How seven Australian small businesses are scaling up with the help of ChatGPT

From writing their own product descriptions to packing up their customers’ orders themselves and social media management, it’s safe to say that small and medium business owners wear many hats. Add a family, chores and the comings and goings of everyday life into the mix and you have hectic daily schedules combined with running a business.

Many business owners on a budget or who need more hours in a day have been utilising ChatGPT as a tool to help them write everything from website content to job descriptions — saving them time, money and helping them to tackle writer’s block, enabling them to focus on other areas of their businesses.

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot launched in November 2022, can help users to write essays, write and debug computer programs, provide code examples, summarise research, translate text, write songs, and even brainstorm ideas.

The hype surrounding ChatGPT has been controversial, with concerns that the program could help students cheat by writing essays for them, that some of the answers it gives aren’t correct and that it can’t comprehend human language.

However, for some business owners, ChatGPT is a game changer and a tool to help them with writing or even Excel formulas. SmartCompany sat down with seven businesses to chat about how they are using ChatGPT to grow their business.

Tribe Skincare

Tribe Skincare founder Kayla Houlihan has been able to use ChatGPT to improve her skincare brand’s copy in multiple areas. 

Houlihan said the program has assisted the brand with updating product descriptions for the website and it even came in handy for re-writing sections of its Brand Bible such as mission and vision statements.

“The most recent time I used Chat GPT was to help me write a PR/media pitch,” she said.

“These pitches usually take me about one hour to write and revise. With ChatGPT, I completed the process in about 15 minutes with the program only taking about one minute to generate the pitch, and then I spent the rest of the time editing and refining it.”

Tribe skincare founder Kayla houlihan. Source: supplied.

“At times, we have employed PR agencies or copywriters to create pitches for us, so it is saving us both time and money.”

Houlihan says she started using the program around a month ago and already it is saving her a few hours in her week currently.

“It even helped me create a job description for a position in the business. These usually take me hours to create, but ChatGPT described the role and responsibilities quite accurately in just 60 seconds,” she said.

“The biggest benefit to the business has been the time-saving. The program has limitations and everything needs to be checked, but it is also surprisingly good and great for when you have writer’s block.

“I think all small and medium businesses should be utilising this tool daily.”

Cartel Flowers

When Cartel Flowers co-founder and managing director Amanda Kereama was asked about her experience and recent uses of ChatGPT, she naturally asked Chat GPT to help draft her answers.

Kereama primarily uses ChatGPT for generating text for various purposes, including content creation, email drafting, and social media management. 

“It has been a time-saving tool for me as I can quickly generate high-quality text without spending too much time brainstorming ideas and structuring sentences,” she tells SmartCompany.

“As a business owner with to-do lists that grow longer faster than I can cross things off it, I now consistently use ChatGPT as a starting point when drafting many types of copy such as replies to non-regular emails, supplier and pricing negotiations, Instagram posts and giveaway captions, website copy, product description updates, pitch decks and proposals and even legal documents where I need to outline particular facts, context, and timelines in a professional manner.”

Kereama says one of the recent practical examples where she used ChatGPT was to draft a proposal or pitch deck for a potential recurring B2B client. 

Amanda Kereama from Cartel Flowers. Source: supplied.

“The tool helped me generate professional copy that I could quickly edit and include within the proposal. It also included points that I wouldn’t have thought to include or mention which not only significantly increased the overall output of my proposal but it also saved me a couple of hours of brainstorming and drafting time, allowing me to very easily edit, add to and finalise the proposal, also avoiding the need to pay someone to do this for me,” she explains.

Kereama said since she started using ChatGPT, it has saved her several hours and money in outsourcing content creation tasks. 

“In terms of business benefits, ChatGPT has now become instrumental in quickly and easily creating content and copy for things I have been putting off doing due to the time and creative brain power thinking it requires,” she said.

Kereama said ChatGPT is something business owners now use almost daily to cross off all the things on to-do lists.

“First and foremost as a starting point for any copy that we avoid writing due to the time/creative brain powers it takes. I can easily tweak something to be perfect and reflect our tone of voice, but I often dread and put off starting these tasks, so using ChatGPT as a starting point is one of, if not the biggest, game changers we’ve seen in eight years of business.”

Girls Get Off

Co-founder Viv Conway of Girls Get Off has been using ChatGPT for so many different tasks. From writing formal letters to asking what formula she should be using in excel, and for bits of copy needed for pitch decks and bios. 

