A Brooklyn soap founder built four Claude projects as an AI C-suite. The CFO interprets sales data. A chief of staff compiles monthly recaps. She keeps the $20 plan to limit usage.
Alpha Score of 75 reflects strong overall profile with moderate momentum, moderate value, strong quality, strong sentiment.
Sara Russell started making soap in 2020, a pandemic hobby that turned into an Etsy store in 2021 and a full-time business in 2023. The creative side came naturally. The business side did not.
"I knew that SEO and Google Analytics data were important, but I didn't really know what they were," Russell, 37, founder of Brooklyn-based Mainland Vintage Bath & Body Boutique, told Business Insider. She spent hours Googling terms, taking LinkedIn Learning courses, and asking in small-business group chats. "I'd spend three hours researching a topic, only to walk away with one actionable thing that makes sense for me."
Russell had tried ChatGPT for Instagram captions but hated most of the output. She also refused to use AI for visual design. "I wanted to maintain that control over my creative eye," she said.
Then her husband, who uses Claude at an enterprise level, mentioned the projects feature. In February, she set up a $20-a-month Claude account and created four projects, each assigned to a business department: marketing, sales, finance, and product development.
"I told all the projects that I want them to be collaborative and to defer to me as the CEO of the company," Russell said. "They can give me ideas, but I'm the authority."
The projects are organized like a C-suite, but the output is treated like that of an entry-level employee. Her CFO project helps interpret sales data she cannot read on her own. A marketing chat called Instagram Strategy researches best practices for converting followers into customers.
An AI chief of staff compiles a monthly recap from all the department chats into a single document. "I go through the document and see what I've delivered on, what I haven't, the sales numbers, what's coming up," Russell said.
Russell said 75% of what she does with Claude now, she could not have done before. Still, she is wary of AI's environmental impact and the lack of government oversight. She keeps the $20 plan, in part to impose a usage limit. "I think we are still on the frontier of where it will go," she said.
She is applying for grants and would rather use that money to hire part-time employees than upgrade her Claude account. "I'm always going to prioritize human creativity over being able to do more with AI," Russell said.
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