Do Something Instead of Nothing: Can AI Really Help a Start-Up?

🐝 Do Something Instead of Nothing: Can AI Really Help a Start-Up?

Let’s talk about AI, small businesses and the accusation that using it makes you lazy.

 
People often receive comments suggesting that using AI makes a business look sloppy and that it is a sign of laziness. It got me thinking, not because I agree with the comment, but because I think there is a much bigger conversation worth having.
 
AI is everywhere now. Some people love it, some people don’t trust it, and others are convinced that anything produced with AI must somehow be less authentic. But what happens when you’re a small business trying to get off the ground and you simply don’t have the budget for a copywriter, graphic designer, social media manager, web developer and marketing consultant?
 
What if it’s just you, with an idea, limited funds, a laptop, a phone and a lot of determination?
 
Do you sit back and wait until you can afford to do everything “properly”, or do you make use of the tools that are available to you and get started?
 
Personally, I’m a fan of doing something instead of nothing.
 

 

Starting a business isn’t cheap

 
Anyone who has started a business knows how quickly the costs add up. Before you’ve made your first proper sale, you could already be paying for a website, domain, hosting, accounting, advertising, printing, photography, software, packaging and equipment. Somehow, amongst all of that, you’re also supposed to find the money to actually run the business.
 
For an established company, paying someone to write a blog or design a social media campaign might simply be part of the marketing budget. For a start-up, spending several thousand rand on something you could potentially learn to do yourself can be the difference between having a little money left in the bank at the end of the month or not.
 
That doesn’t mean professional services aren’t valuable. They absolutely are, and there will hopefully come a point when your business can afford to use more of them. It simply means that when you’re starting out, you sometimes have to be resourceful with what you’ve got.
 
There’s nothing wrong with that.
 

 

AI doesn’t build your business for you

 
I think this is where some of the misunderstanding around AI starts. If I type “write me a Facebook post”, copy whatever comes back and publish it without even reading it, then yes, I’ve probably been a bit lazy. But that’s very different from the way many small-business owners are actually using AI.
 
For me, it’s much more of a conversation. I might start with a rough idea, explain what I’m trying to achieve and see what comes back. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I don’t. I’ll say that it doesn’t sound like me, that it’s too formal, too cheesy, too long, too American, or that nobody in South Africa would say it that way. I might ask for another version, take one paragraph from that version, change half of it myself and then go back again because I’ve suddenly thought of something else I want to include. Somewhere along the way, the original idea develops into something I can actually use.
 
AI can misunderstand what you’re trying to say, get facts wrong or produce something so polished and generic that it sounds as though absolutely nobody wrote it. That’s why the person using it still matters. You have to read what comes back and decide whether it represents you and your business. AI isn’t sitting at my desk running Market Hive SA while I have an afternoon nap. I’m still the person deciding what we’re doing, what we’re saying and what eventually gets published.
 

 

The idea still has to come from somewhere

 
Take this blog as an example. It didn’t magically appear because I typed “write a blog about AI”. It started because somebody left a comment on Facebook. That comment annoyed me a little, but more importantly, it made me think about what it’s actually like to start a business when you don’t have a huge budget behind you. I knew what I wanted to say; I just needed help turning all those thoughts into something people might actually want to read.
 
That’s where the conversation with AI started. I threw ideas into the mix, rejected some suggestions, changed others and kept coming back to the point I really wanted to make: don’t let a lack of money stop you from doing something. Along the way I’ve said things like, “No, I don’t like that”, “That’s too repetitive”, “That doesn’t sound human”, “Try again”, and probably a few things that aren’t suitable for a Market Hive blog. I’ve even sworn at AI when it gets stuck in a loop and keeps giving me the very thing I’ve just asked it to stop doing. If that’s laziness, it’s a surprisingly frustrating form of it.
 

 

Your business should still sound like you

 
One criticism of AI that I do think is fair is that badly used AI can make every business start sounding the same. We’ve all seen those posts that are beautifully written but somehow say absolutely nothing. The language is polished, there are lots of impressive words and you reach the end without having the faintest idea who the person behind the business actually is.
 
That’s where the human part becomes so important. If you make jewellery, tell people why you started making it. If you have a food stall, tell them about the recipe your grandmother taught you. If you organise a market, tell people about the Saturday morning when the rain came down, everybody got soaked and somehow it turned into one of your best market days.
 
AI doesn’t have those memories. It wasn’t there when you made your first sale, dealt with your first difficult customer, completely messed something up or suddenly realised that your little idea might actually turn into a business. Those experiences belong to you, and they’re what give your business a voice.
 
AI can help you find the words, but it shouldn’t take your personality out of them.
 

 

Learning to use AI isn’t the same as being lazy

 
There’s also a strange assumption that using AI means pressing a button and going off to make coffee while the computer does your work. I wish it were quite that simple.
 
Getting genuinely useful results takes practice. You learn what information to give it, how much context it needs and how to recognise when it’s confidently telling you complete nonsense. You still have to check facts, dates, prices and links, and you need enough understanding of your own business to know when a suggestion simply doesn’t make sense.
 
