The thing about being a solopreneur is that you have to do everything yourself. From high-level strategy down to DMing your followers, it is a one-woman show. I know this current gig economy is full of AI tools promising to make it easier, and trust me, I've tried some of them. I'm quite friendly with ChatGPT. But what I want is something that can actually save me time. A tool that will not only hash out ideas with me, but that can do the mundane work. Creating more time to do other things is the ultimate goal, as time is finite and you can merely reallocate its usage.
So when my husband messaged me this week and told me about Claude, I was immediately interested. An AI tool that works like a real assistant? I subscribed that night.
At that point, my most urgent to-do was pivoting from design mode to growth mode: email marketing, social media, ad creatives. I had a vague plan but no real system to hold it all together. For a long time I was using a Google Sheet that just barely worked. I had to manually input everything, it was clunky, and I never had time to find something better.
So I asked Claude to figure it out for me. Not only brainstorm it, but actually do it. I asked it to go into my Notion, build out charts that supported everything we planned together, make it viewable in different modes, and plug in all the data. And it did. Something that had lived in my brain for months was now living outside of it, and it was done in a few hours. Btw, I had attempted to build my own chart a few weeks ago and got so overwhelmed I gave up.
My real struggle has never really been the daily to-dos. I can work very fast and efficiently, given a clear plan. It was the big picture. The road mapping. The planning that requires you to step back and think clearly, which is almost impossible when you are constantly in survival mode, just trying to keep your head above water. That is where I kept losing ground.
I am coming up on five years with KAEIU. In fashion, they say if you survive the first five years, you have made it. I wish I felt like I had made it. Right now it feels more like a glorified hobby than the real, profitable business I know it can be. This year, I want to change that.
If you are in a similar boat, constantly trying to create more time, lean into the tools available to you. The goal was never to do it all. It was to do what only you can do, and let everything else find its place.
With love,
Maria