Making a shit-ton of money with ChatGPT. Experiment 1.
As many of you I have been blown away by ChatGPT. I spent too much time playing with it. Generating articles and code. Analyzing amazon products. Using it as an assistant developer. And discussing during hours with friends trying things with it.
I got excited about trying OpenAI API, just for fun. But as I am working on an early stage SaaS that doesn’t make revenue yet, with very short deadlines, it wasn’t reasonable to “lose” time on it.
Unless… I find a way to make money while having fun. Unless doing this experiment would led me produce code that can be used in our project.
Thus I made a deal with “reasonable me” 🤝
- I must do it at night, he said. After 10pm, when I am done doing what needs to be done on datamz.
- It must be done in less than 3 evenings.
- It must serve a concrete immediate need on datamz.
- I must include things that can be re-used in short term on datamz.
- “Well… at least try to make money with it… and create content about it”, he conclude.
So here I am, Wednesday 4th evening, excited about trying new things 🤩 A new POC that might make shit-ton of money… or not.
The idea
A friend of mine runs a tech / running blog where he share his passions. He tried some articles written with ChatGPT that performed very well. Few months ago he tried an affiliation website but it took too many time to write articles. So he stopped. And I think he is less motivated writing about shoes than running and tech. Understandable.
💡 What if I created an automated affiliate blog ? Affiliation can be a way to make that dollars (deal point 5. ✅) and I need to build datamz’s blog next week so I could re-use the template (3. ✅).
But what about ? What a blog could personally help me on ? And what would I buy from an article recommendation ?
… Books !
I really want to read more ! Sometimes I search on Youtube for books recommendations… I always find the same. It would be great if I can get some books recommendations on various topics. I dont want to be limited on “business, entrepreneur, tech” books.
How about getting recommendations based on hot news / trends ?
And here are our POC idea: - An automated blog that will get Twitter trends, write articles and recommend 3 books to read about it. With affiliate links, of course.
The OpenAI API client code could be re-used on datamz to bring intelligence to analytics and help Amazon sellers get great stuff fast (4. ✅). It seem like a lot of things to develop but I already have some code that scrape Amazon and I have a secret assistant that will help me write the Twitter / OpenAI API implementation (1.2 ✅). You guess it right, ChatGPT itself !
Let’s goo !!
The app can be divided into 3 parts:
- Twitter stuff. Get the trends from the API and everything we need to build an understandable prompt for OpenAI.
- OpenAI API implementation. To send the prompt and get the article content with the 3 books recommendation.
- Connection to Amazon to get the books images and affiliate url.
To have more fun and go faster I talked about this idea to my friend Yassine, a fellow guru developer who preached me Laravel until I joined the cult 😅
“Join-me on this Yassine ! We will make shit-ton of money !!!” I argued. “No. You should eat harissa.” he politely declined.
ChatGPT was more convinced.
1. Getting Twitter trends
It is amazing how fast you can develop basic stuff using ChatGPT. Instead of reading the TwitterAPI to understand how it works, I just asked to ChatGPT to write the code and understood way quicker.
I just had to register to TwitterAPI, apply to the right one (short form filled within a minute) edit the API credentials and it was ready !
2. Generating the article with OpenAI
Same with OpenAI API implementation. I just asked ChatGPT to write the PHP implementation to ask OpenAI to write and article and get the closest result as ChatGPT would return. You might know that OpenAI API actually aren’t as efficient as ChatGPT. I read that ChatGPT uses a model that is not available yet on OpenAI APIs.
Yet it worked pretty well !
In less than 2 hours I had an app that gets Twitter trend, extract 5 long enough tweets, build a prompt and send it to OpenAI to write an article about it !
I even specify in the prompt that the books must be between double underscores so I can parse them to search them on Amazon later.
Here is the massive prompt (in French):
After many tries, the recommended articles were often not relevant. So instead of asking ChatGPT to recommend books, I ask to write 3 topics about the article. We will then use those topics to search on the book section of Amazon and extract books that might be interesting.
3. Getting the right books name, image and affiliate url.
To get and affiliation tag you just have to register for free on https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/
That’s what I did to got my “tag-id” that I will have to add after each book url.
Once OpenAPI returns the article content, we get each topics preg_match_all(‘/__(.*?)__/’, $content, $matches);
For each one we just have to search on Amazon book section and get the first organic ranked book. I would ask to ChatGPT for that but I already had the base-code that scrap Amazon result page.
We then remplace the topic but the book image, title and link and voilà !
That is how I built the “write-article-based-on-trends-that-recommend-books” code base in less 4 than hours.
And this is what happened next: https://readmedium.com/chatgpt-is-a-bullshitter-shit-ton-money-journey-part-2-9562de3e5587
What I learned from there
I don’t know if AI will replace developers. It might. But I know that it can be a great tool to be more efficient on value-less development. I think our value should not be into implementing APIs or scrapping data. The more we can delegate those tasks, the more we can focus on trying to be more efficient. Thinking about creative solutions. Finding the easiest ways to solve complex business problems.
I think this is the starting of really interesting things. People who embrace those technologies and find ways to make it serve there solutions will take most advantage out of it and might make… shit-ton-of-money.
Next ?
Let me know if you are interesting in the next episode. Spoiler: The blog is online since 3 days, with already 25 articles and more than 70 books recommandation 😃
Meanwhile, let me share to you two great videos / podcast I have listened / viewed about AI and business recently:
Some ideas about what to build with ChatGPT:
And a very interesting talk with Martin Cloake, the CEO of a SaaS that uses AI to help their client make decisions:
Share yours :)
