Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- 1. Leverage a ChatGPT Plus subscription
- 2. Use an AI Customer Support Assistant
- 3. Create an AI-Driven Lead Magnet
- 4. Smart Note-Taking and Publishing
- 5. Build an Internal AI Assistant With Your Company Knowledge Base
- 6. Get AI-Enhanced Headshots For Your Team Profiles
- 7. Generate AI-Driven Content Briefs for SEO
- 8. Improve your thinking and writing with AI
- 9. Write Code
- 10. Analyze Your Company Data (without fancy tools)
- 11. Create Quick Landing Pages and Design Prototypes
- 12. Automate
- 13. Use AI to Respond to Emails (in your style)
- 14. Build Your Social Media Audience with AI
- Conclusion
I’ve spent the last 12 months building a self-funded AI SaaS startup with my cofounder to over 45,000 users. There are still just 2 of us, and we want to keep it that way, so we look for every opportunity to use AI ourselves to keep our SaaS lean and still deliver a great customer experience.
Being so close to the latest AI tech has meant we have seen the best (and the worst) tools come and grow (or go). So we have put together a list of the battle-tested ways we use AI in our business and the tools we use, so you don’t have to find them for yourself.
1. Leverage a ChatGPT Plus subscription
Probably the simplest and highest “return on investment” purchase decision regarding AI you can make this year for your SaaS - get you and everyone in your team access to ChatGPT Plus.
At $20 per month, if you value your time even at minimum wage, ChatGPT only has to save you an hour of work per month to make it an economical purchase.
A lot of the ideas I am going to share with you for how to start using AI in your business are going to need it too, so get signed up right away.
The sooner you start using it, the faster you will learn where it will can and can’t help you, and the more familiar you will be with the possibilities of AI tools more broadly.
A ChatGPT Plus subscription will get you:
- Access to the most powerful models (GPT-4 at the time of writing)
- Faster response times and less likelihood of servers hitting capacity
- Priority access to the latest features - like the new “vision” model
- Custom instructions to save tailored prompt settings
- Access to create “GPTs” - custom AI assistants, specialising in certain tasks
2. Use an AI Customer Support Assistant
You can have the most intuitive product in the world, the best documentation, and the finest tutorials, but I guarantee, customers will still always have questions, and as your SaaS scales, the number of customer support queries tends to scale with it.
Thankfully, AI can help.
There are tools like My AskAI that let you add your website and in minutes get a customized AI customer support assistant for your site trained on all your product guides and help documentation, able to answer any question, instantly, 24/7.
Think of it as an AI “first line of defense” for you and your customer support team, answering all the questions that your users probably could have answered themselves (if they could be bothered to look around).
The best AI customer support assistants will also:
- Let you see what users are asking about your product, and suggest ways to fix issues, enabling a fly-wheel of product improvements and content production to fill in any gaps.
- Transfer users to a person (summarizing the conversation so they don’t have to repeat themselves), using your existing chat tools when the AI can’t answer, so you (and your customers) get the best of both worlds.
- Include an AI site search for free, to replace the basic keyword search you have now.
3. Create an AI-Driven Lead Magnet
Trying to capture new visitors through search traffic and social media is likely only going to get harder over the next few years as the content visitors would usually find on business blog posts is served up, personalized to them, in search snippets or other AI platforms.
You need to think more about how you can provide actionable value to users instead of just regurgitated information and AI makes this much easier.
One of the problems many people have when using AI is that they don’t know what to use it for and end up overwhelmed with the possibilities, or they do know what they want to use it for, but they don’t know how to get the most out of it, and end up with poor quality output.
An AI “wrapper” solves these problems and is a product that builds on top of other AI APIs, like OpenAI. They require minimal to no AI knowledge to create and can be built in hours or days. They will often use custom prompts and simple UI and UX to guide the user through a flow to get the best possible results from the AI.
Here is a course showing you how to make an AI wrapper for your business with some great examples where it has been used to create a “Value Proposition Generator”, “Business idea generator” and a “User Persona Generator”.
4. Smart Note-Taking and Publishing
How many ideas or thoughts do you have that never made it to a notebook, email, or blog post? So much content and product ideas get lost because we never write them down, or, if we do, they are just garbled notes that make no sense when we come back to look at them.
This is no longer an issue with some of the fantastic new voice-to-text tools that use OpenAI’s Whisper voice model to transcribe with unerring accuracy (and will skip all your umms and errs).
Try TalkNotes or AudioPen and see how quickly your idle musings and ramblings can be transformed into lucid prose, that, with a few tweaks, are ready to publish or share with people in your team.
There is also no excuse nowadays to not take meeting notes with AI, almost all of the big platforms have the option built-in, the quality is very high and the best standalone tools (like Scribbl and tl:dv) will even summarize the meetings, take action points and let you search them to find what Gerald was going on about.
5. Build an Internal AI Assistant With Your Company Knowledge Base
Most companies start with the best of intentions when it comes to knowledge management and folder structures, but very quickly as people join and have different ideas about how things should be done they become messy and team members end up spending more and more time just trying to find the document or page that answers the question.
AI can help out here too.
There are tools now that allow you to get answer to questions by asking in plain English to a knowledgebase, sometimes from within Slack or Teams.
All you have to do is connect your knowledge base (Notion, Google Drive etc) and you’re away!
You get answers along with the sources used to answer the question so you never need to know where that page or file is, just that they’re there.
6. Get AI-Enhanced Headshots For Your Team Profiles
Getting a professional picture taken for yourself is frustrating - finding the right photographer who won’t make you look silly, scheduling a time that works, and then having to pay extortionate rates.
Add in the complexity of doing this for your entire team and it becomes a logistical nightmare best avoided.
