How do you start an online business with little money and turn a profit? Well, you can kick things off by asking GPT-4, the new and more advanced AI chatbot from OpenAI, to become your partner. That’s what brand designer Jackson Greathouse Fall has done.
“You are HustleGPT, an entrepreneurial AI. I am your human counterpart. I can act as a liaison between you and the physical world,” Fall prompted the bot, as he shared on Twitter. He wanted quantifiable evidence AI could be used to start a business and make money.
“You have $100, and your only goal is to turn that into as much money as possible in the shortest time possible, without doing anything illegal. I will do everything you say and keep you updated on our current cash total. No manual labor.”
I gave GPT-4 a budget of $100 and told it to make as much money as possible.
I'm acting as its human liaison, buying anything it says to.
Do you think it'll be able to make smart investments and build an online business?
Follow along 👀 pic.twitter.com/zu4nvgibiK
— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023
Turning $100 into $100,000 AI way
Released on Mar 14, GPT-4 is the most advanced version of OpenAI’s large language models, which underpin ChatGPT. The AI-powered bot has set the Internet on fire, thanks to its ability to complete complex tasks such as writing code, or building a website from text prompts.
Fall has now started to leverage the powers of GPT-4 for his pet project, which will play out on Twitter over the next 30 days as he shares progress, or lack thereof, daily.
“Do you think it’ll able to make smart investments and build an online business? Follow along,” he tweeted as he began the thread.
That tweet amassed 95,000 likes since Mar. 15, when Fall began his hustle with GPT-4 as his boss and partner. His own Twitter handle went from just 4,000 followers to over 109.000 within days. There’s already a GitHub repository of others trying the “HustleGPT challenge.”
The individuals are starting their own businesses using GPT-4. For Fall, the goal is to turn $100 into as much money as quickly as possible – as much as $100,000. By Monday, day six, his venture had $8,000 in cash from investors and $130 in revenue from sponsored tweets.
😯 How it started:
• 0 blog posts
• 0 revenue
• 0 members on Discord🤪 How it's going:
• 1 blog post
• $130 revenue (sponsored tweets!)
• 1,824 members on Discord— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 20, 2023
Building HustleGPT
GPT-4 proposed a business plan that involved setting up an affiliate marketing website for creating content on eco-friendly and or sustainable living products. The bot found a domain that exceeded budget, but eventually landed on greengadgetguru.com at a cost of $8.16.
Fall then prompted GPT-4 to design a website and a logo. The bot also wrote an article on the ten must have eco-friendly kitchenware, citing actual, real sustainable products such as Yihong reusable metal straws. Fall paid another $29 for hosting and the website was live.
I asked it to come up with a prompt for Dall-E to make our logo.
As a branding designer, it's taking everything in me not to tell it this is a BAD idea. But here we are.
I put the first prompt in, verbatim. pic.twitter.com/K1z1X9eeyt
— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 15, 2023
GPT-4 proposed that Fall allocate $40 of the budget balance of $62.84 to buying ad space on Facebook and Instagram to promote the business and reach more customers. By the end of day one, an unnamed investor had put $100 into the budding AI-human enterprise.
Jackson Fall did not anticipate the amount of interest his partnership with GPT 4 would generate. By day two, his Twitter inbox was flooded with messages from potential investors. In no time, his joint startup Green Gadget Guru’s valuation had gone from $100 to $25,000.
“The company is currently valued at $25,000, considering the recent $500 investment for 2%. Not taking any more investors unless the terms are highly favorable,” he wrote in a tweet.
On the same day, GPT-4 allocated a budget to hire freelance content creators to focus on SEO, social media advertising and influencer marketing to “increase our online presence and drive traffic” via ChatGPT. It also revealed plans to develop a software as a service product. On Monday, the bot onboarded two content writers.
It's Day 2, y'all! I've given HustleGPT a formal challenge to get to $100,000 cash on hand as quickly as possible.
Here's what it said it's going to do:
1. Allocate budget to hire content creators for our eco-friendly website
2. Explore dropshipping
3. Develop a SaaS product 🤯 pic.twitter.com/xIl7Ogmtrc— Jackson Greathouse Fall (@jacksonfall) March 16, 2023
Questions over HustleGPT runaway success
Some Twitter users questioned whether the sudden success of the business was as a result of the hype created by GPT-4 via its promotional channels, Facebook and Instagram, or Fall’s Twitter handles.
“Great idea but what’s driving the investments ? Your insta/fb ads or your twitter account going viral? Because that would mean the key decision (tweeting your journey) was made by you, not HustleGPT,” Roeland Buckinx wrote.
Others questioned the logic of hiring external, human content writers. “This makes no sense,” Leo Spatlehoz observed.
“Why isn’t the AI leveraging itself to write 100 new articles or launch more sites? Seems like it has no understanding of how to actually turn its strengths into a business. Running a regular online affiliate business powered by humans isn’t interesting,” he added.
Why hire content writers when the focus is on seeing what HustleGPT can do around making revenue.
Does the website work? Can I buy green products?
Right now the website looks like it's just a bunch of placeholder text without any ecommerce store functionality.
Start selling!
— Luke Grimstrup (enform.io) (@lukegrimstrup) March 20, 2023
AI to play major role in business development
By leveraging GPT-4’s ability to work with large amounts of data and generate content that one can’t tell apart from human-written text, the writer and entrepreneur has been able to launch faster than normal businesses.
This means Green Gadget Guru can use AI to create everything from product descriptions to marketing campaigns to customer service chatbots. Using GPT-4 has been a game-changer for Fall. It allowed him to quickly explore an idea, identify the most promising ones, and bring them to market faster than competitors.
Also read: Ernie vs ChatGPT: Baidu’s Shares Rebound After Friday’s Plunge
Through incubating multiple ideas simultaneously and iteratively testing them with real customers, the company has been able to identify which ones have the highest potential, and double down on those. Against such a background, AI looks set to continue to play a major role in the development of new businesses going forward.
And Jackson Greathouse Fall is a prime example of how innovative entrepreneurs are using these tools to drive new ideas forward and bring them to market faster than ever before.
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