A Business Plan in 10 Minutes – and I Didn't Even Want to Read It

As an experiment, I had AI write me a business plan. Ten minutes later, I was holding it in my hands and didn’t even want to read it.

I knew: this is an artificial product. It looked like a business plan, but back then I knew far too little about my business to make a sensible plan – so I threw it out. Was it a waste of time? It certainly wasn’t resource-friendly.

There’s always something to do

Whenever a time slot opens up, you get something done that would otherwise have been left lying around. With AI, the same thing happens, just on a different scale: you don’t necessarily have less work, you take on more from the start. You do things simply because you can, not because you need them.

That has its good side, too. You try things out. What would a business plan look like that I’ve never written? That’s exactly how my experiment came about.

The catch: the material piles up, and much of it is useless. I’m not alone in this. In a survey by researchers at Stanford University and BetterUp Labs, around 40% of the workers surveyed said they had received “workslop”: AI content that looks polished but has no substance.

What the washing machine can do

A washday used to take several days (in German): soaking, boiling in lye, scrubbing on the washboard. Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan showed that in the US, a housewife in 1950 managed alone what a household a hundred years earlier needed three to four people for.

Yet the work hardly got any less. The time gained went into additional work, and standards rose along with it. With AI, it looks similar so far: a study of around 25,000 workers in Denmark finds average time savings of around 3%.

And still, the washing machine gets something right. It doesn’t just wash faster, it washes better. Because it was built with exactly the knowledge clean laundry requires: water and detergent, spin cycles and load size in the right proportion.

Without that knowledge, your laundry just tumbles through the air for an hour. It doesn’t get any cleaner.

What AI doesn’t know

AI won’t take your business off your hands, with all its components and quantities. Only when you know what goes into the drum, and in what proportion, does the machine pay off.

Where the time goes

Anyone who does care work knows both sides. The dosing: knowing what’s really needed. And the refilling: every minute gained is instantly spoken for, and hardly anyone sees what with.

This is where Care-Coin comes in. We’re building a platform that makes care work visible: anyone who logs their care hours earns Care Coins, reward points that show where the time actually goes.

If you want to know what happens next with Care-Coin: sign up for the newsletter below. You’ll be the first to know when our campaign on Startnext, a German crowdfunding platform, goes live – expected on 19 January 2027.

One question for you: What do you use the time AI saves you for? → Answer (10 seconds)

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Cover photo: Emily Chung on Unsplash