Hannah Mitchell

How our tiny cafe competes with chains on social media

We're a seven-table cafe in Hobart. Just me, my partner, and two part-time staff. We cannot compete with chains on budget, marketing, or anything else involving money. What we can compete on is personality and community. AI has helped us show more of that online. I never know what to post. Now I spend 20 minutes on Monday morning thinking through the week — what's coming up, what's been happening, what seasonal things are relevant — and I talk to Claude about it like a brainstorm. From that 20 minutes I get content ideas for the whole week. Instagram captions, a Facebook post, something for Google. All in our voice — warm, local, a bit cheeky. I also used it to write the content for our new menu. The descriptions used to be functional. "Eggs Benedict with hollandaise." Now they're actually tempting. "Two perfect eggs, silky hollandaise, on house-baked sourdough — the kind of breakfast that makes you slow down." Sales of our brunch items went up noticeably. We punch above our weight online now. Our Google rating is 4.9 with 340 reviews. That's not AI — that's genuinely good coffee and good service. But AI helped us tell that story better.