Introduction to the Entrepreneurial Opportunity My entrepreneurial idea combines two major trends in business today – inbound marketing and artificial intelligence. This section will highlight literature to support these themes as providing opportunity for entrepreneurial activity. First, inbound marketing in its current form evolved roughly with Google's Panda update, as this changed how the search giant's bots evaluated website. Prior to this update, search rewarded sites for activities like keyword stuffing, excessive internal links, and the change placed emphasis on information architecture, and creating quality content. This change heralded a new era of inbound marketing (Wainwright, 2011). Companies could no longer fake their way to the top of Google's listings; now they were rewarded for the richness of their content. This unleashed a wave of trends in marketing, including now every company needs to have blogs that contain not only material about the company and its products, but company sites are rewarded for things like thought leadership as well. With quality the name of the game, thousands of jobs for writers and other content creators were essentially created overnight (Mak, 2014).

Marketers today must act almost like media companies, the content they create being a major contributor to the value that they are creating as a company. This content attracts eyeballs of the target market, and which then feeds into the buying cycle, which is usually short for consumers, and longer for business customers. Technology, especially software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools have become the stock in trade of the modern inbound marketer (Law, 2017). Most of the tools in the average marketer's tech stack still rely on the marketer to be able to create high quality content.

Another major trend in business is artificial intelligence. What exactly this term means is subject to debate, but using computing power that adapts to feedback is the general principle. Early adopters of AI or near-AI technology include marketers seeking to gain an edge in the marketplace. Artificial intelligence, according to many observers, is disrupting the inbound marketing profession, which already relies heavily on applications and automation (Velli, 2017). There are numerous use cases for AI in inbound marketing (Bernzzani, 2017).

The entrepreneurial opportunity involves the application of AI to inbound marketing. Many companies need content creators, but good writers are hard to find, so many companies rely on freelancers. There are a lot of freelance sites out there, but even then, parsing through the thousands of candidates to find the one that fits well with your company is a time-consuming task. Our company intends to use AI to scan the leading freelancer sites and match writers with what you are looking for – what content, what industry, what target market, and other specs. The AI comes into play when data is integrated – who did companies like yours rate highly? What writers have similar profiles to the ones you've had success with? By using the power of Big Data to link up small businesses that need content creators with the content creators themselves, while still allowing the middleman site to take its cut, our AI will add value to smaller companies that want to play the inbound marketing game at the enterprise level, but don't have the capacity to take on full-time content creators.

Value Prop

The value proposition is relatively simple. Most businesses are small businesses. But these do not necessarily have the time to create inbound programs, and especially not to create their own content. Yet there is a world of writers, graphic designers, artists, video producers, and editors out there looking to take advantage of the trends towards inbound marketing. Because there are so many small businesses, and so many content creators, finding the right match between the two is about as easy as finding your soulmate. The reality is that if an AI application can do the work for you, it will save you hours. Not only will you reduce by over 90% the time spent evaluating potential writers, but you'll have a more powerful, data-driven decision-making heuristic than you would otherwise...

Your best writer could be in Nairobi for all you know – and if you find your best content creators you'll spend less time cleaning up their work, or worse yet paying for work so bad you can't even use it. When you're trying to grow your business, you need to spend your time doing the things you do best – and that's probably not sifting through piles of writers on Mechanical Turk or Freelancer.com, nor is it writing blog posts that, because you wrote them, aren't even that good anyway. What's your time worth to you? That's how you determine your ROI. That ROI is your value prop – you accelerate the inbound marketing process, do it better, and ultimately grow your business more quickly with our AI-driven CreativeFinder app.
Description of Themes

The first theme is opportunity recognition. This theme focuses on recognizing an opportunity in the marketplace. There are a couple of different ways to do this, but both involve being intuitive, paying attention to what they are seeing, and interpreting what they see, hear and read in a different way than others have done. The first is to scan the environment in order to understand what the current trends are. The ideal situation is that you see a trend, and before the market becomes saturated, you move to exploit that trend. You might not gain first-mover advantage, but in most markets there is room for more than one company. In this case, the idea comes from the intersection of two trends that are influencing business – especially small business – today. Inbound marketing is a recent trend that really only took its current shape, wherein it relies heavily on high-end content creation and information architecture, in 2011.

Since that point, the inbound marketing business has evolved rapidly. The emergence of so many SaaS applications to support inbound marketing has been a significant trend in the past few years. This in turn has lowered the cost of inbound marketing programs. Marketers today are data-driven, focused on administering programs, and rely heavily on the promotion of high-end content. While larger companies will typically have content creators in-house, many smaller companies struggle. They lack sophisticated marketing operations, and usually it is one of the principles who does all the blogging and social media, which means that these activities are often pushed to the sidelines. Yet, if the same company had regular content creation, it would be able to build a proper inbound marketing rhythm, which in turn would help it to grow more quickly. Inbound marketing is to some extent scalable, too.

One of the barriers to the inbound approach is that it relies so heavily on content, that companies often struggle to maintain a content pipeline. That is where freelancers have been a boon to many small companies. Competition has kept the cost of freelancers down, but there is still room for high quality, knowledgeable writers, and these are able to earn a good living as freelancers. At the end of the day, however, finding the right balance between cost and quality, and making sure that person can write well, has English fluency, and can meet specs and deadlines – none of these things are easy. Star ratings aren't enough; especially when you have to sift through hundreds of writers. Companies using online freelancing services either cut corners by hiring the first decent person they see, or they spent far too long evaluating potential writers. This is a genuine pain point for small businesses, and one that we have recognized.

The second theme is opportunity creation. Understanding the pain point is one thing, being able to create a solution to it is another thing entirely. In this case, it is understood that nobody is really addressing this pain point, and as a result of this there is an opportunity. However, to genuinely solve the problem, creation must occur. The opportunity therefore has to be created, and that is through the creation of a new product or service that did not previously exist. In this case, the AI application that will pore through the thousands of writers to find the best fit needed to be created. In a sense, we could have retrofitted one of the applications that…