How to Start a Business With NOAN and AI

There’s so much you need to consider and work through to launch and run a business, it can feel overwhelming. Squarespace makes it easy to launch a website and sell your product, but business owners still need to be experts in every aspect, whether that’s developing the branding and positioning, or structuring a subscription, creating a content marketing strategy, advertising strategy, or social media campaign approach.

As entrepreneurs ourselves, it felt like too much, so we set out to make it easy with AI. NOAN is the ultimate go-to-market platform for one-person teams: With NOAN, you can collaborate with AI to build all of your strategy in minutes, then use that strategy to get accurately generated content for your business. 

Note: This article was created by and in collaboration with NOAN.

What is NOAN?

We spoke to a lot of entrepreneurs who were struggling and overwhelmed by all aspects of running a digital business. In response, we built NOAN, a partner for one-person teams. 

In NOAN, you follow set workflows of AI powered Smart Blocks: blocks of business knowledge, like your mission and vision or your brand positioning. You collaborate with AI at every step to build out your business or brand. You can generate your strategy with AI, edit it, and chat directly to AI assistants in each Smart Block that know your entire business strategy and what you’re working on right now. 

The key thing about NOAN is that at any time you can use Create Mode, which allows you to choose from a number of AI assistants to develop any content you need for your business. Each assistant has access to your company strategy, so it can return accurate answers. NOAN helps you build and connect that company knowledge to make it truly actionable. 

How NOAN and Squarespace work together

Squarespace is central to NOAN’s origin story. We are a team of entrepreneurs ourselves, and we chose Squarespace to launch NOAN’s website and get our business off the ground because it’s the perfect platform to get a business up and running fast. Think of NOAN as the knowledge hub to your business. Squarespace enables you to apply that knowledge at scale. 

Between NOAN and Squarespace, you have every tool you need to succeed. Just be structured and clear in your approach, and don’t wait for everything to be perfect to launch. Get something out the door and then keep building and iterating. Whether you're a DTC entrepreneur or startup founder, momentum is everything—so give yourself that feeling by getting something live.  

How to use NOAN AI to build a business

There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. The key is that when working with AI, knowledge is everything. You need to build a good structure, a foundational source of truth, for how AI can understand your business. Putting in a little bit of time up front will pay off down the line as everything becomes quick and easy—articles, emails, onboarding documents, everything you need—all get created in seconds. 

We’re unique in how we build our own product, because we use NOAN to power our own business. Whether it’s to help with decision-making or content creation, if we need features we build them for ourselves first, then ship them to our users. We build NOAN with NOAN, and it’s something we’re really proud of. 

You can use NOAN’s set workflows to collaborate with AI at every step to:

• Build out a business strategy

• Design your brand

• Create a marketing strategy

• Generate ideas for marketing content

• Get recommendations for growing your business

As you build, NOAN stores all of that knowledge, meaning whenever you work with NOAN, it knows exactly how your business operates and comes back with answers or content that’s truly aligned with your business. That extends to Create Mode, where you can develop the copy or images you need with the help of AI. 

Best practices for using AI for your business

One of the big lessons we’ve learned is to be clear in what you are asking for from AI when you are creating. If you think about it, it’s amazing how common this is with human interactions. People are unclear with language and what they want from, say, an employee, and as a result they don’t get what they expected in return. When you’re working with AI, unclear instructions can generate wildly erratic results, because AI has all of the information in the world at its disposal. 

If you want to send your customers an email of a certain length, with a 50% discount in the first paragraph, you’ll need to be clear that that’s what you want. With NOAN, you don’t have to keep repeating yourself. Because when NOAN generates your content, it’s drawing on the business knowledge that has already been stored—your products, business, brand, tone of voice, audience, and business strategy. 

Learn how to personalize AI output on Squarespace

Example: Using NOAN to design a subscription business

NOAN will connect the dots across all areas from your brand strategy to make sure your business delivers on your goals and your audience’s needs. For example, some of NOAN’s first users were struggling to manage and build their own membership and subscription businesses. 

One blocker they face is how to structure and tier their membership or subscription in a way that offers value to their audience while fulfilling their own business goals. 

I’ve watched a user in the construction category collaborate with AI on NOAN to build out a subscription model, price it right for their audience and business, and generate all the materials needed to launch it—all in a matter of minutes. Another user launched their membership using NOAN and has grown it to the point of adding a physical clubhouse for their members. 

Other users who didn’t realize they had a potential subscription business have gone on to launch one using the NOAN platform, simply because the platform suggested it and guided them to it. Each of these businesses were able to use NOAN to make strategic decisions they felt blocked by, then generate what they needed to get up and running. 

NOAN is now available to Squarespace users with a 20% discount on your NOAN subscription. As our partnership progresses, we’ll be building out a number of really useful integrations for Squarespace users. You can try NOAN for free, so jump in and start building and creating. No matter what you’re building, NOAN can make you faster, smarter, and more profitable.