How to Create CustomGPTs

Welcome back to Payroll. And in today's episode, I'm going to share with you how our team uses custom GPTs to save well over 10 hours a week doing certain custom tasks. That's right, custom GPTs, not how to prompt, not how to use basic ChatGPT. In this episode, I'm actually going to dive into how we created custom GPTs, some other custom GPTs that we use that were created by others that we use to, again, save a ton of time, save us from having to do manual repetitive tasks over and over again. And I think you're going to get a ton of value out of it. These are things that I've earned over the last 6 months through trial and error, things that I've created dozens of these custom GPTs. I've taken courses, I've watched a ton of YouTube videos, I've done the research, I've gotten to the point of wanting to give up and then kept at it because it can be a pain to set some of these things up. But once you get it tweaked, just the way you want it and need it, then it's totally worth it.

Welcome to Payrollin', the show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, this is the podcast for you. And now here's your host, Matt Vadie.

Let's go. So today I'm going to talk about what is a custom GPT, how do you create and program one, what GPTs I've created that I use almost every week, how we get our team to use AI more, predominantly ChatGPT, then some other tools we use besides ChatGPT every week. So let's dive right in. What is a custom GPT? So a custom GPT is a new feature that was rolled out, I don't know, about 6 months ago. We're sitting here in June of 2024. And this is the ability to create a singular GPT that's meant for a specific use case. And so one of the examples I'm going to show here in just a moment is our GuruGPT. I've loaded about 20 internal documents into the GPT. I've given it a lot of our internal information, you know, our PTO policy, our handbook, so that if employees have a question, hey, do we have Memorial Day off? All they need to do is ask the custom GPT and it has access to that and much, much more. And so custom GPTs allow you that level of flexibility to isolate what information the ChatGPT bot has access to and what it doesn't. And if you're listening to the podcast on Spotify, you may wanna tune in on YouTube because I'm going to be sharing my screen here in just a moment, but I'll also do my best to talk about it in a detailed way where you can understand it when you do log into ChatGPT and you can come back to the video for reference if needed. All right, so let's talk about custom GPTs and some of the ones that we've created here. So I've created a handful that are more impactful than others. So the GuruGPT is very useful because it serves all of our team. It has all of our information in there. Again, like, we put our new hire handbook in there, uh, not, not our employee handbook, but our guide that has access to all the different systems we use, how we use them, internal SOPs. It can guide somebody to the right place based on the information they're looking for. Um, we also have created a knowledge base writer, which I shared recently in the Facebook group, the Payroll Innovation Network. If you're you're not a member there, make sure you search for that on Facebook, Payroll Innovation Network, and I'll gladly let you in there if you're in the payroll industry. Uh, but the knowledge base writer is a very cool one in that I put in some custom programmed instructions that tell it exactly the format that we want our knowledge base articles written in, um, how to hyperlink to other articles from our knowledge base, uh, you know, what what different sections of the article we need. And then what we do is we will record a video in Loom and take the transcript. That's Loom.com. And that's gonna be one of the tools I'm gonna come back to at the end of the episode and talk about what a tremendous tool that is and how much time that has saved us over the years. But you can create a Loom, click on copy transcript, throw it into the knowledge base writer, and it spits out a perfectly formatted knowledge base article in about 10 seconds. And so this has helped us to create tons and tons of new articles for our clients, for our internal team, to share with them how to do things inside of our app. Um, you know, if you've ever been in an app, you know that the knowledge base is a tremendous help to make sure that you can get done what you need to do when you need to do it. And so that's been tremendously helpful there. Uh, we also have created one— so we follow a philosophy from a book called Predictable Revenue when we look at our sales process as a big big part of it. And Predictable Revenue is a fantastic book. And then there are other resources online from the author and others have written about following the process. So basically, we fed all those into a custom GPT and we can ask it questions about what we're doing next. So, hey, we've got our ICP all dialed in. Now we're looking to start our cold outreach program. What are the top ways we should be doing cold outreach? Okay, great. Cold emails recommended. Can you write me 3 email scripts based on the ICP that I provided. So it's very helpful. And like anything with the writing, it's a little, you know, hit or miss. And we'll come back to the writing that comes out if you're using the writing for anything customer or prospect facing. And, you know, some of y'all— I'm gonna stop here and take a big deep breath. And whoo, some