Ep. 393 How I use AI as a solopreneur – and what I’ve learned so far

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes

After two-plus years of experimenting with AI tools – switching platforms, building custom tools, and making plenty of mistakes along the way – Anna Lundberg shares what she’s actually learned about using AI as a solopreneur: what it’s genuinely good for, where it falls short, and why the most valuable thing you bring to your business can’t be outsourced to any tool.

Key moments

[00:00] Introduction – Why this episode is for solopreneurs feeling overwhelmed or behind with AI

[00:52] Honest history – Anna’s early experience with ChatGPT and why she quickly pulled back from using it for content

[01:24] The custom GPT phase – Building a solopreneur scorecard and why it felt like a genuine leap forward

[02:55] Switching to Claude – The practical and ethical reasons behind the move, and what changed

[04:25] What transferred – How the scorecard became embedded directly in the membership portal

[06:32] The tools in use now – Claude, Perplexity, and a quarterly review tool for clients

[07:17] The thinking partner piece – Why this is the most valuable daily use of AI for solopreneurs

[08:05] What AI doesn’t replace – Human connection, coaches, masterminds, and real accountability

[09:12] Using AI for weekly planning and personal projects – How Anna structures her week with it

[09:50] The content trap – Why AI-generated content erodes the very thing that makes you worth following

[10:41] What intentional AI use actually looks like – Three tiers: thinking, drafting, research

[12:55] Where to start if you haven’t yet – One small experiment, no strategy required

Key resources

• Access the free diagnostic: A free 10-minute assessment to get a personalised report on what’s working, what’s running on autopilot, and where the real leverage is in your business. Find it at onestepoutside.com/diagnostic
• Perplexity – perplexity.ai (recommended for research)
• Claude – claude.ai (Anna’s primary AI tool)
• Wisprflow (for voice-to-text dictation)
• Book a free call with Anna: onestepoutside.com/call

Using AI as a solopreneur

this one is for you if you are experimenting with AI and either feeling overwhelmed by how much there is to learn, feeling behind everyone else, or quietly wondering whether it’s actually making any difference to how you work.

Welcome to Reimagining Success, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert when it works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility and the fulfilment you’re looking for. Ready to redefine success and build a business that you love? Let’s get started.

My honest history with AI tools

Okay, I want to talk about AI today and I want to, of course, be upfront from the start, in case you had any doubts. I am not positioning myself as an expert here. I’m very much figuring this out alongside you. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve changed tools, I’ve changed my mind. And of course, the whole world is evolving as we speak. But what I do want to share is what I’ve actually been doing with it, what’s worked, what hasn’t, and importantly, push back on the idea that AI has some kind of magic to it – that it’s a magic solution that’s going to transform your business overnight, because I think that framing is doing more harm than good.

It’s a bit of honest history, I suppose, because the thing is relevant. I was an early adopter of ChatGPT. I got excited pretty quickly, although at the time I was doing a micro master’s course online, and I very quickly saw that people were using it to do their output. So they had to comment and write things in the forum. And it was even at that time before the whole em-dash stuff, it was very clear that they were cheating. So that wasn’t the best experience of it to begin with. But nonetheless, I used it a lot, back and forth as many of you I’m sure did, and started by sort of drafting content with it, thinking that was the best way to do it.

And newsletters – I very quickly pulled back from using it for my newsletters, actually. I saw it with my accountant at the time, who I don’t use anymore, who was pumping out newsletters that were clearly written by ChatGPT and I started to lose faith in it, to be honest. So I stopped doing that.

Building a custom GPT solopreneur scorecard

And what I did, relatively recently, sort of towards the end of last year, was with the help of an amazing AI expert who’s in my community – developed a custom GPT to be my solopreneur scorecard, as I called it. So it had been a PDF. I had made it interactive in the sense that you could answer it. It was a fillable PDF, right? So you could do it online, which was pretty advanced, I thought. But I turned that into a custom GPT. So it was a conversational AI tool that could ask questions, respond to answers and give personalised feedback. And I was so proud of that and it really felt like a genuine leap forward. And it was at the time.

