Almost Timely News: 🗞️ How Small Businesses Can Grow With AI (2025-06-08)

Watch me set up a small business with just 1 AI tool

Jun 08, 2025

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What's On My Mind: How Small Businesses Can Grow With AI

I strongly recommend you watch the video version of this week's newsletter to see how each of the parts are brought to life.

We talk a lot about the transformative power of AI. There's a tremendous amount of navel gazing in places like LinkedIn, a ton of theory and speculation about the power of AI. What there isn't as much of is applied AI.

Suppose we left theory behind and said, "Let's USE AI to radically transform a business, to help it punch far beyond its weight." What does that actually look like? How could it let the smallest of businesses punch well above their weight?

Today, we’re going to do a step by step walkthrough of not only the thought process, but the application of everything I can throw at a very small business to help it go and grow. I want to test myself, my own knowledge of business, marketing, and AI, and throw everything and the kitchen sink at the smallest of businesses to see what we can accomplish in a relatively short time.

I invite you to take this tour with me, and alter the techniques for yourself. Bear in mind, we'll be doing things that typically Trust Insights bills tens of thousands of dollars for in their full form, so I won't be sharing the super secret sauce, but what we do today will be good enough for any sole proprietor to get going with.

For ingredients, you'll need a paid generative AI tool like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, etc. that has Deep Research capabilities and a canvas for things like coding.

Part 1: The Business

Let’s start with the business itself. My friend Judy (who consented to be my crash test dummy) is an independent artist. She paints and sketches, and sells her work. A while ago, I bought her a domain name as a birthday gift, judybeltran.art, but we honestly haven’t done a ton with it since then. We both work a ton, and it's a common plight for businesses to simply not invest time to grow the business itself.

The first and most important thing we need is a sense of what her business needs and what it doesn’t need. She doesn’t need to be told how to make great art. She’s got that covered.

It’s… literally everything else. She has no real marketing. She’s has a half-finished Wordpress website and a domain name. She has the start of an email list but not much else.

She has no formal contracts or paperwork. She’s a sole proprietor, which comes with some legal risks, things that don’t shield her from liability. I’m not a lawyer, and I cannot give legal advice, but I can use AI to at least get her started in the general right direction until she can afford legal counsel.

Did I mention the part where she works two jobs to support her family?

Luckily, all these things are things we can point AI towards and do some good.

Part 2: Mise En Place

While I was visiting Arizona for the Marketing Analytics Summit, Judy and I had a chance to catch up. We hung out for half a day, and towards the end of our day, I sat her down with my iPhone and just had her ramble and ramble about art, about her points of view, about how she thinks about art, what she dreams, the works. The audio recording of us talking - mostly her talking and me interviewing her - is about an hour of raw data.

In that data is GOLD. I captured her voice, her tone, her points of view, and the things that make her unique among her peers. This is the most critical piece of data you can have - your human-originated data. Without it, generative AI has nothing to pattern-build off of uniquely, and will generate generic stuff. And we know as marketers, generic stuff tends not to sell.

So her voice, plus images of what she’s painted already, is more than enough to set the table for helping her market and grow her business.

Now, here’s the thing: I don’t know squat about art. I really don’t. I took an art appreciation class in college, mainly to fulfill a liberal arts requirement, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about what makes art good or not. The few pieces of art I have hanging in my house were chosen by my wife; the rest of the stuff on the walls was made by my kids.

In terms of marketing art, that’s a bit of a deficit. So we’re going to have to get smart about marketing art. How do people buy art? More important, how do people buy the kind of art she makes? AI can help with that, as can gathering up real people's opinions.

We also need to get smart about business setup for artists, particularly in the state of Arizona. I don’t know Arizona’s particular laws, and that would be good to know.

I know Wordpress reasonably well. I don’t know what specific plugins or addons would be great for an artist, though Judy doesn’t currently do any kind of eCommerce. Everything is commission-based, so we know we want to work with what she has. We should probably think through different ways for an artist like her to make money, too. Commissions are unreliable as a source of income for all but the best known artists.

And a critical thing is that… well, she’s a mom working two jobs. Whatever we come up with has to stand alone and has to be as simple and as fast as possible, ideally things she can do from her mobile phone so she doesn’t ever need to bust out a laptop. The last thing we need is for the infrastructure and the marketing to be another thing on her to do list.

If this sounds like requirements gathering, that’s exactly what all this is. We’re gathering the requirements of what we need to build and have ready so that we can be effective.

Part 3: Hit the Books

Our first stop has to be to do the research, to hit the books. I'll be using Google's Gemini Deep Research, but you can use any Deep Research tool you want - OpenAI o3, Perplexity, Grok, DeepSeek, Claude - doesn't matter as long as it produces high quality, well-cited data.

We’ll use the Trust Insights CASINO Deep Research Prompt Framework to gather up as much research as we can.

If you’re unfamiliar, the CASINO framework goes like this:

Context: What is the relevant background situation or problem?
Audience: Who is the research for? How technically savvy are they? What decisions will they make based on this?
Scope: What sources are allowed? What are prohibited? What timeframe are the sources? What geography are the sources?
Intent: Why is this research being done? What are the primary objectives or key questions to answer? What are the downstream uses of the research?
Narrator: What Role or style should the LLM adopt (e.g., Formal Analyst, Neutral Reporter, Creative Synthesizer)?
Outcome: What is the desired Output Format (report, slides, list)? Are there required sections, specific data points, or formatting guidelines?

The secret to Deep Research? Give your AI tool of choice the CASINO framework and have it ask you questions about the Deep Research topic until you're good to go. In a regular, non-Deep Research chat, prompt it with this.