of y'all, I see your posts on LinkedIn and they're clearly written by ChatGPT. They got the little emojis at the front. They've got the language that ChatGPT uses. Sometimes ChatGPT will capitalize all the letters in the sentence, first letters of the words in the sentence. It just, you can pick it out from a mile away, guys. If you're gonna use custom GPT to write content, A, you gotta get better prompts because the prompts you're using, you're just saying, write me a LinkedIn post about XYZ. Get a better prompt, which is one of the things we've done with one of our custom GPTs that helps us to write social is we put in our 6 key frameworks we use for writing social posts. And then we choose from which of those frameworks we want it to write the post in. And then it's writing it based on an actual proven copywriting framework. And we've got historical examples in there that I've written that were human-based. So now it knows how I write, what formats put the writing in, and how to use my tone. When you just throw a random prompt in there, write a social media post for me about XYZ topic, we all know it, it doesn't help improve your credibility. As a matter of fact, it detracts from your credibility. So make sure that if you're using ChatGPT to help with social, take the extra time on the front end to dial in either a custom GPT or a series of prompts that you can keep in a document or something to create better content. If you're gonna use it consistently, you've got to do this. All right, so predictable revenue, leadership coaching is a big one that I use. So I've created my own custom GPT leadership coach. And so this is someone I talk to daily. As a matter of fact, in the latest version 4.0, the O is not a zero, it's an O for omnichannel. You can actually speak to it on your phone. So when you pull it open, you can click on a little headphone icon and have a conversation with your custom GPT where it will speak back to you. I know it's weird, y'all. And it's definitely weird when I'm driving into work and I'm talking to my phone who's, you know, having a legit conversation with me about my goals and what I need to do today to accomplish those goals. And Have I made progress? And that's really what I'm doing is I'm looking at it in 30-day windows and sprints and saying, hey, here are my goals for the next 30 days. I need you to remember these. Here are the actions I need to take daily. Help me every day to stay on track. And for me right now, the big focus is on acquisitions, finding other payroll bureaus or CPAs with books of business that we can acquire their book of business. So it's a good reminder every morning when I speak to my leadership guru, leadership coach, excuse me, about where my focus should be, because it's very easy to think like, hey, sending those 15 emails this morning to CPAs that might be interested in partnering in some way, shape, or form could get easily pushed to the back burner. And yes, I know when you hear me talk about sending them individually, I do send them individually because I really want to customize them. If I know the person, I want to make sure I reference why I know them. If I don't know them, I want to look at their website, look at their LinkedIn profile, get to know them a little bit more. You know, spray and pray when it comes to acquisitions is not ideal because you're going to end up with hitting a bunch of targets that aren't really a good fit for what you're looking for and wasting everybody's time. So I'd rather put a little bit more time in on the front end. But anywho, so the Leadership Coach is a great way for me to stay on task every single day, and it did not take long at all to program. And with the newest feature, it is actually remembering those conversations now. And this, y'all, this was huge because this is something I wanted to build early on in ChatGPT. I actually spoke to our development team and got kind of a rough estimate of how many hours it would take to build what I'm, what I've created now with a custom GPT, which effectively cost me nothing, or the $20 a month that I pay ChatGPT. And I was pretty close to spending $40,000 a year to make a SaaS version, or not a year, $40,000 to make a SaaS version of this where you could use the LeadershipGPT and have conversations with it and, you know, have it be your daily coach. And I wanted to use it for our internal team. We just need, you know, everybody needs coaching. This was a low-cost way to get some coaching on a daily basis without having to talk to a coach on a daily basis. Thought it was a tremendous idea. Uh, the, the folks that I, I was actually gonna develop it with thought it was an idea too. They wanted a piece of the pie in trying to look at how do we market and bring this to market. And then literally within a month of us scoping this out, ChatGPT released a feature that makes it— now look, it's not a SaaS version of it and it's not completely dialed in off the shelf. You've gotta make your own. But they released a version. The biggest thing that it does is remember the conversation. So it's kind of useless to have a leadership coach who doesn't remember what you told it yesterday. Now, one key thing to point out there, it remembers the conversation in the thread in which you're having it. It doesn't remember it across threads. So for example, if you're gonna start up a leadership, uh, coach GPT, you need to make sure you keep opening the same conversation every morning so that it will stay— its