But over the course of last year, I started noticing the limitations of ChatGPT as a whole. It wasn’t always reliable in the way I needed it to be. The responses weren’t as nuanced or as consistent. You know, you have these really long chats and it forgot what you’d said before. It was very much saying what I wanted to hear. And more broadly, I did start questioning whether ChatGPT was actually the best tool for what I was trying to do, or whether I’d just jumped on it because it was the one that everyone was talking about.

Why I switched from ChatGPT to Claude

I also started thinking more seriously about the ethical dimension. Questions like who owns the data, how is it being used, what are the values of the company behind the tool – and these aren’t abstract questions, they really connect directly to what I stand for in my work, as I’m sure they do for you too. So when I looked at that honestly, I wasn’t entirely comfortable with where I’d landed. So without going into too much detail of the politics here – do, if you’re not aware of it, check out the funding and political connections of OpenAI.

So this year, I made the switch to Claude. I had been using it, but I’m now paying for Claude, which is I guess the key switch. And I want to be clear, this is not a sponsored mention, this is a genuine reflection. I use Claude now as my primary AI tool, because I think Anthropic’s approach to AI safety and ethics is meaningfully different. They’re not perfect, no company is, but the values feel more aligned with me. And the thinking about how AI should be developed, the transparency about what they’re trying to do – that really matters to me. And to be honest, I find it is way better on so many levels.

I also use Perplexity for research. It’s really good at finding current information quickly, without the hallucination problem you get with some other tools that make stuff up. And I use other tools for specific tasks.

So the point is, the tool matters. And it’s worth being thoughtful about which one you’re using and why.

Rebuilding my AI tools for clients and leads

Once I’d made the switch to Claude, the biggest concern I had was all these custom GPTs I’d built. So I’d built the diagnostic, the scorecard, I’d built a podcast assistant that was giving me all my show notes and transcripts and everything. And I’d built another GPT actually that I’ve not rebuilt, which was a kind of matchmaker that would point you in the direction of a curated list of episodes of the Reimagining Success podcast for the particular topic that you had.

But the amazing thing that happened was that the one thing I was most concerned about – my scorecard interactive GPT – thanks to my conversation with Claude, is now embedded directly in the membership portal. So I have two versions. I have one for my members, which is slightly different, and one that’s free and outward-facing. You can go to onestepoutside.com/diagnostic to see what I’m talking about. You do need to opt in, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. But basically, it’s properly branded, I like to think it’s genuinely useful, and of course I’m going to keep evolving it.

Rather than that being a custom GPT that people had to access through a separate platform, it’s now integrated for clients in the member dashboard. And for you, if you’re not a client, you can still access it just on the page on that one link.

In parallel, I’ve developed a quarterly review tool that follows the same logic for my clients. And I have developed the podcast assistant, which I still use – it literally gives me everything I need for Libsyn, which is where I host my podcast, the website, for my email, LinkedIn, and so on. So it’s just been amazing. It was much quicker than I thought it would be.

The quarterly review tool and the diagnostic are both AI-powered, they give personalised responses. And I’m genuinely proud of them rather than just being some free lead magnet I threw together, or something I did just because the technology was new and exciting. It genuinely is a step change in terms of how it works.

AI as a thinking partner for solopreneurs

But the use of AI that’s changed my day to day most isn’t these tools I’ve built for clients and for leads. It’s the thinking partner piece. As a solopreneur – and I don’t need to tell you this – you do not have colleagues to think out loud with. You don’t have a team to sanity check ideas with. You’re making decisions largely alone, which is both the freedom and the challenge of working independently. And that’s what AI has given me.

Claude specifically is a daily outlet for that stream of consciousness. And at the moment, I’m using it with Whisperflow as well, which is a better way of capturing my dictated voice. Hopefully Claude and other tools become better at using the voice chat as well – but for now, that’s a hack worth looking into.

The half-formed idea I need to work through, the strategic question I’m going in circles on, the decision I keep putting off because I can’t quite see it clearly – I use it the way I’d use a smart colleague. Not to give me the answer, but to push my thinking, ask me the questions I haven’t asked myself, and to help me see what I’m missing.

What AI cannot replace

And I want to be clear about what it isn’t, because this matters. Of course, it doesn’t replace human connection. It doesn’t replace the value of being in a live mastermind – which I have literally after I stop talking to you right now – with real people who know your business and genuinely care how it goes. It obviously doesn’t replace a coach or a mentor who brings their own experience and judgment to the conversation. Those things are irreplaceable and I never suggest otherwise.

