When Katie Forse joined Stone & Chalk's AI Solopreneur Accelerator, she already knew AI could be powerful.
What she didn't know was how much further she could take it.
A self-taught AI user, interior designer, and founder of family administration platform Tribu, Katie joined the program looking for a more structured way to use AI while building a business largely on her own.
“I don't know what I don't know,” she says.
For a solo founder, that can be a significant challenge. There is no team to delegate research, marketing, operations, accounting or technology to. Every new task competes for the same limited hours.
Katie wanted to understand how AI could help change that equation.
What she found was an opportunity to move beyond using AI as a tool, and start thinking about it as a team of specialised AI agents working across her business.
From interior design to family admin
Katie's path to Tribu began with AI.
After running her own interior design studio for 10 years, she stepped back for several years after having two children. When she decided to return to interiors, she enrolled in an AI course specifically for interior designers.
It was her first introduction to the technology.
But without any active interior design projects to work on, Katie decided to experiment on something much closer to home, her family's administration.
She created a centralised document containing important family information and quickly discovered just how much was scattered across emails, documents and the memories of individual family members.
She didn't know where her husband's super was held, what his life insurance covered or where to find his income protection details.
Then she started looking more closely at their existing arrangements and realised their life insurance had been taken out when they had an older mortgage and one child.
The family admin project became something more. Katie started talking to other parents and discovered many were facing the same problem.
That became the foundation for Tribu, a digital vault designed to help families centralise information around housing, insurance and legacy.
“A hundred families bought in before I had even built it,” Katie exclaims.
By the time she joined AI Solopreneur, she had a business to build, a product to develop and a long list of jobs that needed doing.
Turning experimentation into action
Katie was already using AI every day, but she describes herself as largely self-taught.
What attracted her to the AI Solopreneur Accelerator was the chance to bring some structure to that experimentation.
The program lets participants build AI agents that directly solve business problems they are facing, rather than simply learning about AI generally, or collecting a folder full of prompts they’ll never use.
Across six weeks, participants build systems they can use across areas such as marketing, sales, operations, and development. For Katie, that hands-on approach was important.
“I learnt structure around my workings with AI,” she says.
She particularly valued the hands-on sessions, where AI practitioners and industry specialists demonstrated how they were applying agentic AI in their own businesses.
Those examples helped turn something that could otherwise feel abstract into something Katie could start applying to Tribu.
Building an AI team of one
One of Katie's biggest takeaways was understanding how AI agents could help connect the different parts of her business.
Rather than asking AI to complete one isolated task, she began thinking about how different systems could work together.
That shift has changed the way she approaches building Tribu.
“I really did have my eyes opened to the possibilities,” she says.
She has since been experimenting with everything from website and marketing strategies, to ways of making Tribu more visible in AI-powered search.
One session Katie found particularly relevant was on AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation), which focuses on helping businesses appear in AI-generated answers when potential customers are searching for solutions.
For Katie, it prompted her to think about how someone might discover Tribu through an AI assistant, for example, a parent looking for a way to manage their family's administration.
She learnt how credibility, content and online visibility can influence the information AI systems draw on, as well as how AI agents could assist with generating content and getting it published once approved.
For a founder with limited time and resources, those kinds of efficiencies are important. The Stone & Chalk program is explicitly built around that: giving solo founders leverage by creating AI agents that can take on specialist roles across their businesses.
The value was more than technology
For Katie, the program's value extended beyond what she learned about AI.
Working from home while building Tribu and raising her children, she says coming into Stone & Chalk's Melbourne hub was invigorating.
“The city signifies opportunity for me,” she says.
She also found herself surrounded by other founders facing many of the same challenges.
The cohort gave her people to exchange ideas with, while the program's facilitators and mentors provided support when she needed it.
Katie particularly valued MLAI's Dr Sam Donegan, who led the technical component of the program, who she says had the patience to explain complex concepts to a largely non-technical group.
She also found the weekly industry sessions valuable because participants could see how other businesses were putting agentic AI into practice.
The result was a combination of technical learning, practical experimentation and a founder network.
The confidence to experiment
Perhaps the biggest change for Katie has been confidence.
Before joining the program, she was already using AI. Afterwards, she was more willing to experiment with what it could do.
“I think your outcome is only limited by your creativity and what you can imagine,” she says.
That mindset is particularly relevant for a founder like Katie, who is building a business without a large team behind her.
The program gave her a clearer understanding of what was possible and how AI could give her greater leverage as she builds Tribu.
The program has shown her how the possibilities could be opened.
Come with a problem to solve
For anyone considering the next AI Solopreneur Accelerator cohort, Katie advises not to turn up simply wanting to “learn AI”, but to instead come with a business problem.
“I think you’ll get the most out of it if you come engaged with your problems from the outset,” she says.
For Katie, those problems were very real: how to build a startup as a solo founder, how to reach potential customers, how to create content, how to improve Tribu's visibility, and how to manage the enormous number of tasks involved in getting a new business off the ground.
The program gave her a framework for exploring which of those jobs could be supported by AI agents. More importantly, it gave her the confidence to think differently about what she could build.
She didn't just learn more about AI. She started to see it as a way to extend what she could do as a solo founder.
