tools like Descript, or maybe when you, you know, were first introduced to chat GPT or the GPT, technology. What did that mean to you as a solopreneur, as someone that's not, that doesn't have any other full-time employees? What did this rush of new tools mean to you and to your business? It was like heaven's sand, literally, like save so much time. I was able to do, especially with the script, I was able to train my clients very easily. And since I'm a non-active

English speaker, I was doing a lot of mistakes. And one of the power. of a feature of the script is to basically correct those mistakes and remove arms and o's and all the long breaks and such. So it's a huge time saver for me. Just record the training for my clients. And from a 30 minutes video probably, I was able to do the specific 10 minutes or 15 minutes video that I need all with the help of that tool. And I won't go into the features of it and such, but it can save you a lot of time.

So that was the main benefit of it, save time to the more tedious test like training my clients, which I did it myself. So that part I never outsource. So that was a huge benefit for me. And of course, when I heard about chat GPT, I tried to see how I can integrate that into my business. And when I started the podcast, that was amazing because I was able to do research by just feeding into the API, just feeding in all the information that I have about my guest. And in a few moments, I was basically having only the important things. I was able to lay out questions for them and

ideas on how to structure the episode and such. And not to mention after that the benefit of having the full transcript from Descript and using chat GPT now with the plugin functionality to ask, I think it's called Ask PDF the plugin that I use, and literally putting there the transcript, sorry, the transcript, and basically getting all the info that I need, like

the important timestamps, show notes, draft for me. Of course, I still need to edit. It's not perfect, and I don't recommend to copy paste from judging the anything. But it's a huge save of time. And another way that I use it is

another tool called Aouphonic. I'm not an audio engineer. I don't like to spend time to I am a technical person. I can do that, but I don't like to spend time removing noise from my recordings or I don't know, echoes and stuff like that. And there is a tool called Aouphonic

that basically you just upload inside the file and it's doing the audio engineering for you, removing the echoes, leaving only the voice of you and your guest. And the

results are pretty outstanding. And recently, they integrate with the future from OpenAI, actually, in which they allow you to basically, they're doing the transcript as well, like descriptive is doing, but it's extracting as well important timestamps, like a basic show note, ideas for your episode titles and such. So literally from editing an episode for about six hours at the beginning when I started, now it takes me probably one hour and a half, two hours. still, it's a lot of manual work, for example, I listen to the full recording and such,

but the amount of time up I save, it's unbelievable. So just a few of the things that I use in order to leverage it. Yeah, some great suggestions, you know, talking about, you know, kind of chatting with chat GPT, you know, something that a lot of people don't know you can do. But I'm really interested, Gabe, because, you know, as a business owner, you know, when you start or when you're growing your business, everyone has that important decision to make, whether they are going to want to stay as the only time, full time, or as the only full time employee, or if they're going to start bringing a lot of other people on full time to join their team. How do you think that decision has maybe changed now for, you know, solopreneurs trying to grow their business, you know, having to make that decision in today's day and age with AI. versus maybe four or five years ago before any of this technology was available.

Adobe just introduced an entirely new way to create, bringing the power and precision of its creative suite into one conversational experience. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in the Adobe Firefly app, the all-in-one Creative AI Studio. Powered by Adobe's Creative Agent, Firefly AI Assistant lets you start with your vision, just describe what you want, and shape the outcome as it takes form, with the assistant. The assistant orchestrates multi-step workflows, drawing on 60 plus pro-grade tools across Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Express,

and more to help bring your ideas to life. You can also get started with creative skills, a growing library of pre-built workflows for common creative tasks, like batch editing photos, creating mood boards, portrait retouching, and creating social variations. Every step the assistant takes is visible so you can refine, redirect, or take over at any time. You stay in the driver's seat as the creative director. Adobe Firefly AI assistant now in public beta. See it today at firefly.adobie.com. I'm a big fan of growing slow and thinking every step of the way.

So I was never thinking to hire a lot of people, but now you basically can grow faster than that, not only without hiring people, but to leverage all these AI tools. From automation to any help that you can think of, for example, from my web design business, a lot of the research, a lot of competitor research I'm doing using AI. And all these things that used to take days, now I can do them in a few hours, and that's a huge benefit that anyone is starting a business right now can leverage.

