Building a business has never been easier, but the landscape is also more competitive. The difference between success and failure often depends on how quickly you can achieve your goals. You need to understand your market and how to scale your business. AI tools can help you get started.
If I were to build my business from scratch today, I would rely heavily on AI tools to make the process faster, smarter and more efficient than ever before.
Here’s exactly how I would approach rebuilding from scratch and what specific AI tools would make this possible.
Table of contents
Two approaches to building an AI business
Approach 1: Use LLMs to flesh out your ideas.
Every entrepreneur needs to know their niche. If you don’t have a unique perspective, you will never stand out in the crowded market. So you have to be specific. I would approach it like a research sprint, using AI tools to cut through the noise and find real opportunities.
AI tools help you organize and validate your ideas. You can start a conversation with ChatGPT or OpenAI’s extended language mode and flesh out all your different ideas in the discussion. I would ask things like:
- What are the pros and cons of this idea?
- Do you see any possible disadvantages in this?
- What would you change about the idea?
This allows you to flow freely. Later, the conversation will be saved to your ChatGPT dashboard so you can review the conclusions. Say it next to summarize what was discussed and get a list of the top ten ideas for cool companies.
From there, you can use other AI tools to research and validate your ideas.
My Next wave Co-host Nathan Lands gives this approach a twist. He says, “I would do something confusion I search and see if there are existing companies in the areas that interest me.” Check out these companies’ websites and copy and paste them into ChatGPT to start researching industries you’re unfamiliar with.
The step-by-step process for validating business ideas
Once you’ve made a list of your top ten business ideas, you need to test those ideas with an audience to see which one sticks.
For this I suggest a tool like Mixowhich allows you to quickly create a website with a single prompt. Mixo allows you to create some test pages that you can show to a focus group. You can show potential buyers a real model to see what they are more likely to spend money on. The following steps can help you get started.
- Provide Mixo with the details of the software products You think about it. Based on this idea, Mixo creates a landing page for you with images and text.
- Have ten different websites created – one for each idea you are interested in. Make sure every website has an email opt-in box so people can add themselves to the product’s waitlist.
- Buy ads on Facebook, Google, Twitter or whatever platform your potential users are on. You should receive ads for each landing page. Then you make the product depending on which one on the waiting list has the most interest.
- When you release the product, Hit up the people who joined this special waiting list. Since you’ve already built an email list before, you’re ready to launch your first marketing campaign.
- And of course, email the other nine lists and let them know that you didn’t make the product they signed up for. If the products are similar, you can ask them to look at the actual product you made.
Now that you have the idea, it’s time to develop relevant features. Whatever you want to build, you should use AI to analyze the features that should be included or excluded. First, I recommend finding existing products that are close to your idea. You can then exploit them to build your own. Here is the step-by-step process.
- Find reviews in places like Reddit or Trustpilot or anywhere you can collect comments, reviews and feedback.
- Copy and paste everything you find Claude. Then ask for sentiment analysis to understand what people love or hate about the product. When you create your version of the product, make it better than the existing one.
- For marketing, Lean into these differences. If people love a feature, highlight that feature in your campaigns. If they hate something or ask for a feature to be added, then add that functionality.
Approach 2: Scale your content with AI.
If I were starting a new business now, I would focus on content creation. There are more opportunities than ever to influence LLMs and dominate AI overviews with specific keywords at the bottom of the funnel.
AI can help you create the content you need to reach your customers, wherever they are. This is how I would do it:
- Choose a niche topic what you’re really happy about. I would choose something that I have experience with and can speak about myself. When you venture into sub-niches, there is unlimited potential.
- Use AI to help generate ideas. Right now I’m constantly using Perplexity and Claude in my AI stack. Use these tools to research your niche until you understand this universe inside and out.
- Create as much content as possible around these topics as possible. AI can help you outline these posts or even write them for you.
- Expand into Multimedia. Let’s say I want to make a video about creating 3D tours of houses for a real estate product. I can ask Claude how to make the video. How is the river? Which camera do I need? How can I capture other people’s attention? It creates an outline for me and I can follow those notes to make sure I’m hitting all the bars.
- Use AI tools to speed up the production process. For example, TimeBolt can locate all pauses and then remove them from short videos. Those are hours saved.
Essential AI tools for modern business building
Building a business used to require huge upfront investments, months of development time and teams of specialists. Today, you can validate an idea, create a working prototype, and start acquiring customers faster than ever—if you know which tools to use.
Let’s dive deeper into the tools I find most helpful.
Perplexity: Validate ideas quickly
confusion is a large language model like ChatGPT or Claude, but it also searches the Internet when you ask it a question. I find Perplexity’s informed answers hard to beat. You can ask Perplexity what people are currently searching for, what they’re struggling with, or what content they want. This will help you find a niche where you can make an impact.
You can also use Perplexity to find information that web scraping tools cannot access. If there’s nothing on the site to search, it finds reviews from Reddit or TechCrunch and then tells me what the tool is about. I used this process to discover product details for my website Future tools.
Cursor, Repilt and Firebase: Managing your product and website
If you’re starting a new business, these three software programs make up the perfect tech stack. You can easily create a product, create a website and keep everything updated.
Everything starts with cursoran AI code editor that can help you build your software faster. The biggest advantage? Cursor leverages your entire codebase for context, so the output is accurate and integrated into the larger system.
With Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Cursor searches the text of all your uploaded files and uses this information to complete the code and improve the accuracy of the software you create.
Now you need to create a website that attracts buyers and keeps customers updated about what you have to offer. Repetition takes you from idea to website, all with AI. With Replit’s cursor integration, you can automatically link all product changes to your website, eliminating duplicate work.
Replit manages the frontend and Fire base takes care of the backend. Firebase can help you manage your hosting and organize your databases. This tool also manages single sign-on with existing accounts like Google or Apple, so you don’t have to worry about sign-in functionality.
So, with Cursor to write the code, Replit to host the frontend, and Firebase to host the backend, you have an integrated AI approach to building your business.
NotebookLM: Create well-researched content
NotebookLM is an AI research assistant that can read your sources and help you write, summarize, and brainstorm – all in one place.
I use this to get breakdowns of complex academic papers so I can understand the information quickly and easily. NotebookLM can also create mini-podcasts from the documents. I can use these summaries later when creating my own content.
Even in the age of AI, your company needs a face.
AI can help you at every step of building your business. But your human presence and your brand still matter.
As people are inundated with AI-generated content and avatars, they are looking for real people. When I click on a YouTube video and hear an AI voiceover, I immediately hit the back button because I assume it’s low-effort content. I want to hear a person explain things to me.
So you need to show your true voice and unique personality to build trust. Your content needs a face when creating content. They should get to know you personally and build a bond with you.
I keep the human element at the center Future tools. I personally curate every tool available on the site. I use AI to scan the product details so I can easily review the tool before it is published, but every recommendation has my authentic seal of approval. AI and personalized content are completely compatible – and absolutely necessary in the future.
Use AI tools to build your business
Now you have my actionable tech stack so you can start building your business today. For more actionable insights and industry journeys on how AI can boost your business, click here The Next Wave Podcast.