How 3 solo founders use AI to transform their content into business

• Solopreneurs use AI to help them create more successful content in less time.
• AI helps with cross-channel optimization, streamlining the execution process, and lead generation.
• This article is part of "The AI-Powered Solopreneur," a series exploring how solo business owners use AI to drive growth.

These days, content creation can feel like a full-time job. For solopreneurs running podcasts or active social channels alongside client work, maintaining a consistent presence can be hard to manage without any teammates.

"I would not be doing this level of content if I didn't have AI," said Katrina Purcell, Fractional COO and host of the Managed Chaos podcast. Purcell produces a weekly podcast and publishes related content across LinkedIn, Substack, and a blog on her website. AI tools like Riverside for transcripts and Gemini for content ideation and creation make it possible, she said.

Here are the specific ways Purcell and two other solopreneurs have integrated AI into their processes to make content creation more seamless.

AI helps optimize content across different platforms

"I've never really thought of myself as a content-generating creative person," Purcell told Business Insider.

Before generative AI, she struggled to identify which content from her podcast would perform well on different platforms and often took the "lazy route" and simply published the same copy everywhere.

Now, she's trained a custom Gem on Gemini to support her in creating content tailored to different platforms.

"I gave it the brand guidelines for the podcast, told it that it was adept at SEO, that it knew all the latest content trends, and then I asked it to start coming up with content based on the transcripts," she said. Prompts she uses include:

• What should the LinkedIn post be that's going to be popular this week?
• What should the Substack be?

She'll do some light tweaks and editing, but the AI does most of the heavy lifting.

Recently, she wrote a Substack post based on a podcast episode using this process, and a reader reached out to say how valuable the post was for them, and asked how long it took her. She had to admit it didn't take her long at all, thanks to AI.

Purcell added that she's continually training this Gem on new information about her goals and audience, and always "closes the content loop" by telling it how different posts performed.

AI speeds up the execution process

For Gigi Robinson, who's been a social media creator since college and now runs a consultancy called Hosts of Influence to help other creators with their brands, creativity was never the bottleneck — it was going from an idea to a finished post.

Rather than getting in her head about optimizing every aspect of a post, AI helps her get it done rather than focusing on perfection.

For instance, she's been able to create LinkedIn videos based on trending news stories quickly. She'll copy and paste parts of a trending article she likes into ChatGPT and ask it to generate specific talking points in her brand voice. From there, she can quickly ad-lib a video without needing to script something out herself. This approach helped her get over 100 million impressions on LinkedIn in just 90 days last year (confirmed from a tracking document viewed by Business Insider) and led to more inbound brand deals from LinkedIn.

Robinson has also found AI video editing tools like Adobe Premiere and OpusClip valuable for a first round of edits. She and her contract interns still make nitpicky tweaks, but it takes much less time than doing everything manually.

"Before, video editing could take hours. With these tools, getting a cut of the video finalized for posting is usually done in under an hour," Robinson said.

AI helps turn content into business

Esosa Edosomwan, the coach and nutrition specialist behind The Raw Girl and UMI, still prefers to keep her content creation process largely human-driven after experimenting with AI video and finding her audience doesn't respond to it.

Outside of small things like using Claude to optimize social captions or Nano Banana for video thumbnails, the biggest benefit of AI has been helping her turn social media followers into customers. When she had a piece of content go viral on Instagram early last year, the flood of DMs became impossible to keep up with.

For help, she turned to the AI tool Manychat. In addition to the automations that send lead magnets — free resources in exchange for contact info — when followers message call-to-action phrases like "workshop" or "hormones," she's trained the bot to respond to other messages with her brand and voice, keeping the conversation going.

"I have even had a couple times where friends thought it was me before realizing it was my chatbot," she said. "That has really helped with inbound leads."