Today we'll be building a prompt for Deep Research, instructions for generative AI to conduct deep research on my topic. I've attached the Trust Insights CASINO Deep Research framework. Our task today is {your task here}. Ask me one question at a time until you have a comperhensive understanding of the task and can fill out the CASINO Framework completely and produce a CASINO prompt for Deep Researcher.

Why do we do this? Because many Deep Research tools have significant limits, like the number of reports you can run per week or month. They're scarce. That means we want to take the time to nail the prompt, and thus preserve our scarce research credits.

We need to commission Deep Research reports about:

The bare minimum set of contracts and papers that a business like Judy’s should have, from model releases for the people she paints to commissions. I don’t know what else would be involved, so we need Deep Research on this
How artists can effectively market themselves these days - what channels, strategies, tactics, and techniques
- Digital and local - especially in her metro area
What Wordpress plugins would be complementary to her website - and free ones, at that
What other revenue streams an independent artist could be making besides commissions
Any kind of intellectual property protection she should pursue
Playbooks for sales and marketing for independent artists
An ideal customer profile and buyer persona for her art

It would also be helpful to get firsthand narratives and perspectives about how artists are marketing themselves and growing their businesses. This goes beyond synthetic, AI-powered deep research into real exploration. I’ll use Reddit forums for this, distilling out what I can find.

Each of the Deep Research reports will end up being 30-50 pages long. I’m not going to make Judy read them (though I’ll certainly make them available to her). Instead, this will be fodder for AI to consume and create materials from. If we prompted well, we'll have incredibly reliable content to work with.

Part 4: Basic Business Infrastructure

Now that we have all the Deep Research done, it’s time to start building. The first thing we’ll prompt into existence is the business model. Based on our Deep Research about artists and revenue streams, plus the kinds of work Judy is capable of producing, we’ll devise a basic business model and strategy with a minimum of two streams of income.

After that, we tackle the basic legal paperwork stuff. Again - and I’ve told Judy this as well - I am not a lawyer. I cannot give legal advice. Right now, Judy can’t afford a lawyer at 350 bucks an hour to do this for her, so we’ll get started with “good enough” paperwork until she sells enough art to afford a lawyer.

This syncs up with my warning from previous newsletters about not taking away paying work from humans. Helping Judy with this isn’t taking money out of anyone’s pocket because she wouldn’t spend it anyway.

We’ll generate:

Contracts for commissions
Liability stuff, releases, waivers, etc.
A chart of what to use and when

Once that's all set up, then we'll make sure her website is in good working order with things like Wordpress, Cloudflare, and Substack, as well as analytics - because of course, you need analytics to make good decisions about what's working and what's not.

That takes us through the basic business infrastructure. Could we do more? Sure. But the goal is for a single sole proprietor to have less on their list to do, not more.

Part 5: Basic Marketing Infrastructure

Once we've got the barebones of the business set up, it's time to start setting up the marketing. If we did our Deep Research well, we should have a bounty of business information available to us, like an ideal customer profile and buyer persona. That's super important - everything we do has to be couched in terms of what's likely to sell.

In fact, in our Deep Research prompt itself, we asked it for not one ideal customer profile, but up to 5 for both B2B and B2C. In the art world, you can sell individual art commissions, but you can also sell art to corporations at scale, for things like hotel rooms.

Once we've got the ICP, we need to understand who Judy is. We'll run an OCEAN personality analysis based on her writing, along with a distilled version of her writing style so that her website sounds like her. Without that, you'll just end up with AI slop, and that's no good.

After we've built the foundation pieces with Deep Research, we need to construct an overall game plan. Based on all the data, what shoudl her overall marketing plan be? We know we need good foundation assets like a website, but what else will we need?

For the website, we need to make pages for the B2C buyer to understand what's for sale and why they should hire Judy. And then we need a page on the website for the B2B buyer to understand how to hire Judy for the kind of art she makes and how to engage her for B2B projects.

After we've built those foundational copy pieces, we can put up some blog content just to give the casual browser a bit more to work with.

We might want to think about something a bit more interactive than a static website. We can prompt our AI, with a list of image files, to create a virtual gallery that viewers can walk through. We'll ensure it uses GA4 events so that we can see who's using the gallery, see if it attracts any kind of attention. We might even put some music to it.

Speaking of interactives, what would it look like if we made a B2B art buyer's guide, or something like that which she could put on her website to help guide art buyers' needs and whether she's the best choice for them or not? That sure would be helpful and something different - most artists just toss their art out there and say, "Here's the art, take it or leave it". But buyers, particularly corporate buyers, want to make sure they're buying business needs - reliability, contained costs, predictable timelines, and quality that matches their brands.

Judy's already got Instagram set up, so we just need an Instagram content strategy for her. We'll prompt that into existence using the ICP, using what we know about her, using her art examples, and develop an overall strategy and then a tactical work plan.

We want to repurpose her content as well; she does Instagram Lives. She also has Threads, so we'll want to build a strategy and content for that as well.

Part 6: Wrapping Up

Everything we did today is foundational stuff that AI can help us with to deploy a business or upgrade a business very quickly. None of this is out of reach as long as you think to ask good questions and have the patience to gather good answers. The only significant cost of what we did today was to use a paid generative AI tool, at 20 bucks a month. That's it. Nothing else to buy. The rest is elbow grease.

I hope it's inspired you to do the same thing for your own business, no matter the size, but I especially hope it's inspired the smallest of businesses to reach higher, to know that with AI, you can punch above your weight in ways that other businesses can't. Take the lessons from today and the questions I asked and apply them to your business.

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Christopher S. Penn