How We Use AI in Our Business

We hope you enjoyed the guide for teens — “Find Your First Business Idea” — that we shared in our previous newsletter.

But here’s something you didn’t see: on the last page, we suggested that if you were still unsure about your idea, you could try using AI.
And then we hesitated. Should we leave it in? Should we take it out?

In that section, we explained how you could take what you’d written in the guide — what you like doing, what people say you’re good at, and what you see a need for — and turn it into a short prompt for ChatGPT.
The goal was to help spark new business ideas and show that AI works best when you start with thoughtful input of your own.

But we started wondering if it really fit.
Was it a good idea to bring AI into a guide made for (pre)teens?
Would parents even want their kids to use it?
In the end, we decided to remove that page — and save the conversation for a newsletter.

That questioning made us think about our own use of AI — how we rely on it, what we avoid, and what we’re still learning as teen entrepreneurs.

Why we decided to use AI

AI helps us do things faster and better, and go further than we could without it — so we can focus on what matters most to us: developing new ideas, improving our products, and connecting with our audience — the parts that truly make our work meaningful.
And, especially at our age, it allows us to create something real and polished now, without having to wait years to “be ready.”

So for us, the question isn’t if we should use AI in our business but when and how to use it.

Still, we’ve really been thinking about that question: If we use AI at a young age, will we still learn how to think, plan, and write?
We think yes — actually, maybe more than before.

When we don’t let AI step in

Before we tell you how we use AI in our business, we want to be clear about when we don’t use it.
Let’s take our newsletter as an example. (Because the truth is, we wouldn’t even be writing a weekly newsletter, and doing many other things, if we weren’t using AI.)

✖️ We don’t ask AI to find topics for what we’ll write.
For example: “Give us newsletter ideas with tips for young entrepreneurs.”
If we did that, we’d just get very general — and honestly, boring — information that anyone could find by asking AI the same question.

✖️ We also don’t ask AI to plan our newsletter once we come up with a topic.
For instance: “Write about how to talk to customers at your first market.”
Again, the answers would be generic and not necessarily relevant to our audience.

Using AI that way would leave no space for original or creative content — and that’s exactly what we’re trying to develop.

More generally, we don’t want to use anything AI creates before we’ve done as much thinking, planning, and writing as we can on our own — and that’s to preserve our personal ideas and thoughts.

How we actually work with AI

As we just said, nothing’s easier than finding information today: ask Google, ask ChatGPT, and you’ll get it.
What goes beyond that is sharing your own experiences. That’s what sets you apart from AI.
You can’t really compete with the information — that part’s done.
But you can — and should — share your personal stories and ideas so people can relate and connect with you and your business in a real, authentic way.

Before ever asking for help, we explained to AI who we are — our ages, our energy, our way of speaking — we even shared some of our values. And we added: “Edit as little as possible. Just help us sound our best while keeping our voice.”

For every newsletter, we do the thinking, planning, and — most importantly — the writing of our stories ourselves before using AI.
After AI makes edits, we go back and make many more changes so our ideas stay fully ours and the words and message match who we really are.

Other helpful ways we use it

Beyond writing, we also use AI in other important parts of our business —
creating captions and hashtags for social media, writing product descriptions for our website, or asking technical questions like “How do we edit this or that on our website?”

The rule stays the same, though:
we do as much as we can before asking AI for help — and we always double-check what it tells us.

Because we’ve also learned that AI doesn’t know everything (and that’s a bit reassuring actually).
Sometimes it gives answers that sound right but aren’t — especially when it comes to technical things.
More than once, it’s led us in the wrong direction while we were trying to fix something on our website!
Because of that (and because we’re still learning the tech side), we’ve worked with a web designer to help us when things get too complicated.

Learning to play it our way

We will continue using AI as a tool — or rather, as designer Frank Chimero says, like an instrument.
A tool just executes, but an instrument requires practice — you have to play it.
The sound it makes depends on how you use it: your touch, your choices, your creativity.

We’re learning to play it — to make it sound like us, to help us grow, and to create more of what we love doing.

So, back to our guide: maybe one day, we’ll add that last page back in. For now, this reflection felt like the right place to start.

What about you — how do you see yourself using AI (or not) in what you do?

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🤝 Before You Go

📅 We’re back in Pacheco this Saturday at the Kids Community Market — November 1st, 10 AM – 1 PM 👉 See details on our Events page

💌 New here? You can still catch up — read our previous newsletters here.

Solène & Zélia, for SoliaVenture

P.S. We recently came across a young entrepreneur who started a cleaning business after asking ChatGPT for ideas — and it worked! He’s now growing it every day. You can watch his start on Instagram here.