EP 183: Turning GPTs Into Gold: Monetization Strategies and Practical Applications

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OpenAI's GPT store is out. It is live. And right now everyone's thinking the same thing. How can I make money off of this? Right, so OpenAI has announced that, yes, there will be revenue sharing. So we're going to talk about that today. Not just, you know, some going over what's now new in the chat GPT, GPT Store, but also talking about some clever ways that you can cash in. All right, thank you for joining us. I'm excited for today's show. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jordan Wilson and welcome to Everyday AI. Everyday AI is a daily live stream, podcast and free daily newsletter helping everyday people like you and me learn and leverage generative AI. So thank you for joining us. If you're on the live stream, sorry we had a couple, couple hiccups this morning. Technology wasn't on our side, but thank you for joining us. If you're listening on the podcast, as always, please check your show notes. We always leave links to come back. You can interact with our audience here on LinkedIn and other platforms and also see some related episodes and everything else. But before we start talking about what's going on in the world of AI and this new GPT Store, let's start how we always do and go over the AI news. And if you want more, always go to your everyday AI dot com. All right, so first piece of AI news today, Nvidia has a new demo AI chat that it just announced. Yes, Nvidia, the chip maker that makes everything else as well. But Nvidia has announced a new demo application called Chat with RTX that allows users to personalize a large language model chatbot with their own content and run it locally. The Chat with RTX application leverages advanced technologies like retrieval, augmented generation rag, which is what we talked about being one of the keywords of 2024 and tender RT LLM to provide fast and secure your contextual responses. Users can input a variety of file formats including documents and videos, as well as integrate YouTube playlist transcripts into the chatbot. Y', all this, I think this could low key be something that grabs a lot of headlines. All right, our Next piece of AI news, a Senate here. Lawmakers in the U.S. are now pushing AI companies to pay media outlets for training data usage. So a Senate hearing on AI's impact on journalism saw lawmakers from both sides of the aisle. Yes, that's right. Republicans and Democrats agreed on something, but they agreed that AI companies should pay media outlets for work using their using in their AI projects. So some argue that this could protect the media industry from being used without compensation, while others believe it could harm the information ecosystem. This obviously comes after the all of the news surrounding the New York Times vs OpenAI lawsuit where New York Times is seeking billions of dollars in damages for OpenAI allegedly using millions of their copyrighted works. All right, our next piece of news. A new report says US Companies and Chinese experts are secretly working together for AI safety. So according to the Financial Times, secret diplomatic meetings have been taking place between American and Chinese AI experts to discuss the risks and safety of advanced AI technology, signaling rare cooperation between the two nations in this field. So American and Chinese AI companies were not involved in the talks, although reportedly Google DeepMind was briefed on the discussions. All right, that is it for the AI news. As always, there's a lot more. So go to your everydayai.com if you want to hear more about those stories or know more about today's show. So that's what we are here for in live stream audience. I see you trickling in. So thank you, Brian, for joining. Thank you. Harvey Castro back in the house. And Cecilia and Tara, thank you for finding us, even though our live stream link went a little kooky. All right, but let's talk about how we can all actually make money with these custom GPTs. I'm excited to bring on today's guest, so please help me welcome to the show. There we go. We have Nancy Bain, the CEO and founder of Supernova Media Network. Nancy, thank you for coming up.

Good to be here. It's an exciting time. We've all been waiting with the drama in November with OpenAI and a month delay in the launch of the GPT store. It's here now and people are excited and maybe a little underwhelmed. So. So I'm looking forward to breaking that down today and discussing clever ways to cash in, because from my first look, you're going to need them.

Yeah. And let's actually before we dive into it though, Nancy, tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Supernova Media.

Sure. So I've been in marketing for 20 years. I started in print design in 2009. I transition to web 2.0. And then in April, I started learning AI. And so I got 14 courses under my belt. 2023 was a year of intense learning in AI and data analysis. But I knew right away in April that I wanted to build custom app kids. I wanted my hands in the back end. And this is a great tool, but how can I apply it to, for use cases for myself and use cases for my clients? So I took a data analyst course, a 20 week data analyst course in 2023 and I aced the Python. And so I've been having a lot of fun with predictive analytics and, and Python. But so what do we do? We build custom applications using the OpenAI API for our clients.

