Written by Lidia Vijga
A revolutionary language model ChatGPT developed by OpenAI uses artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate with people using natural language processing. ChatGPT has been trained on 570Gb of data mostly from the Internet, books, and Wikipedia. As a result, ChatGPT can comprehend and converse with people about a wide range of topics. Including startup-related stuff! Startups can use this AI tool in many ways and the number of ChatGPT use cases is growing quickly. Here are the top 10 ChatGPT examples and use cases for startups:
1. Identify ideal customer profiles
This sounds crazy but it works! Many first-time startup founders can find it challenging to identify ideal customer profiles the traditional way.
Identifying ICP is no simple task! It requires the right mindset and techniques. Many startup founders also oftentimes fall victim to their own bias. As an early-stage startup, your goal is to find the right customers for your product as quickly as possible. But how can you gain an insight into who exactly would benefit from it without being too biased?
ChatGPT can help startup founders identify ideal customer profiles. How? Simply describe your SaaS product, list its main features, and let ChatGPT do its magic. It may not identify all of the ICPs but it can give startup founders a great starting point and save them months and months of work. While having a human-human interaction is still preferable for more accurate results, leveraging the power of ChatGPT can give startup founders a great starting point and save them months and months of laborious research.
2. Identify product features to build
Have you ever spent a lot of time and resources to develop a cool product feature that you hoped would increase product usage or bring new customers? Only to discover that no one uses it! That feeling of discouragement and frustration is all too familiar for startup founders.
ChatGPT will not tell you with 100% certainty which features will be in high demand, it can certainly speed up the process. You still have to get feedback from your users. However, I and my startup founder friends were getting very accurate results. With ChatGPT, what used to take weeks or even months for them can now be done in a matter of minutes!
So how ChatGPT can help startups identify what product features they should be building? Simply describe your product, and existing set of features, describe the user profile and use case and ask ChatGPT what features you should build that can help this user get more value out of the product, be more productive, etc. The results may surprise you!
3. Figure out a monetization strategy and pricing model
Monetization is a tough topic for early-stage startups. Unfortunately, many startup founders sadly fail to successfully monetize their products, though it may appear simple on the surface. Pricing models greatly vary based on your product, industry, and go-to-market strategy.
Many founders always flock to subscription-based pricing where customers pay a recurring fee per user to access software. This is the simplest pricing model, however, it can pose many challenges. One of the main ones is account sharing. Is your product tightly integrated into your customers’ workflows where account sharing is not a viable option? Can you effectively expand ACV (average customer value)? In many instances, you will find that the bigger the client is won’t necessarily correlate to more licenses purchased.
This is where you will need to get more creative with your pricing model. This is where ChatGPT can help you! Ask ChatGPT to come up with the most effective monetization strategy for your product. Just like in previous examples, describe your product, product-defining features, use cases, and challenges that you’re experiencing monetizing your product. The next step is to go and get feedback from potential clients!
4. Identify additional use cases for your technology
Did you know that Play-Doh originally was designed and launched as a wall cleaner under the name Kutol in the 1930s? Back then, coal heaters that people used to heat their houses left a lot of black residue on the walls. However, as oil and gas heaters pushed coal heaters out of the market the demand for wall cleaners declined significantly. While looking for a pivot, the company heard of a school teacher who used their product in arts and crafts classes. This insight sparked the Play-Doh revolution. These days the company sells over 100 million cans of Play-Doh per year.
Not many people know but YouTube was originally launched as a video-dating site with the slogan “Tune In, Hook Up.” However, the concept failed to gain traction and so when it became apparent that users were using the platform differently than expected by its creators – the founders pivoted.
One of the biggest mistakes startup founders can make is getting too attached to their perfect idea of how and who should be using their technology. If you don’t have a sizeable user base to get real-world data you have to try asking ChatGPT! Describe your tech and existing use cases and ask ChatGPT to list any additional use cases for your technology. You may not realize what your technology is capable of!
5. Identify pain points for your product and how to overcome them
Creating interactive mockups in Figma has become a norm for most startups. It is the best way to test a product with potential customers before actually building it. You can get quite granular with mockups, however, it is still quite difficult to foresee many challenges that can come up later down the road. Identifying and addressing these pain points is especially important for hardware startups.
So how can ChatGPT help startup founders? Easy!
Simply ask ChatGPT to create a table listing the most common pain points of the product and how these pain points can be solved.
Example for a cell phone:
Limited Battery Life | Optimize battery usage – Improve the software and hardware of the cell phone to optimize battery usage and provide longer battery life.
do it for “insert your product description here”
This simple ChatGPT prompt can potentially save you weeks if not months of work!
6. Improve website messaging
One of the biggest challenges that many startup founders experience, especially at the early stages, is they fail to clearly explain what their product does in Layman’s terms.
Many have the urge to get fancy and creative. However, that is the privilege of later-stage companies with established brand awareness. When people land on your home page you literally have seconds to grab their attention and explain what you do. Even minor improvements in your website messaging can significantly increase conversion rates. This is especially true about the hero section (above the fold section) of your website.
While ChatGPT can give you great ideas on how to improve your website messaging you will still have to A/B test it.
7. Create a pitch deck
Creating a startup pitch deck is equal parts art and science, and early-stage startup fundraising can be one of the most daunting obstacles founders may encounter. Without any prior fundraising experience, it might become challenging to make a good first impression on investors and speak their language. After all, why should they trust a complete stranger with their hard-earned money? Not only do founders have to get investors excited about their product but also demonstrate that their business model is viable, and create a human connection with investors.
Just like with the website messaging, ChatGPT can help you create a copy for your pitch deck. Just let Chat GPT know that this is an investor deck. Oh and one more thing to mention, ChatGPT is notorious for coming up with bogus statistics so make sure to verify any numbers that it comes up with.
8. Write code faster
Yes, ChatGPT can even help you write code speeding up your product development cycles. ChatGPT uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology that can understand what you’re trying to code and also generate the code for you! Also, if you’re using GitHub, you can give GitHub Copilot a try. It is a more specialized and integrated solution for software engineers.
9. Write sales and marketing emails
For any B2B startup looking to take their product to the market, having a well-crafted email outreach cadence is paramount. But creating effective cadences can be tricky and time-consuming. Fortunately, ChatGPT can simplify this process by giving startup founders an easy way to craft custom email sequences for different customer types that they can plug into their automated email software!
It does sound easy, however, it may take you quite a bit of time to figure out the right prompt for ChatGPT but it’s well worth it. We highly recommend you tell ChatGPT to use a certain tone of voice so it doesn’t sound too robotic and unnatural.
For a more in-depth guide on how to use Chat GPT for sales, check out this article.
10. Create article outlines
If you’re pursuing PLG (product lead growth) strategy like many SaaS startups, most likely you will need to write a lot of content to drive organic traffic to your website.
However, do not make a mistake that many startup founders make and use ChatGPT to write content for your website! Many popular search engines like Google and Bing have already implemented AI-generated content detectors. And you definitely don’t want your website to get flagged by search engines for pumping out AI-generated content.
Instead, use ChatGPT to generate article outlines that you can use as a guide to write content for your website. Simply ask ChatGPT to write an article outline, specify the topic, target audience, keyword, or key phrase that you’re targeting, etc.
All in all, ChatGPT is an amazing tool for startup founders that can help them overcome many challenging obstacles on their journey toward success.
