5 ChatGPT Prompts To Start A Successful Business

If you’re not setting out to make big waves in business, you might as well not begin. Go big or go home. But start small. One paradox of entrepreneurship is that serving a small group of customers insanely well will lead to growth faster than going broad. Before buying your domain name, designing your brand or building your products, follow these steps and use these prompts.

Knowing your business will take off ahead of time will give you all the confidence you need to keep going when it gets tough, when it inevitably does. ChatGPT can help. Copy, paste and edit the square brackets in ChatGPT, and keep the same chat window open so the context carries through.

Find a profitable niche

Intentionality matters for building big. Don’t sleepwalk into a niche; do your research, analyze the data, and find an industry that matches your skills, with room for a new player. Join an upward trend, follow your passion, and use your existing ace cards. The perfect niche is waiting for you to find it and this prompt will help.

“I’m starting a business. Help me identify a profitable niche market that aligns with my skills and interests. I have experience in [your skills], a passion for [your interests], and am looking to enter a market that has growth potential and room for new players. Consider trends and data in [specific industry, location or market] that could be a good fit for my background.”

Define your winning offer

Now you know your niche, decide what you want to offer and how you want to package it. Get options from ChatGPT. A service, a product, a productised service. A one-off cost, a subscription model, a tiered plan. A done with you, done for you or do it yourself. There are multiple variations of similar businesses, so find the offer and package that you think you could sell.

“Given the niche market of [your chosen niche], what are some potential service or product offerings I could provide? I am considering business models like [subscription, one-off cost, tiered plans]. Could you suggest options for [type of service, e.g. done with you, done for you, do it yourself or type of product, e.g. physical or digital] services or products? Additionally, give me some compelling value propositions for these offerings.”

Talk to potential customers

Thinking that you could sell something is not enough. Don’t build anything before you talk to potential customers. Run your offer by them. Ask them if they would buy. If they say yes, collect their details and put a card on file. To collect data that will validate your idea, create a simple landing page that describes the offer and let people join a waitlist. Run Google ads to the page and see how many register interest. Take emotion out of the picture and scrutinize the numbers.

“Help me validate my business idea in the field of [your chosen niche] by talking to potential customers. List the questions I should ask potential customers about [specific aspect of your product/service]. Then, provide the structure and wording for a simple landing page to gauge interest in [your offer]. Suggest 5 potential slogans to use in ad copy for [type of ads e.g. Google ads].”

Create a business plan

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail. For maximum chances of this working out, you need a business plan. Run the rough numbers, identify the growth levers, choose your winning team. Operate with intention. Whether it’s to show to investors or just keep you on track, use this prompt to know what you need to do and where you’re headed.

“Your task is to draft a business plan for a new venture in the [your chosen niche]. Include sections on market analysis, targeting [specific demographics or customer segments], financial projections for [1 year, 3 years, 5 years], based on my offer of [describe your product or service offering], growth strategies such as [specific tactics or initiatives], and team composition including roles like [specific roles or expertise needed]. Also, include potential risks and how to mitigate them.”

Decide your marketing strategy

So you’ve nailed down your niche and offer, got customers ready to buy and you know how many you need to make it worthwhile. Now figure out marketing to reach people at scale. Choose your channels so you can experiment, define the metrics you’re going to measure, and refine the messaging that will resonate hard. Keep going until you find the marketing activities that lead to signups. This is the fun part.

“Acting as a world-class marketer, describe some effective marketing strategies for a new business in the [your chosen niche]. Suggest channels like [define these, e.g. a specific social media platform, email marketing, SEO, content marketing], identify which key metrics I should track, and suggest messaging that will resonate with [your target audience]. Additionally, provide ideas for initial marketing campaigns and how to iterate based on results.”

You could use this prompt to start with one area of marketing and then resend to get a plan for another.

Source: Forbes