How Gen AI Unlocks Growth from the Ground Up

Following your passions is considered a terrible way to start a business. You can be passionate about something and terrible at it. this is true for most sports fans, for example - they are passionate, but incapable of making money from the thing they love the most.

Scott Galloway’s advice on the matter is pretty clear.

"Your job is to find something you’re good at and then spend the thousands of hours and apply the grit and the perseverance and the willingness to break through hard things to become great at it - because once you are great at something… the self -worth of being great will make you passionate about whatever it is.’"

On the surface, this makes a lot of sense. Find something you are good at, persevere, make money from it, and as a result you become deeply passionate about it – because the money & success makes it feel good. The example he uses is a white collar worker working in a corporate environment – and in that environment it works: become great at tax law, make money (because the corporate environment is set up to turn tax law expertise into fees), fall in love with tax law.

There are millions of people out there who have followed his advice to the letter, but hit a mountainous roadblock because the thing they're good at isn't as obviously monetizable. They’ve found something they are good at, put in the time, spent thousands of hours grafting at something until they have become truly great at it – but then they go to monetize it, and realise that to build their business around that passion, they now need a vast array of new skills that are beyond them.

Take one of our earliest NOAN users – Matt Scorringe. Matt is a world-class surf coach, has spent thousands of hours in the water surfing at the highest level and thousands of hours refining his coaching skills to Olympic level. But in the digital age, and with a shift to subscriptions as a business model, he’s expected to also be a brand strategist, membership manager, copy writer, website builder, newsletter editor, partnership strategist, social media manager. Not his core skill set. Not his passion.

If you just look at the health and wellness category alone it’s full of people like this – experts in their field who struggle with business growth stunted by not being experts in categories other people have spent thousands of hours perfecting. They’ve got their business up and running, but they now don’t have the time available or even perhaps the skillset to learn those other areas.

They are set up to fail.

As highlighted by investor James Wise in his book Start-Up-Century new business applications have soared over the past few years. The barriers to starting a company are the lowest they’ve ever been. Off-the-shelf technology is now available for anyone to create a full tech stack. For instance, a small business owner can in minutes access payment processing, website-building tools, membership paywalls, and CRM management platforms and, in theory, connect them all to make a business. These platforms are ideal if you know what you need to build, how to position your business, create your value props, structure your pricing, how to tier your membership, or know what to send your users. But most don’t. How could they? It’s not their expertise. It's not their passion.

Knowledge is the missing link.

There are millions of businesses out there that could be supercharged if that roadblock could be lifted for them – that’s why we founded NOAN. We want to democratize access to the right business-building knowledge and strategies to free those people who are great at what they do, without having to also learn how to be great at every other aspect of business. AI provides us the ability to deliver that knowledge at the right time, helping them get to market faster, grow more quickly and make them more productive.

When implemented by global companies, top-down AI will inevitably take thousands of jobs, but when put in the hands of SMEs from the bottom up AI will drive economic growth by enabling them to do things that were previously impossible or too costly.

By putting these capabilities in the hands of those who could never access this kind of support previously we can have an incredible impact across society. Businesses in typically under supported sectors of society could be given the power to grow with AI, communities could be changed. No need for education on how to run a business, build and learn at the same time with the ultimate SMB support partner at your finger tips.

Take, for example, a farmer who has created the perfect environment for growing organic food, bringing visitors into their farm to stay, the works. But they have no idea about how to go to market digitally. What if you can make that part of the journey mind-blowingly easy, so they can focus on the part they're really experts at? Here's how we do that:

We’re seeing AI integrated into every product in the market right now, it’s changing the way we live and work. But we believe that AI-powered products are only as useful as the underlying knowledge and strategy of the business using them. You could use a tool to build a webpage or deck in seconds, but it needs to be drawing on the right information about your company. The usefulness of AI will depend on its ability to access the right knowledge at the right time. NOAN’s workflows enable businesses to build a connected singular strategy that can then be leveraged seamlessly. At every step they can collaborate with AI assistants that actually know and understand their business, known what they are working on right now - and have access to the world's knowledge. For an SME this solves a vital piece of the puzzle that has been missing.

A recent study of 5,000 UK SMEs found that ‘if the UK managed to boost tech adoption among its SME community, the contribution it makes to the national economy could be doubled to £448bn’. That’s just in the UK, globally the impact would be substantial. When implemented by global companies, top-down AI will inevitably take thousands of jobs, but when put in the hands of SMEs from the bottom up AI will drive economic growth by enabling them to do things that were previously impossible or too costly.

We want to give that power to those people.

If you’re interested in using AI to power the global growth of SMEs get in touch at hello@getnoan.com