You also learn that the first answer isn’t necessarily the best one. Sometimes you need three versions before you find something useful. Other times AI gives you one sentence that sparks a completely different idea, and you head off in another direction altogether.
 
That’s not removing the thinking from the process. If anything, I’ve found that it can make you think more carefully about what you’re actually trying to say.
 

 

There are still times when you need a professional

 
Being enthusiastic about AI doesn’t mean pretending it can do everything. There are absolutely times when you need an accountant, lawyer, designer, developer, photographer, marketing specialist or someone else who has spent years learning their profession.
 
As your business grows, hopefully you’ll be in a position to use more of those services. AI doesn’t need to replace them. It can actually help you work better with them. You can use it to understand unfamiliar terminology, organise your questions before a meeting or work out what information you need to give a professional so that you’re not paying them to spend the first hour figuring out what you’re asking for.
 
The trick is knowing the difference between “I can learn to do this myself for now” and “I really need somebody who knows what they’re doing.”
 
That’s not an AI decision. That’s a business decision.
 

 

Don’t wait for perfect

 
This is probably the part I feel most strongly about, because small-business owners already have enough reasons to convince themselves they’re not ready.
 
You tell yourself you’ll start posting when you have better photographs. You’ll launch the website when the wording is perfect. You’ll advertise once the logo has been tweaked again. You’ll write the blog when you have more time. You’ll start properly when you have more money.
 
Suddenly six months have gone by and you’re still preparing to start.
 
I’d much rather see somebody take a decent photograph with their phone, write a post with a bit of help from AI and put their business in front of potential customers than spend months waiting until they can afford the perfect campaign.
 
Your first attempt probably won’t be your best one. It isn’t supposed to be. You learn, change things, improve and hopefully look back a year later and wonder what on earth you were doing in the beginning.
 
That’s called progress.
 

 

AI can give the little guy a helping hand

 
Technology has always changed the way businesses operate. We moved from paper diaries to spreadsheets, landlines to mobile phones, newspaper adverts to social media and filing cabinets to cloud storage. We use spellcheck without feeling guilty about it and calculators without worrying that we’ve somehow cheated at mathematics.
 
AI is another tool, albeit a particularly powerful one.
 
For a large company with departments full of specialists, it may simply make certain tasks quicker. For a tiny business where one person is doing the marketing, administration, customer service, sales and everything else that needs doing, it can make some things possible that previously weren’t.
 
That’s the part of the AI conversation I think we sometimes forget.
 
For a start-up, the alternative to using AI isn’t always hiring a professional.
 
Sometimes the alternative is simply not doing it at all because you can’t afford to.
 

 

So, is using AI lazy?

 
Of course it can be. You can use almost any tool lazily. You can take a terrible photograph with an expensive camera, create an awful advert in professional design software or spend five minutes throwing together something in Canva and call it finished.
 
The tool doesn’t determine how much thought went into the result.
 
If you’re using AI to avoid thinking, checking or contributing anything of yourself, then you’re probably not going to get particularly good work out of it. But if you’re using it to help research an idea, challenge your thinking, organise your thoughts, learn something new or turn something that’s been rattling around in your head into something useful, I don’t see that as lazy.
 
I see it as using the resources available to you.
 

 

🐝 Do Something Instead of Nothing

 
For a start-up with limited funds, the choice isn’t always between a beautifully written article created by a professional copywriter and one created with the help of AI. Sometimes the choice is between publishing something or publishing nothing, marketing your business or staying invisible, learning how to do something yourself or waiting until you can afford to pay somebody else.
 
I’ll choose something.
 
Because something can be changed. It can be edited, improved, redesigned, rewritten and made better as your business grows.
 
Nothing can’t.
 
If AI helps somebody write their first blog, create their first marketing plan, understand something they didn’t understand yesterday or finally get their website launched, then I think that’s a pretty good use of technology.
 
Use the tools you’ve got. Learn how they work. Question what they give you. Put yourself into the result, and when you need a professional, use one.
 
But don’t let the fact that you can’t afford everything at the beginning stop you from starting.
 
Do something instead of nothing.
 
Sometimes the difference between an idea sitting in your head and a business actually existing is simply being willing to start with what you’ve got.
 

And one final thought…

 
This blog was created using AI.
 
And I think that’s rather fitting.
 
It started with a comment made by a real person, which sparked an idea in my head. I knew what I wanted to say and why I wanted to say it. Then AI and I went backwards and forwards with it. We changed the structure, removed things that sounded repetitive, rewrote paragraphs that didn’t sound natural and argued about wording until it started sounding like something I would actually say.
 
So yes, AI helped write this blog.
 
But I brought the idea, the opinion, the experience.
 
AI brought the ability to help me turn all of that into a finished article.
 
Neither of us would have written this particular blog without the other.

And that’s the point.

AI doesn’t have to replace human creativity.

Sometimes it can simply help us do something with it.

🐝 Do Something Instead of Nothing.

Written by Cat Howard & ChatGPT — with a fair amount of editing, arguing and the occasional swear word along the way.

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