But your coach, your mentor, your mastermind do not want you messaging them every two minutes when you have a bit of an existential crisis. They’re not going to help you with the day to day operations. So as a daily thinking outlet, as a way of not having to carry every half-formed thought entirely alone, honestly, it’s a complete godsend.

I also use it almost as a replacement for my to-do list at the moment, because I’m checking in at the end of the week, closing out, capturing next steps, and then starting a new week on Monday and beginning again. I’ve created a project for my fitness and nutrition goals as well, so I’m using it personally too. It really helps with my weekly grocery shop.

Why AI-generated content is a trap

But the trap I see most often is using AI to produce content and scale. And I totally understand the appeal and I fell for it, as I said at the beginning. It’s fast, it’s cheap, the output looks polished enough. But the problem is, as we know, it sounds like everyone else because it’s trained on everyone else’s content. So the AI-generated LinkedIn post, the AI-generated newsletter, the AI-generated thought leadership piece – they all have a kind of texture that people are getting increasingly good at recognising. Not always consciously, but there’s a reason some content makes you stop and some slides past you without leaving any trace.

And the worst thing, I think, is the comments. So if a post on LinkedIn is written by AI and then someone’s writing a comment written by AI too, it just becomes this ridiculous world where AI is speaking to AI. Your genuine thinking, your actual experience, your real perspective – that’s what can’t be replicated. So AI can help you express it more clearly, structure it better, push it further, but it cannot generate it for you. And the moment you outsource your voice to AI, you’ve given away the very thing that makes you worth following, worth hiring and worth listening to.

And I’ll also say this – I think there’s something important about bringing your values to how you use AI. Being thoughtful about which tools you use and why. Being honest with your audience about when and how AI is involved in what you create. Not pretending the work is entirely yours when it isn’t. But also bringing your values into the stuff that AI is helping you create, to make sure it’s not just generic content that anybody could have got from a marketing template or a Wikipedia article. This really matters ethically, but also practically, because your audience can feel the difference between something that’s genuinely yours and thinking that’s been outsourced.

What intentional AI use looks like in practice

So what does intentional AI use actually look like? Here’s how I think about it. Use it generously for thinking and sense-checking – this is where it adds the most value in my experience, and where the risk of inauthenticity is lowest. Talking through a strategic problem, starting with your own point of view – don’t go in completely blank or you’ll get too sucked into what the AI is telling you. But you can explore a decision from multiple angles, ask it to push back on your assumptions. All of this is, in my view, excellent use of the tool.

Use it carefully for drafting and structuring – so you can get something on the page faster, it can help you organise your thinking, give you a starting point. But anything that goes out under your name should be written until it sounds like you. If you read it back and it doesn’t sound like something you’d say, then rewrite it.

Use it thoughtfully for research. As I said, Perplexity in particular is really excellent for this. But verify anything that matters – AI hallucinations are real, and the last thing you want to do is cite a statistic or a study that doesn’t exist.

And above all, don’t use it to replace your voice, your relationships, or your genuine thinking. These are your competitive advantage. The more AI proliferates, the more valuable genuine human thinking, genuine human connection, and genuine human perspective become. So don’t give yours away.

Where to start with AI as a solopreneur

And in fact, next week’s episode is going to be about exactly this. If you haven’t started yet, I’d love to hear from you – let me know where you are in this journey. And just begin somewhere small. One task you do regularly that feels tedious – try doing it with AI assistance and see what happens. You do not need a whole strategy at this point, but you do need one experiment. And already with that, you’re going to be way ahead of the game compared to most people who haven’t quite caught on yet.

So it really is worth being intentional, slowing down a little bit to speed up – as I always say – in how we’re going to use it in a way that sits with us, that feels authentic, but also helps us work more efficiently and build a stronger business, especially as a solopreneur without the teams and budgets that bigger businesses have.

My solopreneur diagnostic is actually a good example of AI used the way I’ve been describing. It’s a tool that helps you think – clearly it’s not a replacement for thinking. It’s AI-powered, it takes about 10 minutes and gives you something genuinely specific to work with. And it’s free. You can head on over to onestepoutside.com/diagnostic.