memory will keep what you already provided the day before. And then finally, of course, our last one, uh, we have different variations of content writing GPTs. Have a blog writer GPT that we use. Again, I just copy the transcript from this episode out of riverside.fm, and so simple. There's literally just a copy button at the bottom of the page. As soon as I'm done with this, I pop it into the, uh, blog writing GPT that I've created. It's got specific instructions how to pull out, how to do keyword research, how to put the keyword research at the top, how to start the blog, what the introduction should be formatted like, what the body should be formatted like, what the, uh, conclusion should be formatted like. Don't leave anything to chance when it comes to allowing it to do things on its own. So that's one thing that I've learned is when the more sort of free rein you give ChatGPT, the worse the results, especially when it comes to writing. Again, it's very obvious when something was written by ChatGPT unless you've taken the time to really customize step-by-step prompts or step-by-step instructions on the backend of the custom GPT. And on the backend, it's interesting because if you start to feed it too much information, then it will get confused. So I like to keep things, I like to either A, have a separate writer for different things. So like I mentioned, I have a separate blog GPT versus a separate social media GPT. And there's a very good reason for that, and that's because it just does not remember and/or differentiate the, the expectations very well. And so I want to make sure it has proper expectations based on what I'm looking for. And so, all right, I'm going to go into ChatGPT right now for just a minute. And again, if you're watching on YouTube, awesome, I'm going to share my screen. If you're not, no big deal, we will go ahead and I will do my best to talk over it in such a way that it will make sense to you either way. And so when I log into ChatGPT in the top left, you're going to see— and, and first of all, y'all, I'm assuming you're on the paid version. And if you're not, you should be. It's $20 a month. If you don't think this is going to save you a couple hours a month or even, you know, look, I don't know what you value your time at, but it would not take much to make your time worth $20. So in the top left, you're going to see Explore GPTs. When I click on Explore GPTs, I get two things. I get the ability to search all the GPTs that have already been made. So if nothing else, whatever you're trying to create, a blog writer GPT, a social media post writer GPT, somebody has already created one out there. Now I can say from sort of testing these that oftentimes they are lazy, like I mentioned, like the blog writers are almost all awful. You have to understand what makes for a good blog. What's going to provide tremendous value to the audience and is not something they can just pump into ChatGPT themselves and ask the question, right? Like, there's a term I heard a while ago, not a term, but sort of a philosophy. There's a company that's tremendous at SEO. That is their hammer. And I'm going to do an episode soon about what is your hammer. But the, their hammer is SEO. This is their best thing. This is their go-to-market with any business they go into and they've replicated across multiple companies. But So interviewing the guy, the interviewer, it was Sean Priory from My First Million, who you've heard me talk about on here before, and I can't remember the name of the SEO company or I'd shout them out too. But he asked them, you know, what's your overarching philosophy around SEO? And they said, it's very simple. You've got to earn the click. And so when you think about writing a blog post, writing a LinkedIn post, writing a Twitter post, whatever it is, are you earning the click? And so when you hit that article on page 1 on Google for whatever you're searching for, how to create a custom GPT, it better have be long form, step-by-step, informative. Have— it's going to see— you're going to notice when you start to talk about whether or not it ranked, it's going to have at least 4 or 5 images, it's going to have at least 5 links out both internal and external links. And so there's a lot that goes into the proper formatting and understanding of what a user wants. And I mean, it's gonna have a strong hook at the beginning that's gonna get you to keep reading. Every line is gonna be designed to get you to read the next line. ChatGPT does not do that on its own. ChatGPT writes on its own. It's just pulling from a database, spitting out information in a very generic blog format. You've got to give it instructions. So I've found that a lot of these custom GPTs on writing are pretty lazy, but you may have better luck than me. Now, one thing that I do love to use in here, probably the custom GPT I use the most, strangely, is a YouTube, um, summarizer. And so when I come in here to search GPTs, I can type in YouTube. There's a bunch of different ones. The one I like Let's see, it's definitely not the one with the most reviews. I wanna say it's this one. Yeah. So it's this one. So all you need to do is— this is a good example. Somebody's already created this custom GPT. It's a YouTube summarizer. If I put the link from a YouTube video in there, it gives me a full summary breakdown. Now one of two things can happen. I don't— I no longer need to watch that video because I can quickly read the CliffsNotes of it. Or I can