A friend of mine is a stage performer, model and DJ. They have a website and multiple social media channels (Facebook, IG, TikTok, etc) as well as a Patreon. It seems they are basically a solo business owner ( I think they may also get help from their partner, but I can't tell if it's official or just an under-the-table thing). Their website looks like it was DIY, pretty darn well I might add, and judging by the date of the posts on some of their social media channels, they seem to be being stretched thin. So, much so that they even semi-jokingly mentioned something about looking into hiring an assistant (I know, I KNOW! lol). In that same comment thread they also implied not knowing if they would be able to pay enough for that assistant. There were some other context clues mentioned in that thread that caught my attention, but I'm trying to keep them anonymous. But my thought process is that they could use a social media manager and/or a booking scheduler/coordinator. However, before I pitch them, I'm trying to work out how to field the "I don't have the money to pay you" response in my head.

@Erin Booth , thanks so much for this. I've been trying to think of any of the things I need to have ready for if/when I get my first client and this is definitely something I want to have figured out ahead of time. This, along with the checklist in the Blueprint, is VERY helpful! Now on to reaching out to my warm network and creating some YT content! I hope you feel better soon!

I know I'm a couple of days late to the party, but I just wanted to drop a thought in here too. I've been using various cloud AI (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, NotebookLM, etc) since 2022 just to teach myself how it all works. I haven't delved into the ones that generate pictures or videos, only the text ones. But I've come to the realization that at it's core it's just one giant auto-correct on steroids. The "AI" label is really just marketing. Once I realized that, it made it so much easier for my brain to think about how to apply it. As Erin and other people above as said, AI is NOT good for "thinking" or "creating" or "decision making". It IS good for helping you build a "structure" for your creation, fast. I think of AI as a "mirror"; it mirrors back what you give it based on statistical probability of what the next likely response is. For example: If I put into chatGPT "I'm writing a fiction novel about witches, dragons and werewolves for young adults. Write my first chapter for my protagonist Mike..." (yeah that's a woefully insufficient prompt, i know, but you get the gist), ChatGPT is gonna look at all its training data about witches, dragons and werewolves, then look at all of the data it has on you, do a probability equation and spit out a response to you that makes you happy. That's not creating anything, that's basically people-pleasing. LOL. So instead, I make sure I create "the first draft" and then I ask chatGPT to look for things like sentence structure problems, flow problems; basically I want it to be my editor. When I read chatGPTs response. I look for things that jump out to me: things I didn't think of; perspectives I never considered, etc. And I ignore things that don't make sense or things that don't feel right, that feel too robotic or corporate for something creative (or vice versa). I let it's response prompt MY critical thinking and then I re-write and re-word the draft myself. Rinse - Repeat. That's my unintentionally, long-winded way of saying: No this version of AI (ChatGPT, Claude, etc) is NOT gonna take VA's jobs. Maybe something built off of this era of AI in the future will, but we're not there yet.

Ummm... 1) Active Listening (?) 2) Connecting the dots between vastly different data points (I can't think of a more succinct way to say that at the moment) 3) Making analogies when explaining something

This is awesome! Thank you, @Erin Booth !