And I think everyone that will try, and succeed at leveraging AI will have a huge advantage, a huge leverage comparing to those that are afraid that, I don't know, AI will replace you. In reality, it won't. If you are focusing on the high-impact things and you're focusing on actually embracing this change

because every technology that came was something that you're probably afraid at that point, but it turned out to be something very beneficial for humanity. Even that AI is growing at a faster pace that anything we've seen. But yeah, leveraging this tools will help, especially small business owners that don't have a lot of capital, to basically compete with bigger companies.

Even that there is one particular thing that I'm personally afraid of. Literally big companies with a lot of budget, actually building AI-powered agencies, for example, especially my field of web design and marketing, and to automate a lot of things like marketing copy or including web design building. And I noticed that you have a guest that talk about that. So all these things can be a bit scary,

but in the same time, you can be one of them, of those that can leverage these things without a lot of founding because just a bit of technical knowledge and you can learn them quite fast, actually. Yeah, you know, you bring up a good point because in the kind of, you know, creative agency or marketing agency space, I think traditionally it's worked well, the model, because, you know, you're having people work one-on-one with other people to grow a company, to grow a business. And now when you

introduce in mass a lot of AI technology, you know, you might be taking away at some points that human connection that brands are helping to grow other brands. Is that something that you see maybe happening in the future is, you know, in general, you know, growing your business. If you're working with an outside agency, a third-party partner, it might become less of human interaction and just more of automation and AI. Is that something that you see might be happening? It's totally possible.

To be honest, it's so hard to predict. I think it's an everyday thing. Like something that's true today, tomorrow can be simply something so far away in the past. Like, for example, a simple feature or a simple tool that you use a lot. I see a lot of, for example, SaaS companies building tools around social media platforms. And we all know what happened to Twitter. Like they increase the price of API. Same can happen to AI.

I don't know. Open AI overnight can increase. so high the prices of accessing the API that a lot of small businesses or a lot of independent solopreneur creators will go bust because they might not afford like other big companies are doing it. But it's still a lot of optimism around the subject and I I'm not sure if that will be the case but I think we are heading towards probably an universal income level or how it's called, in which everyone will be basically giving the same amount of money and will live up like more normal life than everyone chasing the new shiny

object and new growing their business or their job and such. But probably that will take quite a few years. And I think AI will have a huge impact on this because this was a topic quite popularizing towards years ago. But now with AI indeed replacing some jobs and some low leverage jobs might be the case. But yeah, in this field of marketing, anything can be possible. It's hard to predict that that will take in or that one. It's impossible. Yeah, no, that's a good point. So maybe something that's a little more accurate to predict is how solopreneurs can use all of this technology. Right. So you're talking with and working with a lot of solopreneurs. Let's say someone has jobs.

started recently. So maybe they're less than a year or two in, or maybe they just started their business. And they're seeing all of these new tools and technologies almost every day, you know, promising to change the way that someone does business. Given your experience, how would you recommend that a solopreneur can actually use some of this technology to not just start their business, but to grow it? How can they do that? Good question. One of the things that I'm doing myself and I talk with others and they are doing the same, it stick to the basic principle of business and not trying to reinvent with it. Use what is already working, but use the AI tools available in order to do that faster, do that better, basically filling up your time to be able to focus on the strategy part, on the growing part.

And as advanced as AI is now, I think there is still quite a bit of time until we arrive at that point, I don't know to create for you the perfect marketing strategy, for example. At this point, it's just giving you probably tactics, not more than that. And in order to free your time, to be able to focus on the actual business and learn, especially if you are starting out or you just start out a few months or years ago, start focusing on the important aspects of the business. And that's one of them is to actually take care of your clients and build that human connection

because with any AI in the world, that human connection you won't disappear. And if you are able to empathize, if you're able to make that connection with your clients a stronger one, AI will just help you to leverage that and to grow not only your business because at the end of the day, doing business is growing your client's business. will be a game changer for anyone. Simply free up your time.