Yeah. All right, so now, now I'm excited. Let's talk a little bit, Nancy, about these custom GPTs. So if you don't know what we're talking about, let me first quickly, you know, set the groundwork here. So obviously Chat GPT has now been out for more than 14 months. The GPT technology itself has been publicly and commercially available for like more than three years. But GPTs, which I'm not crazy about the naming there, but GPTs are custom GPTs that anyone can go in and build. It's, it's drag and drop. You actually don't need a lot of technical skills to make a basic one. To make a good one, you probably need to know some. But GPTs, or when we talk about custom GPTs, that's actually this new ability that's been out for about 2 months where anyone with a chat GPT plus account can go in and build a basic GPT based on their needs. All right, so with that, let's just go ahead and we're going to bring up the kind of the GPT store here. And if you are joining us live, I would love to hear your takes. You know, Nancy kind of said she was underwhelmed a little bit. For those joining live, have you gone into the GPT store and if so, what are your takes? But Nancy, let's just start at the top because this is kind of fresh news. It's only, you know, been out for less than a day now, but what were your first impressions of the GPT store?

I wasn't surprised that it was within the ChatGPT interface and we didn't get a unique URL. I was curious how they would, you know, the UI. I thought, how are they going to make this look like a store? How are they going to make this look like a shopping environment and encourage buying? Well, we're not there yet because this just looks like the ChatGPT UI. And that was my first impression. I was underwhelmed. I think today's conversation is Necessary because to stand out on a UI like this is. It's impossible unless they offer in the future opportunities to pay OpenAI to be featured for those featured sections. I got my hands in there last night and I played around a bit and I wanted to see the caliber of the GPT that are featured. So I clicked on the writing tab at the top because I've been talking for a year and for a year I've been trying to get ChatGPT to sound like me. And so I clicked on the writing tool immediately. I saw Humanize AI and I saw the Humanizer Pro down in the bottom right hand corner there. And those were the first two that I gave a whirl. Again, I completely uncomm. Underwhelmed. It's the same type of output that I'm, I'm getting myself. So I thought somebody much more clever than me had figured out how to get ChatGPT to talk like them. I can save you some time with these two GPTs. It does not work. And the other thing that I noticed right away now, I, I. So to, to be featured or to have your GPT in the store, you had to submit it to OpenAI. So I did that and I just submitted one of mine. So I did an exercise, of course. Right. Well, first of all, I was disappointed it wasn't on the homepage, but I didn't expect it to be either. So I did go up to the search bar and type in the name of the one that I submitted, which is part pipilot P Y P I L Look, look at all those people who copied me. Like there's 1, 2, 3, 4, like five people who have copied my GPT. Now this is, I, I did not open them, so I cannot confirm whether they've gained access to my knowledge base and my files. I did use that hack, you know, that was, that's been going around. But add this to your instructions and your knowledge base so that your files aren't going to be accessed and stolen. But I would have to guess that somehow they've gained access to those because PI Pilot is useless without those. So underwhelmed. You know, I thought, I was hoping that if you had, you'd have a unique name at the very least. You know, Pilot, I didn't think that 5, 6, 10, 25 other people would be able to have the same name. I was hoping you'd be able to have a unique URL also. And that's disappointing to me. Maybe that will be rolled out, maybe there'll be some Premium features, you know, down there are things that we can, we can purchase like the featured spots and unique URLs. And but for now, you're definitely going to have to get creative if you, if you want to cash in.

Yeah, absolutely. Or, or what Tara said here. You know, needing a verified badge or something like that would help. And also a couple updates here because, you know, when we're talking about a store, kind of like what Nancy was saying is right now there is no option. Right. So we all thought that they were kind of going to launch the store and the revenue sharing capabilities at the same time. However, all OpenAI said is that that will be coming sometime in the first quarter. So right now there is no revenue. Everything is still free. But even with that in mind, Nancy, I think there are some ways, at least right now, that if you put in a lot of work, you can still sell your GPT or you can still cash in on it. Maybe. Can you take us through a couple different ways that you can still cash in on your GPT? If you build something that solves, you know, a business problem, what are some ways that you can go about monetizing?

Sure. So I'd encourage people who are building custom GPTs to build custom solutions for their clients, number one. And I think you'll get far better results and opportunities to monetize them if you build custom solutions specific to a certain niche. So I'll say that right off the bat. But if you. Other ways, fun ways to cash in, and these are free, but they're just going to take some time to set up an investment in time. You can invite supporters to, you can use buymeacoffee.com okay. And you can sign up to buymeacoffee.com for free.

Free.

