Sometimes using AI feels like I’m working with the dumbest person I’ve ever met, but the word “constraint” very rarely enters my mind when I think about how AI is enabling me<\/a> to run my business.<\/p>\n Business Insider wants to talk to founders of AI-powered companies with fewer than 10 workers, and employees working alongside AI agents and bots, to understand what the “Tiny Teams” era really feels like \u2014 the wins, the fears, and the human skills that stand out. Share your story by filling out this quick form<\/a>.<\/p>\n I didn’t set out to build an AI-powered business \u2014 I just wanted to move fast without hiring<\/p>\n For about the last 10 years, I’ve been doing career coaching for product managers on the side of my full-time job. I went from zero clients to consistently having a full plate. In 2025, I decided to coach full-time.<\/p>\n I knew I wanted to be bootstrapped, and hiring full-time employees was way too expensive. Part-time isn’t ideal either because that’s somebody who might not fully understand my business needs; it’s not their main focus.<\/p>\n Puder doesn’t have a background and tech, but AI helped her built her own website.<\/p>\n Christopher Gregory-Rivera for BI<\/p>\n Before building my website, I was a casual AI user. I would go to ChatGPT<\/a> for help with ideas, writing, and research. I don’t have a background in tech, and because of that, I initially didn’t think of AI as an enabler for my business. After building my website, I discovered how useful AI could be for both my webpage and the internal system of my business.<\/p>\n Five free credits a day helped me build my website to scale my company<\/p>\n When I tried building my website before using AI, I probably put in 30 or 40 hours, and it turned out so ugly and clunky. Then I started testing Loveable<\/a> using five free credits a day. After seeing how fast the AI tool worked and how good it looked, I knew I’d be back the next day to keep building.<\/p>\n When I first started using Lovable, I think the credits were correlated to the number of messages I sent. I discovered a hack after I sent a message with a single easy change request, and it cost me a credit. In the next message, I put six requests, and it did all six changes and only took one credit again.<\/p>\n I think they’ve discovered that loophole. Now, credit usage seems more closely tied to the amount of power<\/a> a request consumes. There are times I’m building, and I’m surprised because I won’t realize I’m making such an expensive request.<\/p>\n I’m not sure how many credits it took to build my whole website. It’s definitely more than five, but someone could build a whole landing page with five credits. They could ask the AI tool<\/a> to make a basic website with three sections and brand colors, and I think it would honestly only take two and a half credits.<\/p>\n I still use my 5 free credits almost every day, even though I have a paid subscription<\/p>\n I switched to a paid account, and now I pay $20 a month for my subscription, which I don’t think is that expensive. I get 100 credits a month, plus my five free credits every day that don’t roll over.<\/p>\n I’ve started to think of my AI tools as workers<\/a>. I want to make sure I use them to their full capacity, which is why I always try to use the credits that don’t roll over. It’s the same as if I hired someone full-time: I’d want them to deliver high output every day.<\/p>\n If it’s been a while since I’ve given my website backend some love, I’ll write a prompt asking which areas of the code would most benefit from a refactor, and ask it to rank them. Then, based on how many of my five credits I have left, I’ll tell it which areas to fix.<\/p>\n AI helped me cut down the time for a task from one hour to one minute<\/p>\n One service I offer is finding and applying to jobs for clients. Each client has very specific criteria for the kinds of jobs they want, and I would manually search for jobs that fit those criteria for each client.<\/p>\n Puder says she used AI to help her reduce a task that used to take 60 minutes down to one minute.<\/p>\n Christopher Gregory-Rivera for BI<\/p>\n It used to take me around 60 minutes a day per client just to manually find the right jobs to apply for. I built AI-driven automations that reduced search time<\/a> to one minute. Getting 60 minutes a day back for each of my clients has been a massive scale unlock.<\/p>\n I really didn’t think it was possible.<\/p>\n Sometimes I have to go back to a human engineer, but I’m still impressed with AI<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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