I think that's the answer. Use these tools to free up your time to be able to have free time to actually put back into your business. And that's how you grow. Yeah. That's great advice because in the end, especially as a solopreneur, it all comes down to your time, right? Because you're doing a little of everything. You are doing admin, you're doing marketing, advertising, client relations, right? So maybe what would your advice be then to, you know, a first step or maybe a the most impactful first step that you can take to use AI to start to free up the time?

You know, what's maybe, you know, a practical piece of advice that you can give to other solopreneurs on how to use AI to get back a little at that time? I think the easiest one will be to build a simple chatbot with AI in which you feed basically all the questions that usually get asked by your clients. Put that on your website and will save you an enormous amount of time. You won't get annoying messages and emails or phone calls in which they ask you how much is the price. Even if the price is on your website for how long does it take this to be finished or do you do that part or that part and such? and there are unlimited tutorials online in which you can learn without technical knowledge how to build a simple chatbot like that and you just feed up the information to them

and out of the blue you end up with almost zero customer support. Of course it has a downside because sometimes during those small conversations I don't know how much it costs or whatever, you can build a relationship and actually can sell. But in the same time, probably, those asking those type of questions are not your regular clients and you might want to avoid those. And yeah,

you'll just throughout the time. I think this is a small step that you can take and personally it's in the working for my own website and hopefully in two weeks or so to launch it. So that would be a huge thing for me to literally save probably

roughly around one to two hours a week, which just imagine two hours a week or free time that you can put into another part of your business. Yeah. And, you know, winning, winning a couple hours here and there, you know, Gabe, I think you bring up a good point is you always have to, you know, invest a little bit up front, you know, but usually it's it's a one time investment or, you know, checking back in on it monthly, quarterly, whatever it may be. So, uh, you mentioned one thing that you're kind of working on, but I'm wondering, what's the next biggest, um, use case that that you're going to be exploring, you know, to help your, you know, solo entrepreneurship run even better. What's what's that next thing, maybe aside from the chat bot that you just mentioned, to better, you know, communicate with with customers and clients on the front end. What's another application that that you're looking into?

I have something in mind. It's probably, might be the biggest time saver and money saver as well, literally to try to automatize the podcasting. I want to just record and enjoy this type of conversation rather than spending time on post-production or hire someone to do that for me. So I have in mind a project to literally try to use AI to automatize all the steps from editing the audio and video to, I don't know, outputting short snippets or teasers to create the show notes all by themselves.

Not sure how easy will be that. It's still just a raw idea. idea, but I think if I am able to do that probably by the end of the year, I will save my time long term a huge amount of time. And probably someone is already working at this idea. I'm pretty sure about it because podcasting is a huge industry. So if someone is building that before me, I'll be happy to pay for that because that will be literally enormous amount of time saved in long term. Yeah. Wow. So that's, it's such a good example to be able to sit on this side and to hear you, Gabe, talk about all these different ways that you're looking to use AI to grow, not just grow your

business, but save time. And I think that's, you know, if there's one thing other solopreneurs can take from today's conversation, I hope that's it because it is such great advice. So Gabe, thank you so much for joining the everyday AI show. It was great to have you. and thank you for sharing your perspective. Thank you so much for having me. It was an absolute pleasure.

And yeah, hopefully those listening took at least one note, useful notes, and start leveraging this beautiful tool or I don't know how to call it. Yeah. Oh, exactly. So, yeah, if you were or we're not taking notes, make sure that you go to your everyday AI.com, sign up for the free daily newsletter. We're going to be sharing a lot more about everything that Gabe talked about. his, you know, his agency, his podcast. If you want to check it out, we'll have it all in there.

So thank you so much for tuning in. As a reminder, if you did catch us live, thank you. If not, we do this every weekday morning, 7.30 a.m. Central Standard Time, or you can catch it on your favorite podcast platform. So we hope to see you back tomorrow and every day with everyday AI. Thank you. Meet Firefly AI assistant. Now live in Adobe Firefly, the only Home in One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create in your own words, and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface.

You direct the outcome while the assistant accelerates execution. Stand control with the ability to step in and refine at any time. See it today at firefly.adop.com. And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going. For a little more AI magic, visit your everyday AI.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind.

Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.