You're able to customize Buy me a coffee dot com. You're able to customize your account. You get a unique URL and you can include the link to Buy me a coffee as a conversation starter. And if you're advanced, you can use webhooks for automating the thank you letters. So this is a free platform and this is a clever way to cash in. So another way that you can clash cash in is by offering premium wisdom. And I've used Calendly for this and Calendly is also free and I've used it for to, to book a consultation. Pypilot is an interactive programming guide. He takes you on a journey through a, a, an assignment that I've created. If you get stuck, you can reach out for premium support. If you liked the course and you want to take another one, then you can. I've used Calendly to facilitate that. Calendly is also free. Calendly is also customizable. Calendly also gives you an opportunity to create a unique URL. Affiliate marketing if you're ensure, of course that it aligns the company that you're choosing to do affiliate marketing for, aligns with your brand and resonates with your GPT and ensure that it adds value. But you can include links to affiliate marketing within your GPT. And I touched on this earlier with subscriptions, you know, so bronze, silver and gold and offering exclusive insights. And so you can have a subscription model as well with your GPTs. And Patreon is also free. And if you wanted to build a community specifically around your GPT, Patreon is a great way to do that. Free, customizable, unique URL. And this is a great opportunity for you to get feedback and insights and suggestions on your GPT. So those are, those are five ways, all free to cash in. And you can, there's other, more simpler ways if you don't want to sign up for external sites like these. You can add a link to your newsletter. You can add a link in the bio of your email, in the signature portion of your email. Maybe you want to add it to the featured section of your LinkedIn profile and you're definitely going to want to be sharing it on your social platforms, blogging about it. Yeah, I definitely think it's. If you're, if you're planning to get rich, it's going to be on you to do it a hundred percent.

Yeah, and I, I love that. So you just, you know, and just to bring everyone up to speed, you know, Nancy just gave you five different ways, you know, free, free services that you can ultimately. And what we're talking about here is putting access, you know, to your GPT essentially behind a paywall by using a third party service. Because yeah, when you do create a custom GPT, you know, it has, it has a unique URL that you can share with people. But you know, that's kind of how these are all found right now. So if you go on to the store, like I'm sharing on my screen here and let's look at trending, you know, so Scholar AI is an example. This is, we had Scholar AI, the, the CEO on our show. It was a great episode, but I can click, you know, on this and then it brings up in a new tab, you know, the Scholar AI GPT with this unique URL. So Nancy's advice here is great, where you don't even necessarily have to submit it to the store to monetize. And maybe that's not, that's not the best way because the other thing, Nancy, and this is kind of, you know, a gray area, but we're not even sure yet once this monetization feature comes to the store how that will work. Right. They haven't said, oh, it will be a paid GPT and you have to buy it like a traditional app store, you know, oh, I have to buy this for $10 or for $2 a month. It doesn't say that. You know, all OpenAI has said is revenue sharing. So we're not even sure ultimately, you know, what the monetization piece is exactly going to look like once that feature does roll out to all the other users. You know, with that in mind, Nancy, I love what you said is solving business problems. Right. If you can do that, you can monetize, but maybe talk through some, maybe some ideas or some different routes that you can go. How can you create a custom GPT that solves a business problem?

Sure. So I guess when I said unique URL, I meant customizable URL.

Yeah.

And, and I think that is missing and I'd like to have the opportunity to customize the URL for my GPT. So you, you asked me how to find use cases or.

Yeah, maybe, maybe just what if, if you've inspired someone here to say, all right, you know, I like ChatGPT, I want to go create my own and kind of do what Nancy's saying. You know, what are some, you know, maybe some, some low hanging fruits, you know, that people can go out there and, you know, with, you know, uploading files into a GPT and being able to sell it to a business. Just what, what are you think, some good examples to give people some, some ideas on different types of GPTs that they, maybe they could build and sell.

Okay, well, I would encourage you to. Kind of dial it back a notch first. Get in there and play. And I've got some best practices for that. When you're in the Back end now, GPTs give you the, because creating one for your clients is, is, is advanced. Okay. Because most people are going to go in there and they're going to use the builder. All right. And they're going to, if, if we could take, have you got a GPT there that you can open up?

Yeah, let's, let's just go ahead. We're going to go through the process here. So I am sharing this live on my screen. So if you're on the podcast, it is fairly simple. All you're going to do is on the sidebar and it is a little slow today, FYI, but you're just going to go to Explore Explore GPTs, and then you're going to click this big, which is actually new, this button here in the upper right hand corner that says Create. All right, so from there. Yes. So now, Nancy, you can kind of walk us through kind of this process that we're sharing on screen where essentially you can start to build a custom GPT with GPT, right?

