How I'm using ChatGPT as I start a new business

Save time and gather new perspectives as an early-stage founder

I recently founded a company in aviation maintenance. I had forgotten how invigorating the early days of a new company are! There’s so much to learn, and no shortage of really impactful tasks and projects to start chipping away at.

Compared to the last time I founded a company in 2012, I now have a pretty strong researcher and creative brainstormer by my side all the time: ChatGPT. ChatGPT has memory now, too, so I have fed it evolving descriptions of the product and business I’m building that it stores and references each time I come back for a new task.

Here are some ways I’ve used ChatGPT to save time and inject some creativity into my early founder tasks, starting with the one that has been the most beneficial for me at this stage, Customer Discovery:

• Brainstorming the titles of people involved in the sales cycle, like users, payers, other stakeholders, and people who might veto a deal. From the titles, ChatGPT can gather actual names of people in those roles that I can then find on LinkedIn and reach out to.

• Parsing customer discovery interview transcripts to extract answers to our customer discovery questions, exact quotes that demonstrate enthusiasm for our product, and next steps for moving the conversation forward. Some of the meeting recording and transcription services like Fathom already summarize meetings and next steps, but they don’t answer specific questions so I grab the transcript from Fathom and use it for those tasks.

• Reviewing agendas of the main industry conferences for relevant sessions and new companies, products, or people not yet on my radar.

Early branding, marketing, and messaging:

• Generating name ideas for the new company. I gave a brief description of our idea to ChatGPT and asked for 20 names. I read somewhere to ask for more than 10 when requesting a list like this. I refined the results by saying things like “too vanilla, more unusual”, or “make up new words that remind you of the industry/product”. Relatedly, I asked ChatGPT to search for available domain names corresponding to the list.

• Making a keyword list for things like social media post tags and other SEO. Then updating the list as it stores more information about our company in its memory.

• Writing a one page executive summary. I put in my AirPods and went on a walk and spoke about the product, what was unique about it, pain points potential customers face, trends in the industry, and so on. I copied and pasted the transcript into ChatGPT and asked for an executive summary with paragraphs hitting those key points. I’m no prompt engineer so I found the writing to be pretty bland, but the points and organization gave me a strong starting point to work with. As I continue working with ChatGPT and similar tools, I’ll feed them more of my own original writing so they can learn my tone and style.

Market research:

• Conducting ecosystem and competitor research. I had ChatGPT populate a table of companies from large aviation organizations to new startups (by press releases or funding news) that participate in the ecosystem, what category they fit into, which airlines use their products, their website, and more. This took a lot of prompting and refining but saved me a lot of research. I had ChatGPT output the information in CSV format so I could paste it into Excel.

• Estimating market size and value proposition. ChatGPT helped me understand how this market is segmented and also gave me some starting points for different ways to calculate our value delivered to customers. Ultimately, there’s no way out of talking to and getting close with actual customers, but this helped me become familiar with the jargon and gave me different ways to approach our value.

Strategy and technology:

• Identifying novel areas for potential patent protection. I had to make a case for how we could win against a big, well-funded competitor and wanted to describe a moat we could build by protecting our technology so I asked ChatGPT to compare ours to our competitor’s and other existing patents and suggest some areas that could be novel and worth digging into more as we build the first version of the product.

• Researching viable venture capital firms, summarizing trends in funding in our industry and technology area. Suggesting some ways to make the fundraising pitch deck flow logically given our strengths and weaknesses.

• Helping with wording and positioning for sensitive discussions and negotiations. I’ve told ChatGPT what outcome I wanted, why I thought it was justified, and what kind of tone I wanted to use, and I asked for a few different ways to counter an offer.

• Being a thought/conversation partner. As I’m learning about a new industry, I have some pretty basic questions and like to have back-and-forth discussions with ChatGPT to deepen my understanding. You can use the mobile version and actually speak and listen on a walk or in the car, and grab or review the conversation history later.

Admin:

• Providing or editing basic legal documents. I have a working understanding of the early documents a startup needs like NDAs, offer letters, and IP assignments so I can use ChatGPT to modify or write new clauses. (I think it still, for now, goes without saying that I’d still recommend consulting a lawyer?)

• Reviewing and editing emails, and Substack posts! ChatGPT can review your writing for tone, grammar, logic and flow, and more. It can help you think of titles or subject lines, write conclusions, and generate relevant ideas.

In addition to the above, ChatGPT has a lot of its own ideas on how it can be helpful to early founders, so just ask!