Yesim Saydan, a branding and communication expert in her early 50s based in the Netherlands, has transformed her solo consultancy business by creating over 17 custom GPTs to serve as her virtual team and mentors. The entrepreneur, who helps senior executives and established entrepreneurs grow their authority through social media and brand strategies, turned to OpenAI’s custom GPT feature to overcome the scaling challenges she faced when working alone.
Before AI, Saydan’s main option for scaling was hiring freelancers, which she found time-consuming and often disappointing. “I spent a lot of unnecessary time training the freelancers on my specific framework, and it often felt like they didn’t care as much as I did,” she explains. When OpenAI launched custom GPTs, everything changed for her business model.
Building a Virtual Team
Saydan quickly learned that creating effective AI agents required specialization. Initially envisioning a four-person team, she discovered that AI produces subpar results when overloaded with too many tasks. Instead, she created a custom GPT for each important task, resulting in her current roster of 17+ specialized agents. These include a market researcher, sales call analyst, proposal writer, video scriptwriter, and even a LinkedIn profile evaluator that assesses profiles using six pillars.
The key to making these agents powerful is the training process. While she can create a custom GPT in five to ten minutes, Saydan invests significant time developing standard operating procedure documents for each task and client. She has client-specific AI agents trained on each major client’s tone, goals, and past conversations, ensuring she never starts from scratch.
AI Mentors: Steve Jobs, Dan Kennedy, and Elon Musk
Beyond creating virtual employees, Saydan developed custom GPTs modeled after her ideal mentors, including Steve Jobs, Dan Kennedy, and Elon Musk. Her Steve Jobs GPT is particularly sophisticated, trained on transcripts from videos where Jobs explains his strategies and product launches like the iPhone and iPad. She spent roughly 40 hours researching and building training assets for this single mentor GPT.
To get authentic responses, Saydan has developed specific prompting techniques. Instead of asking “What do you think of this idea?” which causes AI to agree and please, she asks “On a scale from one to 10, how good is this idea?” This approach generates more honest feedback and typically requires three to five rounds of refinement for strategic outputs.
Mixed Feelings About AI’s Future
Despite her success, Saydan admits AI “scares” her. “When a product like NotebookLM was introduced, I started thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is going to make the entire human race obsolete,’” she confesses. However, she’s found peace in recognizing that AI’s true power comes from combining it with human expertise, using custom agents as “an extension of our brain, rather than a replacement.”
Key Quotes
I spent a lot of unnecessary time training the freelancers on my specific framework, and it often felt like they didn’t care as much as I did.
Yesim Saydan explains the frustrations she experienced before adopting AI, highlighting why custom GPTs became such a transformative solution for her solo consultancy business.
I quickly realized AI produces subpar results when it’s overloaded with too many tasks.
This insight led Saydan to create 17+ specialized custom GPTs rather than a few generalist agents, demonstrating an important principle for effective AI implementation in business.
When a product like NotebookLM was introduced, I started thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is going to make the entire human race obsolete.’
Despite successfully using AI in her business, Saydan expresses the anxiety many professionals feel about AI’s rapid advancement and its potential impact on employment and society.
AI, by itself, is powerful, but what makes it truly magical is when we combine our expertise and skills with it. Using custom agents as an extension of our brain, rather than a replacement, is what really produces great output.
Saydan’s philosophy on AI represents a balanced perspective that emphasizes human-AI collaboration rather than replacement, offering a framework for how professionals can adapt to the AI era.
Our Take
Saydan’s story represents a blueprint for the future of solo entrepreneurship in the AI age. Her 40-hour investment in training a single Steve Jobs GPT demonstrates that effective AI implementation requires significant upfront effort—it’s not simply plug-and-play magic. The sophistication of her prompting techniques, particularly avoiding questions that trigger AI’s people-pleasing tendencies, reveals that prompt engineering is becoming a critical business skill.
What’s particularly noteworthy is her honest acknowledgment of AI anxiety despite being a power user. This cognitive dissonance—simultaneously embracing and fearing AI—likely reflects what millions of knowledge workers are experiencing. Her solution of viewing AI as a “brain extension” rather than replacement offers a psychologically healthy framework for adaptation. As custom GPT technology becomes more accessible, we’ll likely see an explosion of solo entrepreneurs building similar virtual teams, fundamentally reshaping the consulting and professional services landscape.
Why This Matters
This story illustrates a critical trend in how solo entrepreneurs and small businesses are leveraging custom AI agents to compete with larger firms without traditional scaling costs. Saydan’s approach demonstrates that the future of work may not be about AI replacing humans, but about individuals orchestrating teams of specialized AI agents to amplify their capabilities.
The 17+ custom GPTs she’s created represent a new business model where knowledge workers can scale infinitely without the overhead of human employees. This has profound implications for the freelance economy, consulting industries, and professional services sectors. Her success also highlights the importance of prompt engineering and AI training—skills that are becoming as valuable as traditional business expertise.
Moreover, her creation of AI mentors modeled after visionaries like Steve Jobs points to a future where anyone can access personalized guidance from the world’s greatest thinkers. This democratization of expertise could level the playing field for entrepreneurs globally. However, her candid admission about AI anxiety reflects broader societal concerns about technological unemployment and rapid transformation that many professionals share.
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Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/built-steve-jobs-custom-gpt-to-make-my-business-decisions-2026-1