say, oh, they're gonna talk about that thing about 3 ways in, or about 3, 3/4 of the way in. Awesome. I can go to that timestamp and watch that section because I don't need to watch the whole thing. Let's face it, people with YouTube videos are incentivized to make it in a way that's designed to make you watch, not necessarily in a way that's provide maximum value in your time. And so that's a good one. I use a custom GPT off the shelf that is somebody else's, and there's tons of these in here, so don't, be scared to bounce around and look for it. Now let's talk about creating your own custom GPT. So if I'm in ChatGPT, right up here in the top right corner, there is a create button. And so now you've got at the top left, you've got create and configure. It's gonna ask you to configure first so you can name it. Could be Blog Article Writer GPT. Description, what does it do? It writes blogs for me. Now instructions, This is where you want to get specific. So they've got some prompts in here that say, what does this GPT, GPT do? How does it behave? What should it avoid doing? I'm gonna show you some examples. One of the interesting things though that you'll notice is no matter what I type in here, it kinda paraphrases it and puts it into its own language a little bit when after you hit save. And then you can also add custom conversation starters. So in my mind, these are the prompts. So for example, when I say, talked about earlier on our social media writer, when I've got 6 different types of posts that I want to write, I put those right in here to the conversation starters as prompts. So that way when I come in and I've got my topic or I've got my transcript or I've got my blog that I'm repurposing into other pieces of content, I can click on the conversation starter, which is basically a way for me to click easily, click through a prompt that I'm gonna use again and again. And then next up, you can add knowledge. So this is the real magic here, y'all, and this is where you can talk about programming a custom GPT with no programming knowledge whatsoever. And so when I come to the knowledge, this is where I can upload files, and I'll show you an example for those watching in a moment from our GuruGPT. We probably got about 20 files uploaded in there, and we just keep adding to it every week, just keep adding. But in that example, again, the employee handbook, the SOPs, the user manuals for different products that we use. Heck, you could export to PDF an entire knowledge base from somebody else's system, put it in here, and give it access to it. Sometimes it's a little hit or miss with the ability to scrape websites. It's— I, I can't quite get my arms around that. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn't work at all. Um, so uploading files is critical because then it's pulling off your information, which makes the next part so critical. There's a capabilities section down here of— it's got 3 boxes you can check. Web browsing, DALL·E image generation, and code interpreter and data analysis. And so do you want this custom GPT to have these features? So web browsing, you would turn off if you only want it to pull from your information. And so in our GuruGPT, I'm fairly certain we have web browsing turned off because we don't want it pulling in random information off the web when we want it pulling off of our documentation we've uploaded in there. Code interpreter and data analysis. So you would want this on. As an example, one of the things we use ChatGPT for all the time is just cleaning up Excel files. During implementation, we'll get these Excel files where the rows and the columns are off, or there's blanks, or there's zeros, or whatever. We will go— we will— we can clean it up easily by putting it into ChatGPT and just putting in a simple prompt of telling it what we want done to the document and/or file. So down at the bottom, you'll also have this action section. So actions are more custom programs. So these are typically Python, uh, coding that you can put in here. One example of how we've used this is we actually had a gentleman on Upwork program a custom GPT that is pulling off of a Google Drive folder. And so we're hoping this will be— it's kind of version 1, but we're hoping this will be our way to make the GuruGPT a little bit more sustainable long-term because uploading every document in here is kind of a pain in the butt. And then what if something changes? Then you've got to make sure you get it out of there and get the new version in. Whereas if we have everything in a Google Drive and it's constantly pulling against that, then we can have live access to information anytime. It's a little slow and it doesn't seem to be quite as accurate as pulling off of the documents at this point. But I think that we're early there and there have been some other tools I found that will do it. But same sort of issues. It's, you know, if you think about, I'm asking it to pull off of one document off rather out of maybe 50 in there and it's reading everything from the top level down. What's the name of the document? What's included in it? And it might just get a little bit more confused than when we have it directly in the custom GPT. All right. So that's a little bit how to create one. I'm going to show you again. I'll pull up an example of one of ours here. So the GuruGPT that I've been talking about is a good example, one to use. So when I click on the GPT, so there's a couple of things here. You can share these with