Individual entrepreneurs and small teams make up 80% of all businesses worldwide. Each of them wants to survive and earn money, for which they need a plan of specific actions. Previously, they had to attend business courses for this purpose. But now, they can simply use an AI platform like this one. This small example opens up great prospects in a multitude of areas!
Project essence
Founded only this year, today’s startup has yet to release its service but has already raised £300,000 (approximately $380,000 USD) in investments.
ProperPlan believes that “a big dream deserves a good plan to achieve it.” The goal of the startup is “to bridge the gap from ambitions to concrete actions.”
The target audience of the startup includes individual entrepreneurs and small businesses, which make up no less than 80% of all businesses in the world.
At the core of the platform is an AI machine trained on the knowledge of “the best business experts.” This machine needs to be fed your goal and the resources you possess, and then it will instantly create a plan that allows you to achieve your goal with the resources available at the start. This means that each plan will be strictly individual – tailored to the specific situation of the entrepreneur.
As an additional resource, the startup promises that the platform will also feature “virtual coaching.” This could mean either an AI assistant to ask business-related questions or a catalog of educational materials – or perhaps both.
ProperPlan is not just a tool for creating action plans. It will be a full-fledged project management platform – where not only the scheduled project execution timeline (goal achievement) will be stored, but where completed steps and achieved results will need to be marked. Undoubtedly, the AI machine will likely be able to suggest plan adjustments if it sees something going wrong.
The main difference between ProperPlan and other project management systems is that the user will not need to create the project execution plan – the platform will do it for them. The user will only need to execute this plan 😉
What’s interesting
At first glance, the idea of ProperPlan seems fantastical. However, on the other hand, there are books and courses that teach budding entrepreneurs the general principles of creating and developing a business. There are articles and blogs that give entrepreneurs advice on solving various specific business problems and tasks. There are business trainers and consultants who promise to help entrepreneurs develop individual plans suitable for their specific cases.
Yet, every entrepreneur probably thinks that their business, their tasks, and their problems are unique 😉 Which, of course, is usually not the case – especially when it comes to small businesses, which ProperPlan specifically targets.
Therefore, the same business trainers and consultants use the same general business principles, adapting them to one of the typical situations – applying again some general methods of adaptation. And if it’s a typical, albeit multi-variant task – then a modern AI can quite cope with it.
At this moment, the example of a startup from a completely different area comes to mind – AutogenAI, which I wrote about a week ago. This startup created a platform where AI can be used to create compelling tender applications, commercial offers, and even startup presentations. It has already raised $65.3 million.
The catch is that the founder of AutogenAI is someone who spent a long time writing tender applications and learned to do it well. He then spent several years consulting and teaching, passing on his accumulated experience in creating compelling tender applications and commercial offers to others.
But after the recent breakthrough in AI, he decided to pass on his experience to AI – creating a platform with an AI machine trained on his principles. And now, he doesn’t need to train or consult anyone – this AI machine itself advises people what and how to write to make it maximally convincing.
However, he has already killed or will soon kill the business of many experts who are still engaged in manual training and consulting on the topic of creating effective tender applications and commercial offers 😉
As I once said, any effective training course should eventually turn into a service. Because if a course teaches a certain algorithm of successful actions – then this algorithm can be programmed and a service based on it can be created, helping to achieve the desired result without “unnecessary” training.
However, such an algorithm could have been very complex, multi-variant, and require a certain level of intelligence to choose possible action options. Therefore, many training courses could not turn into services.
But now this “certain level of intelligence” can be provided by AI. This means that the transformation of training courses into services I promised should now take an explosive character.
By the way, ProperPlan is not the only startup that decided to use AI to create plans for achieving business goals.
In October, I wrote about a startup called Ignition, which created a platform to help bring new products to market – raising $8 million in its first round of investment.
Their motto is “Create what sells. Sell what you create.” Under this motto, they created an AI machine that helps solve three tasks:
market and competitor analysis, plan for creating a minimum viable product, marketing plan to bring the resulting product to market. In the summer, I also wrote about a platform called Gobi, which was going to create an AI machine to help create a plan for developing a ready-made product based on a general idea and connect the idea author with developers. However, this startup has now pivoted, deciding instead to create AI friends 😉
Where to run
The founder of today’s ProperPlan writes in her blog that individual entrepreneurs and small teams make up 80% of all businesses in the world.
In fact, she understates. Even in the U.S., small businesses represent 99.9% of all companies. Well, yes, it depends on what is considered a “small” business. But there are tons of them anyway – and each of them wants to survive and earn money.
And for that, they need a plan 😉 Which many of them cannot create themselves – so they go to business courses, watch videos with business experts, and read business blogs. In essence – this is the potential target market of ProperPlan, which wants to replace or supplement business education for small entrepreneurs with its AI platform.
Thus, the market exists, it’s big, and the competitors are clear. Moreover, the main competitors are not direct, but indirect. Not those who make similar platforms – but those who are engaged in business education of budding entrepreneurs and small businesses.
So the first direction of concrete movement is to create an analogue of ProperPlan. Targeting, first of all, to lure customers away from business courses and business trainers.
But from this follows the second, more general direction – creating AI platforms that replace training in other popular areas.
To do this, you need to analyze what topics are currently popular courses, whether there are large data sets on the general principles on which these courses are based – and create a specific AI machine trained on these data, optimized for the requests and questions of students of such courses.
Which business of training courses on what topic would you like to kill with such an AI machine? 😉
About the company
ProperPlan
Website: properplan.com
Last round: £300K, 06.12.2023
Total investments: £300K, rounds: 1