Luckily, AI has the answer for this one too using AI image generation tools like Headshot Pro, where users can upload any images they already have (they don’t have to be professional) and the AI will generate picture-perfect headshots perfect for the team section of your site or to add some consistency to your teams’ social media profiles.
7. Generate AI-Driven Content Briefs for SEO
Creating blog content is pretty pointless if you aren’t thinking about the impact it has on your SEO.
But most fully AI-generated content doesn’t hit the SEO mark, the best results still often come from humans.
Knowing what you should be writing about and how you should be writing, can take A LOT of research, and this is where AI can step in and save you a ton of effort.
A tool like Swiftbrief will do your keyword research and clustering and generate an SEO-optimized content brief to make sure that all the effort you put into writing the content doesn’t go to waste.
8. Improve your thinking and writing with AI
One of the most powerful ways I use AI, and more specifically, ChatGPT, is as a sparring partner when working on creative or detailed written tasks.
Here are 4 quick examples of what I mean:
- Email flow or cold email critique - I’ll input my email subject lines and copy and ask it to act as a cold email expert and give me feedback on ways to make copy more persuasive or improve conversion. If you use Google Workspace, then you could use Bard to help you.
- Landing page copy - I’ll give it the context of my business, customers, and problems and ask it to generate tens of H1 and H2s that I can then iterate on for testing. For better results, I give it examples of some I had already been thinking of.
- Reviewing terms and legalese - Obviously, it isn’t a replacement for a lawyer, but for lower ticket issues, pasting in the contract or term text and telling it your concerns e.g. “I want to make sure I retain IP ownership” or asking for specific risk areas can help you more quickly identify potential issues.
- Coming up with new feature or product names - Giving it context to your business, some guidance on tone, length and a few other pointers, you can quickly get a list of tens or hundreds of potential names that you can use as a jumping-off point when your creative juices aren’t flowing.
9. Write Code
Whether you just need a little bit of html or css to smarten something up on your landing page, or you need help with a bug that just won’t go away, AI is here to help.
I’d say this is probably the most impactful and effective use of AI since ChatGPT’s launch, drastically reducing the amount of time it takes top developers to build while also giving novice codes superpowers.
Now you can just paste in your code to ChatGPT (make sure you have chosen for ChatGPT not to train on your data) along with the error and you’ll be given a near-perfect response of how to fix it.
Better yet, now you can upload screenshots directly to ChatGPT and just ask for a fix or for the code required to make UIs.
If you want to go a step beyond then get your entire development team subscriptions to Github Copilot so they can get AI to write code where they work.
10. Analyze Your Company Data (without fancy tools)
One of the most powerful modules included with ChatGPT Plus is the Code Interpreter module. Often overlooked and under-used, this essentially turns anyone into a hotshot Data Analyst.
All those questions you wanted to ask to guide product decisions but usually needed to wait for someone to write a query for or for analyst time can now be solved with simple questions that you can keep iterating on and diving into.
I’ve used it to find out things like:
- Correlations between features and conversion
- The most common company emails signing up
- How activation rates vary over time by acquisition source
But as long as you have the data, the AI will find a way to get an answer, making simple charts and also answering questions on your interpretation of the data along the way.
To supercharge this kind of analysis there are also tools like Formulabot for Excel and Sheets which can help you do this sort of analysis directly in Excel, so you never need to commit a formula to memory again.
11. Create Quick Landing Pages and Design Prototypes
If you’ve got a side product or growth experiment you want to try out quickly, it’s unlikely you want to go to the effort of getting something heavily designed and scoped out.
With Framer you can give a few instructions as to what you want your SaaS does, along with a few design pointers and it will use AI to create a full landing page in front of your eyes.
tldraw is even more impressive, create a wireframe of your product using their drag-and-drop GUI and then click “Make real” to bring it to life as a fully coded, functioning widget to test out.
12. Automate
You’ve probably already heard of Zapier, the automation king and one of the biggest SaaS companies going.
You’ve probably also had grand ambitions of automating away all the repetitive processes from your day-to-day operations too I imagine, but then, when confronted by triggers, workflows, and actions, you quickly found something more interesting to be doing.
Well, Zapier just used AI to make things a hell of a lot easier.
All you have to do now is describe the process you want to automate and Zapier’s AI will create all the steps you need so you just need to connect your tools and set it to live.
13. Use AI to Respond to Emails (in your style)
Yes, you read that right, you can use AI to respond to your emails now, although take caution - AI-generated emails are often incredibly easy to spot and can rub people up the wrong way.
One tool that can help with this is Ellie which will learn your writing style when replying to your emails, making it seem that little bit more human.
It won’t be long now before we see AI spiraling into back-and-forth exchanges with itself!
Bonus tip: You can get some inspiration for prompts to use in ChatGPT for writing emails and content.
14. Build Your Social Media Audience with AI
While I am definitely against posting AI-generated content to social media platforms verbatim I think there are great tools to help you craft and create better content.
You can:
- Use ChatGPT to critique your draft posts by asking how you can make it punchier, more persuasive or whatever your goal for posting is.
- Use AI writing features within tools like Typefully (for Twitter or LinkedIn) that can give you inspiration for posts, help remix content, or change the tone of your messaging
- Use video clipping tools like Opus that takes long-form video content and uses AI to turn them into a series of “viral” short-form videos for repurposing on platforms like Reels or TikTok.
Conclusion
There are so many AI tools out there, that they can feel overwhelming, but focusing on learning to use and apply ChatGPT to your business, along with using simple, easy to use customer support tools like My AskAI will ensure you can ride the AI wave in 2024.
I hope that gave you a few ideas of new ways you can use AI in your SaaS, let us know if there is anything you think we’ve missed!
