Most AI content is made for tech people. I get it — tech people are early adopters, they’re online, they engage. But some of the best conversations I have are with business owners who aren’t in tech, who are busy running actual businesses, and who want to know: what should I actually use?
This is the stack I’d build if I were starting a small business today.
The Constraint: Real Life
You don’t have time to learn 15 new tools. You have a business to run. So the criteria I used:
- Free tier or cheap enough to expense without thinking about it
- Works without technical setup
- Solves a real, recurring problem
- Not going to become a second job to use
The Stack
For Writing Anything: Claude
Customer emails, social posts, product descriptions, proposal letters, FAQs for your website — Claude handles all of it. The key is learning to write good prompts, which isn’t as hard as people think.
My go-to prompt structure: “I need to write a [type of thing] for [who will read it]. My goal is [what I want them to do or feel]. Here’s the context: [paste your notes]. Write a draft in a [friendly/professional/direct] tone.”
That’s it. Works 80% of the time.
Cost: Free tier is genuinely useful. Pro is $20/month if you hit limits.
For Research and Fact-Checking: Perplexity
Before you make a big decision — hiring, buying equipment, entering a new market — you need information. Perplexity gives you current, cited information faster than any search engine. It’s not Wikipedia, it’s a research assistant.
Best use case: “What are the main ways businesses like [your type of business] are using AI right now? What’s working, what’s not?” You’ll get a real, sourced answer in 30 seconds.
Cost: Free tier for most use cases. Pro is $20/month for unlimited searches.
For Customer Responses: A Custom GPT or Claude Project
If you get a lot of the same questions — pricing, hours, how your service works, what to expect — you can create a simple AI that answers those questions in your voice. This takes about an hour to set up and can save you hours every week.
Not a replacement for real customer relationships. A tool for handling the routine stuff so you can focus on the non-routine stuff.
For Social Media Content: Buffer + AI Writing
I’m not going to pretend AI writes great social media posts on its own — it doesn’t, at least not without significant guidance. But the combo of writing your ideas down (even rough), running them through Claude to clean up and expand, then scheduling through Buffer? That’s a workflow that works.
The key insight: AI is better at editing and improving your ideas than generating them from nothing. Use it as a writing partner, not a writer.
For Meetings and Notes: Otter.ai or Fathom
If you do any amount of video calls, you need one of these. They record, transcribe, and summarize your meetings. You stop the call, you have notes. That’s it.
The time saved over a month of meetings is not small.
Cost: Both have free tiers. Fathom is free for personal use, which is remarkable.
What I’d Skip for Now
- AI image generators — cool, not essential for most small businesses
- AI website builders — if you already have a website that works, don’t rebuild it just because AI is involved
- Complex automation tools — n8n, Zapier AI, etc. are powerful but require setup time; build the basics first
The Honest Bottom Line
You could spend $50/month on the tools above and realistically save 5-10 hours per week. That’s not an aggressive estimate — that’s what I hear from business owners who’ve actually done it.
The ones who see results aren’t the ones who download the most tools. They’re the ones who pick two or three and actually learn them.
Start there.
— Deco