“Even if the tone of voice isn’t perfect, it produces something that’s easy for me to tweak,” she says. 

Recently, Conway used ChatGPT to write a formal letter and the excel formula, which gave her a formula she hadn’t even known about that meant she could get live currency conversion updates from AUD to NZD. 

“We track our time, so I can tell you that it took me 10 minutes from the time I opened ChatGPT, to tweaks, sign, and send off. It would have easily taken me half an hour, and maybe a few attempts if I’d had to write it from scratch. The time saving is wild,” she says.

Viv Conway from Girls Get Off. Source: supplied

Conway started using ChatGPT at the end of last year.

“It would easily have saved me 15 hours of time I would have spent trying to find answers on my own, writing various bits of content, or liaising with copywriters,” she explains.

“The biggest benefits have been productivity related. Some of the content that I’ve used ChatGPT for will be used for wholesaler pitch decks and will in turn lead to an increase in sales for us.” 

“Small and medium businesses are usually trying to juggle multiple balls in the air at once, and I think this helps people with tasks like writing content or finding solutions to problems that might otherwise be a huge time-suck to the business.

“It saves time and it doesn’t require you to use your brain as much as you would have to if you were creating content or trying to find answers yourself.”

PublicSquare

Brisbane-based technology company PublicSquare CEO Dean Arnold also uses ChatGPT for daily business tasks. 

Dean Arnold from PublicSquare. Source: Supplied

“I use ChatGPT for pretty much everything from software development, Excel modelling, and copywriting, and even to assist with pesky writer’s block,” he says.

“People often call me to discuss ChatGPT, at which point I tell them I am using the program as they have called.”

Zoom2u Technologies

Zoom2u CEO and founder Steve Orenstein said ChatGPT has become useful for the company, mainly for content creation ideas. 

“If I could click my fingers and streamline one thing these days, it would be content production,” he said.

“Producing social media content to the quality and pace that is required to remain relevant these days can be time-consuming. We’re currently posting multiple times a week on YouTube, so we sometimes need a little inspo for topics.

“ChatGPT can help in this instance by supplying a list of topics that entrepreneurs might be interested in listening to, or what topics are trending in the business, tech, and leadership spaces.”

Orenstein said ChatGPT can also be useful when doing research in an area you know little about. 

“More recently I have used ChatGPT to sense-check a couple of emails, and I daresay its capabilities will continue to reveal themselves as we use it more.”

Zoom2u CEO and founder Steve Orenstein. Source: supplied.

Pure Public Relations

Pure Public Relations managing director and founder Phoebe Netto said some of their most recent new business inquiries have come from people finding them using ChatGPT to find them as a business.

“It can give you some measure of insight into what people are saying, thinking, and questioning, along with the tone and language they use for specific topics. It can give you some initial insights into subject matter and tone,” she said.

“It can be useful to some extent for research, but don’t expect it to be accurate. There are some recent high-profile examples of where it can go very, very wrong.”

Netto said ChatGPT is going to make bad writers far more replaceable. 

“Content writers who create low-value, poorly written content for marketing, SEO, and website filler are going to find their work diminished in value even more,” she said.

“On the other hand, it will make good writers even better operators, because it helps them introduce efficiency. We have been starting to test it out to summarise information, find key themes in information, synthesise information quickly, and reorganise information into an initial draft presentation or sections with headings.”

Pure Public Relations founder Phoebe Netto. Source: supplied.

Reebelo

Reebelo Head of Marketing (ANZ) Mariana Raltcheva said for a high-growth start-up, it’s essential to stay updated with new technology that impacts how companies operate and has so much debate around it. 

“We have tested ChatGPT to see how it might change the copyrighting world, especially as it relates to SEO, which requires a lot of output from the team. We’ve also had some fun with the creative aspects, such as “Explain what Reebelo is as if you were an alien and add a touch of humour,” she said. 

Mariana Raltcheva from Reebelo. Source: supplied

“We’re also interested to see how this might impact customer service solutions in the future, but with this being such a crucial element to the business, simply handing this over to an AI that is still in BETA is not something we’d consider. We’ll stick to experimenting in fun ways with ChatGPT before making a full-time commitment.

“We are still very early on with this technology, and while it has demonstrated potential for creating efficiencies; its entry-level should be taken seriously. This being said, we’re predicting that it’s here to stay!”