What are micro-startups anyway?
 

How does generative AI play a crucial role in innovation and market penetration?
 

Why is this an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs to bring a disruptive product with an excellent experience to market quickly, without much code or money?
 

And most importantly, why is it the new weapon of choice?

 

Micro-startup is a term I coined for myself when I want to remind myself that what's important to me is not the company's valuation with an imaginary sense of ego but income.
 

In simple thought, I quantify many essential things for an entrepreneur who wants to penetrate the market:
 

1. The importance of a very, very specific niche - The more you can niche down, the more personalization becomes a powerful weapon in your market connection.
    

2. Ruthless focus on resources and control - The smaller you are, the more available resources are (especially in the current era), and most importantly, you're not dependent on investors to keep going. Meaning you're not reliant on external factors to continue creating the reality you envision. In my opinion, that's the essence of design.
    

3. You become all-around - You think you understand what you're selling until you meet the first person. When you're focused on a micro-startup, it means you're inevitably going to reach the sales stage within a few weeks (or even less), and it will kick you into a journey where you're: vulnerable, learn to live with rejection, leave your ego behind, and start giving real value aligned with your personality. This journey gives you all-around skills in marketing, sales, design, and development. It has a tremendous impact on you and your imagination. Personally, I think it's the greatest benefit you can gain from this journey.
    

4. Flexibility with the market leads to a much better fit - The leaner you are, the less committed you are to a board, and the more focused you are on the real thing: creating and bringing it to the market to get feedback. Your mental flexibility is higher because you're more liberated. When you know you can sell a product on a subscription model for, say, $8, with 10k subscribers, you reach a million dollars a year, which is quite a motivation.
    

5. All roads are open to you - Made a million dollars? Congratulations. It means you understand the market. You understand yourself. You understand your product. You're not shaken by rejections. You're confident in yourself, not in what others say about you—you've developed an understanding unique to how you interpret your niche. And that's, my friend, what I think investors want to invest in. All roads are open to you, with much better odds: Want investment? Your chances are much higher (and it's also fairer for you and them). Want to continue self-funding and live well? It's totally possible. Want to make a small exit? It's entirely possible because you're selling an asset, not a product that is you.
    

The term micro-startup goes much deeper than this, and I'll delve into it another time.
 

I wanted to give you a taste of how defining two words—Micro Startup—creates a strong focus on thoughts that can empower you and give you a sense of control.

 

Let's continue…

 

How does generative AI (like GPT) create an incredible opportunity for entrepreneurs adopting the micro-startup method?
 

Generative AI manifests in several dimensions that I'll briefly present here:

1. Front-end or, in other words, how the application looks - I'm not saying every app should now be like a bot, but AI in the form of a language model creates significant abstraction in both the app's design and the ability to deliver the design with high personalization by generating real-time queries (prompts) and bringing them directly to specific users.

2. Back-end or, in other words, how the application works - When using the reasoning capability of a language model, the ability to solve logical problems to make decisions by the algorithm increases dramatically in both implementation simplicity and result.
    

Don't worry, I'll explain with two examples:
 

Imagine your algorithm has a stage where you want to say, "If the user is in a certain engagement in the app, then show them notification X."

 

A few words before we discuss this:

1. The chosen case significantly impacts your ability to generate repetitive use of the app. It's one of the most important business metrics for user growth, product-market fit, and converting app usage into long-term revenue (I'm deliberately avoiding technical terms).

2. To implement this algorithm with good personalization requires a relatively complex algorithm, and its complexity increases as we aim for high personalization. To such an extent that, in some cases, involving AI (of the regular kind, not the one we're talking about) is necessary.
    

To solve these two issues I've presented using generative AI, you can do it with just one or two prompts.
 

Even without integrating advanced prompt engineering, extracting information from a private knowledge base, or fine-tuning a language model, you can still achieve excellent results with nearly zero technical and financial costs.

 

In other words, we understand there's a double opportunity here:

1. To create solutions that deliver existing value propositions in a better and more innovative way, thereby creating market disruption. When you combine the principles of micro-startup, it also significantly impacts your market reach and penetration ability.
    

2. Low resources to reach a seven-figure income - Thanks to the democratization offered by LLM technology (models like GPT), you can do this with relatively low knowledge and even lower costs.
    

The Unfair Advantage
 

One of the parameters of an unfair advantage is networking. While I'm the last person to argue against this, I'll say that, unfortunately, not everyone has it.
 

For example, I don't have much networking due to my shyness and misguided perceptions of internal beliefs.
 

This parameter can severely affect someone wanting to start a startup through investment. I realized that when I'm dependent on networking to reach investors, I inevitably feel out of control because I have no immediate way to reach them.

Additionally, I also think it's not the right thing for me or them.

 

But when there's an opportunity to develop a product with a solution delivered by a language model, combined with everything I said about micro-startup, not only do my chances increase dramatically, but it's also the right thing to do for my growth as an entrepreneur and a person.

 

Furthermore, if I want to reach the stage of investment in the future, I've gone through a journey that makes me believe more in myself and what I represent based on information, thus providing better risk-reward value to the investor.

 

At the end of the day, you're playing against yourself, not against external circumstances.
 

The ability to maintain the belief to choose your thoughts and course of action, in my opinion, must be in full alignment between a mission that's greater than myself and my belief in the actions I choose.
 

To meet this condition, I must believe I'm dependent on myself and not on external circumstances such as investment.
 

If I think with my brain, I'm done. The brain knows how to produce wonderful logical inferences but only in relation to what it already knows and the existing paradigms within it. It's very limited because when you're at the beginning of the journey, you haven't seen the world as you'll see it at the end of the journey.

But if you think with your imagination, anything is possible there. Very quickly, you start choosing actions and thoughts related to what you want to happen, not in relation to the "limitations" you interpret now.

In my view, a language model is the ultimate mechanism to make this real and not slogan-based self-improvement and empowerment nonsense.