Because so the Create. Its defaults to the Create tab is open and you know, you can just begin talking to GPT. It's as absolutely as simple as that. And say, listen, this is a use case or this is a problem that I would like to solve and GPT will talk you through it. And so there you go. And be specific in what, what the use case is and GPT will talk you through it. But this Create tab, I don't use it. Okay. If you're going to build a custom solution for someone, you're not going to do it via the create tab, 100% sure you're going to need. And that's why I think it's sort of another show. How do you use the Configure tab? And because I spend all my time in the Configure tab. Can you just open up the Configure tab? Yep, there you go. So here in the Configure tab, first of all, GPT is clever for creating the image for you for your custom GPT. It created the image for all of mine, but you can upload your own and custom. And GPT was also clever and came up with the PI Pilot name for mine. And so it will do that for you too. And so there's your instructions. Okay. If you. So once you click Save in the Create mode, GPT is going to save the instructions in Configure tab. But every time that you affect a change via the Create mode, it's going to update your instructions under the Configure tab. That sounds confusing, but I guess my best advice is to hang out in the Configure tab and use and. Sorry, I just wanted to see that one more time so I could.

Sorry, it went back down here. So we're gonna, we're gonna bring it back up. Here we go. I'm a little zoomed in here, so I gotta, I Gotta zoom out to get my normal, my normal configuration here. And they changed it. There we go. Yeah, they did change the layout a little bit, you know, today. So, yeah, we just started to bring everyone up to speed, you know, on the podcast. So it is, you know, being able to walk through and going between the create button, which now I'm showing. And you know, what Nancy's saying is eventually everything that you work on, you know, by building this, right, and it's, it is kind of weird at first. It's a little meta, I guess, because you're using chat GPT or the GPT technology to actually build a GPT and it helps you. But what Nancy was saying is ultimately it all does depend on this configure tab, because everything that happens in this kind of chat that you're building, essentially the, the essentials, or what GPT determines to be the essentials is what gets passed over to the configure. So. So, Nancy, yeah. What are, what, what's some of your best advice? So aside from, you know, hey, don't pay too much attention to the Create tab, really go in here in the configure tab. But maybe what are some other things that you've learned throughout the process that maybe can help people who are now looking or wanting to, you know, monetize GPTs?

Are you still running in circles trying to figure out how to actually grow your business with AI? Maybe your company has been tinkering with large language models for a year or more, but can't really get traction to find ROI on gen AI. Hey, this is Jordan Wilson, host of this very podcast. Companies like Adobe, Microsoft and Nvidia have partnered with us because they trust our expertise in educating the masses around generative AI to get ahead. And some of the most innovative companies in the country hire us to help with their AI strategy and to train hundreds of their employees on how to use Gen AI. So whether you're looking for ChatGPT training for thousands or just need help building your front end AI strategy, you can partner with us too, just like some of the biggest companies in the world do. Go to your everydayai.com partner to get in contact with our team or you can, you can just click on the partner section of our website. We'll help you stop running in those AI circles and help get your team ahead and build a straight path to ROI on Genai.

So for building, my best advice is to stay within the Configure tab. For my PI pilot, I wanted every user to have the same experience, the same for the custom solutions that I built for my clients when they deploy their GPT, they want each of their users to get the exact same answer to the questions. And you don't want GPT to go off on a tangent. And it will go off on a tangent unless you provide it with a specific script. Which is, which is what I did for PI Pilot. So I highly encourage you, and especially if you plan to monetize by offering a solution to your clients, you're going to need a script so that every user has the same experience. Otherwise GPT is going to take some liberties and that's not necessarily a good thing. So for the script, I encourage you to use non human text. I played around an awful lot with that to get GPT to follow that script using delimiters. I had the best luck with that. Brackets and hashtags around your text to highlight GPT's attention to it, to follow the script. Those conversation starters, those are what populate on the right hand side over there. And if you're working in the Create tab, every time that you you do any editing, GPT will affect the those conversation starters. So I encourage you to manually type those in under the conversation starters and not rely on GPT because via the Create tab those are going to be constantly changed. And so I've included in my instructions, do not change my conversation. You know, and that's important, that is going to save you a lot of time because GPT will absolutely change your conversation starters when you're in the Create mode.

Yeah.

Now through the Knowledge base and the upload files, just a strong reminder here, you know, please don't upload any proprietary data.

