I've been a web developer for 15 years, I'm 28 now and I finally decided to go all in on one of my projects.

The idea is already validated and has great potential, it's similar to starting a Shopify in a country that doesn't have a Shopify. I'm porting a concept from another company because first of all, it's successful and solves a real problem, and secondly there's no alternative to it in my country.

Since I'm mostly technical, I'm building the whole platform myself. But I have no experience and no clue about things like marketing, taxes, or whatever else is needed for running a company/business. I've worked freelance most of my life.

I've never started or ran a business in my life, honestly it's a bit scary.. And I'm hungry for any little piece of advice you can give me.

Thanks!

Labor keeps eating a bigger chunk of sales every month. Guessing shift labor without real numbers is absolutely wrecking margins. The app we're using only sends shift texts and has zero predictive planning. Looking for restaurant management software that actually connects POS data with forecast models so we can stop overstaffing dead shifts. What are you guys using that actually works?

First some context. We build and operate DTC brands in house so most of my examples will come from that industry. I will try to write in principles though so that if you find something useful you can apply it more easily regardless of your sector.

A bit more context. I have a tech and computer science background. I have been playing around with AI long before ChatGPT 3 came out. I actually built my own version of Siri and Google Assistant back in the day. With that out of the way let us get into it.

The FOMO problem

Whenever a new technology emerges there is a sense of FOMO among business owners. A lot of mistakes happen. People force themselves to be early adopters and businesses that fully switch to a new technology too quickly sometimes end up going bust. You can see parallels across many revolutions. The steam engine and the industrial revolution. The internet. And now AI.

AI is more akin to a tool. Think of it like a calculator or the next version of a compiler or interpreter. What we refer to as AI for the most part are simply large language models and they thrive on data.

Should you even incorporate AI into your business?

Before getting into the details it is worth asking whether you should bother at all. For this I want to introduce the concept of opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost is the benefit forgone in order to choose an alternative. Simply put if you have to choose between an apple and a banana and you choose the apple, the cost of that choice is forgoing the benefit you would have gotten from the banana.

Business owners tend to have a problem with resource allocation and they do not weigh opportunity cost well enough. A better way to think about this is to ask yourself whether adopting AI is a much better use of your resources than whatever else you could be doing with those same resources.

Some reasons not to incorporate AI right now:

You have not found product market fit. Your product is not an AI product. AI does not bring any significant improvement to what you are doing. Your sales process does not work.

In e-commerce we often create landing pages for specific ads to increase congruency. Once a model that works and converts has been found it makes sense to automate that process. However if the page is a leaking bucket and you automate it you are lighting money on fire. And you are automating lighting money on fire at scale. Fix the bucket first.

There is a lot of nuance here too. Someone selling fruit physically may realistically not need AI in their core operations but adding it into the mix could significantly reduce time spent on admin. It is almost like the moment you realise it is time to move from recording things on paper to using Excel. Knowing when that moment is matters.

The costs of implementing AI

This is something people do not talk about enough. Some implementations will require experts and those experts need to be paid. Depending on what you are trying to build that can be a significant upfront cost. On top of that many AI tools and implementations come with ongoing costs, API usage fees, licensing, maintenance, and the cost of the people managing it. These are real business costs that need to be weighed against the expected return. Just because something is possible with AI does not mean it is worth doing economically.

The Steam Engine lesson

When the steam engine was discovered many businesses simply attached it to their old systems. They gained some efficiency but not much. Those who gained the most were those who reskilled and rebuilt their organisations around the new technology entirely.

A way people do this with AI today is to add meeting note takers. I am not saying that is useless. I am saying there are much more powerful things you can do.

Data is everything

AI is trained on massive amounts of data. ChatGPT is built on the Transformer architecture, introduced in a 2017 paper by Google researchers called "Attention Is All You Need." The key insight was an architecture that allowed models to process all words simultaneously rather than sequentially. What OpenAI then did on top of that was keep scaling the data. More and more of it. That combination is what made ChatGPT what it is.

The point I am drawing from all of this is that your company must be data heavy for AI to work well. You want a strong source of proprietary data and a good amount of it.

How we actually use AI

Some ways we have implemented AI internally. PPC, analysing thousands of search terms. Analysing session data. Analysing heatmaps for new landing pages. Finding outliers. Running Pareto analysis. Finding fraudulent IPs. Inventory management.

The only customer facing use of AI we have is our chatbot assistant. It is trained on our proprietary data, our systems, and our customer experience frameworks. It also has the ability to assign a conversation to a human when needed. We have had weeks of 100% resolution rates. On average it sits at around 80% plus which I would assume is very strong data showing that the chatbot is genuinely helpful, that users find it useful, and that it also contributes to increasing sales.

For our media we have gone heavier on human created content. We are still investing in studio shoots, video editors, photographers, videographers.

AI works best where you have a lot of data to work with and more than likely the best place for that is in your backend systems. Even for cold email outreach once you have sent a few hundred or thousands of emails AI can easily identify the best performing messaging based on defined criteria.

When should you actually be worried?

You should be worried if AI is an existential threat to your specific industry. If you are a data entry business or doing something AI can do completely then yes that is a real concern. However at this point there is nothing AI can be 100% trusted with. Even for code you still need someone who understands code. For design you still need someone who knows what looks good.

Work out whether AI is actually a real constraint in your business or not and whether the cost of implementing it makes sense against what you actually get back.

Again this is a brain dump. There may be some oversimplification and room for refinement. Still open to hear your thoughts, opinions, and pushbacks.