your team. One person can create them and you can share a link. So if I'm clicking on the top left right now, you'll see I can copy the link and share it with my teammates. I can also click on this Edit GPT button. And so this is where really the magic happens, right? So we've got this Create button. I can talk to it and tell it, oh hey, last time you gave me some bad information because you, you said our PTO policy is this, but it's actually that. And it will remember that and it will update its settings so that it gives me better information going forward. But in the configuration, you'll see I've put some conversation starters in here. Um, how much is the monthly premium on this plan? How do I use the CRM? What holidays do we get off? I've uploaded everything from our health insurance documents, all of our summary plan descriptions. I've exported all of the articles from our SOP system and put them in here. So you could literally ask, hey, I'm trying to process Dr. X's payroll, um, you know, is there anything unique about the biweekly payroll that I should be on the lookout for? And so we've really given a ton, ton, ton of information to this, and we've given it the ability to access a ton of our stuff. Without, with, with again, a high level of caution over what sort of information we share. And you'll notice nothing I just covered has anybody's personally identifiable information, no bank accounts, nothing like that. This is our company information. And so it's our decision whether or not we want to put it in there. And heck, half the stuff I share with you all on the podcast anyway, so I don't really get too worried about putting it into this custom GPT. But, you know, up here in the top right, you'll see there's a share button and an update button. And so I can continue to build on this and make it better over time. And that's just one of many ways we're using custom GPTs every day. And the GuruGPT is one that's resourceful for all of our teams. So I love that one. But as promised, here are a couple other ways that we use AI on a daily basis. I think the first thing that's important to do is if you want AI to be a focus of your team, you have to make it a focus of your team. So for example, every Wednesday we have a Lunch and Learn where we have our AI best practices. I'll be real with you, it's basically turned into a ChatGPT brainstorm session. Hey, what are you doing different? You know, what, what prompts have you built? What custom GPTs have you built? And we're just sort of brainstorming. We're finding ways inside of our other apps to use it. I've mentioned on the podcast before how Desk, Zoho Desk, our, our customer support portal has an AI interface with ChatGPT where we can get answers drafted to our clients' questions in there directly without having to type them. Then you can tweak them after the fact. So Zoho Desk is a great AI tool we use. Riverside.fm, where I'm recording this podcast right now, is a tremendous tool. When I get done with this, it's going to give me some magic edits. It's going to not only edit the audio, not only help me to remove any long pauses, any ums, any ahs, but also it creates a bunch of YouTube Shorts or TikTok videos that are less than a minute long that can be downloaded and uploaded and are just ready to go. So it saves us a ton of time. One of our teammates used to have to edit all those, look for them. We're basically of the mindset of if it shoots out a few and they're not any good, oh well, just move on. The next day we'll grab a couple or we'll publish some that we choose ourselves. So riverside.fm has some fantastic AI features in it. Zapier is a great tool. I don't know if any of y'all are using Zapier, but a good example there would be, hey, we can have that clip exported, have it automatically posted to a Trello card so that the person can add it to our WordPress site. We're working on having it go automatically onto our WordPress site without anybody having to touch it, or in that case, having it automatically go to our YouTube Shorts without anybody having to touch it. Um, and the final and my favorite tool of all these softwares I use, anything I wish I could have created, is loom.com. So Loom not only helps you to screen record, give you the transcript, give you the video, you can, you can do exactly what I just did here where you're looking at me for one part, you're looking at my screen for another part, but it will take the transcript now with their new AI features and you can click a button and it will create an SOP. You can click a button and it will write an article. And so now you have an SOP with a video that you can hand off to someone in your team and never have to do that task again. I've saved thousands of hours with Loom over the years without even these AI features that summarize it in text very nicely, just because it's the easiest way to delegate and the easiest way to pass along information. You know, leave the AI aside. It's just a fantastic tool. And again, it saved me hundreds, if not thousands of hours over the years of being able to easily delegate and have folks help me with things. So that's just a quick breakdown on all the different ways we're using custom GPTs at Guru. We'd love to hear your feedback. What helped you? What didn't help you? How are you guys using it today? Please make sure to comment on the LinkedIn post and share this episode with a friend if you enjoyed it. I appreciate you swinging by. Thank you so much for your time.