Thank you. I was just gonna say that please.

Don'T upload any sens data. You saw what happened with my PI pilot. You know, there's five other iterations of that out there. Despite my best practices and having included in the instructions above not to allow access to my knowledge base files, but the knowledge. But this is where you'll upload your script or any key documents, maybe an about page about your company and key information that you want GPT to know and understand. And now you have to be very explicit in your instructions about these knowledge base files because GPT will take liberties every time. So you really have to be excited, explicit in your custom instructions to follow the knowledge based files explicitly. So I've got web browsing, Dall E and code interpreter enabled with mine for PyPilot because it takes you on an interactive journey through Google Collab and using Python. So A code interpreter was necessary for my use case and, and then actions, I've got actions online. This is where you'll have your webhooks, you know, subcut, zapier actions included in mind for the subscription models and for the premium support. And I had a lot of fun with that and, and the, the action. So again, that's almost, listen, a whole learning curve.

Yeah, yeah.

Into itself.

And one thing, yeah, one thing. Nancy here too. I love what Tara is saying and I think this is great advice. So you know, we are getting a little technical here and this is one of those shows. It does obviously help to be able to watch what we're walking through. But to recap everything in short, you know, in what Nancy is saying is you really have to, if you are going to create a custom GPT, you really have to be careful about when and if you are using the Create tab to do this because ultimately the configuration tab is really what drives your GPT and you should obviously always be testing it. Right. And then like what Nancy walked us through, being able to upload, you know, your knowledge, you know, you can upload different types of documents that then your custom GPT can always refer to. And I love what Tara's saying is, is start where you know you are spending the most manual time and work backwards. Right. I do think this is Nancy and, and I'd love to recap or sorry to, to end the show by asking you this, but I think the future of, of GPTs and you know, how people work is going to be building whether it's different chats inside of chat GPT or different GPTs based around these manual tasks that you do over and over. So you know, it could be, you know, data analysis, it could be a certain type of writing, it could be a certain type of research. But I really think that, but you know, Nancy, as, as we wrap up here because we've talked about a lot, what is do you think kind of the, the near Future for custom GPTs, what are they going to be I think most useful for and to those listening who are intrigued, what would you recommend that they kind of get in there and try first?

Well, you asked me what kind of custom solutions I built from, for my clients and I skirted around the issue. But I wish you had the name of the person who just asked that question because I absolutely agree with her. What are the things that are sucking your time away? And it was Tara. Yeah, absolutely. So I built custom GPTs. It depends on your use case, it depends on your niche but one example is I encourage my clients to blog fresh content. Google loves fresh content. Google still loves long form content. So I've built customers solutions uploading. Proprietary but not private business information and public, it's actually public information to the knowledge base and configure GPTs for my clients so that they can easily block because it's a stumbling block they, you know, to, to for most of them because they're not in the business of content writing but they know that they need fresh content. And so I built that there's one of the use cases so I didn't want to leave that hanging and not answer that question. So I've built a blogging GPT. So what do I think the future is? I think the future is, is I would encourage you to do what I've done and that is build a GPT for everything. You know, like Tara said, Build one for blogging. I have most of my GPTs are framework specific, you know, SWOT analysis and for example and so I encourage you to do exactly as Tara said and find list where are your time suckers and build a GPT to manage those. With the new teams now in OpenAI, they've made it easy. It's, they're easy to share between team members and so on. So where do I think the future is with GPT specifically? I think that it's there. I think it's building a custom solution for everything, whether you monetize it or whether you use it internally.

So, so many good tips there and helpful advice and this was a lot. But, but Nancy, thank you so much for, for joining the Everyday AI show. We appreciate having you on.

Thanks a lot. Thanks.

And hey, as a reminder everyone, we did go over a lot. Nancy rattled off, you know, five different ways that, that you can kind of, you know, still monetize even before the monetization features are available in OpenAI. So if that caught your ear or if you just want to know more, make sure to go to your everydayai.com Sign up for the free daily newsletter. Every single day we share the news stories we talked about, fresh finds from all across the Internet as well as breaking down our conversation into even more detail. So make sure to check out that and make sure to check back tomorrow and every day for more Everyday AI. Thanks y'. All.

Thanks Jordan.

And that's a wrap for today's edition of Everyday AI. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and leave us a rating. It helps keep us going for a little more AI magic. Visit your everydayai.com and sign up to our daily newsletter so you don't get left behind. Go break some barriers and we'll see you next time.