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The next gold rush: how to get rich with GPTs 🤖
Welcome to a fresh edition of eBiz Insider, my free newsletter packed with tips, insights and opportunities to build your online business.
Today...
How To Get Rich With GPTs
Launch a VA Business From Scratch in 30 Days
His $500,000 Exit After 6 Failed Businesses
$100,000 Selling 💩 In A Box
$50K/Month From Only 8 Customers
$1M/Year Asking People How Much Money They Make
He Landed A $100K Freelance Client
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How To Get Rich With GPTs
OpenAI recently announced the launch of the GPT Store 🥳
That's an app store for ChatGPT, where anyone can create their own apps that enhance ChatGPT's functionality.
Example: there's a GPT called YouChat that lets you chat with any YouTube video 💬
(Note that ChatGPT Plus is required to build your own GPTs and use those created by others. That costs $20/month.)
👉 Here's an 81-minute video from Liam Ottley breaking down the significance of the GPT Store and showing how you'll soon be able to make money from it.
Liam says in the video...
Looking back to 2008, when Apple unleashed their App Store, only those with app development skills got a slice of the millions the App Store generated.
The difference for us today is that the skills required to create for the GPT store and start making money can be learned in an hour or two, rather than 3 years of software engineering at college.
GPTs can't actually be monetized yet, but OpenAI plans to launch a “builder revenue program in Q1. So hopefully within the next few weeks 🤞
Liam again…
Since there's going to be tens of thousands of people rushing to this new opportunity, the challenge is not knowing how to create GPTs, but how to create actually valuable GPTs that will stand out from the competition.
Liam lists 5 skills you'll need to accomplish this…
Market Research and Use Case Identification
Data Sourcing, Preparation, and Curation.
Prompt Engineering
Developing tools that enable your GPT to perform functions.
Marketing
In the same video, he goes on to create a "stock investing assistant, based on the wisdom of Charlie Munger," showing every step along the way 👀
To give you a better sense of what's possible here, here's another GPT that blew my mind 👇
Grimoire is "a GPT coding wizard" created by Nick Dobos, a former Twitter engineer.
Examples of use:
Someone tweeted…
I've been using the GPT Grimoire… which is incredible… I've been relearning Ruby on Rails with it as a teacher and it's been phenomenal.
While creating and monetizing your own GPTs sounds awesome, I reckon the fastest way to make money here is to become a GPT creator for hire 😎
In other words: help businesses create their own GPTs to increase productivity.
Or even just show them how to use existing GPTs, set all that up for them.
Check out OpenGPT.com for inspiration, lots of crazy GPTs listed there 🤯
Launch a VA Business From Scratch in 30 Days
Today's email is brought to you by The Savvy System.
That's a top-rated course for building a virtual assistant business 🏆
We've collected 25 ratings and reviews from students.
Here's what one student had to say…
I bought the course 9 months ago, and now have a full-time business with 17 clients and 5 employees. The program offers step-by-step instructions on building a business and the options to scale. They cover everything from branding to taxes.
His $500,000 Exit After 6 Failed Businesses
Ash Read founded a niche website called Living Cozy, described as “your go-to source for modern homeware and furniture brands” 🏡
Per a recent profile, the site was earning “tens of thousands of dollars per month” – so $20K+ monthly revenue – before Ash sold it last year.
He apparently sold it for a "6-figure deal," and I'm guessing that amounts to at least $500,000 🤑
How it all began…
Read started at age 18 with his first software company and kept trying businesses as side gigs over the next decade.
For his day job, he worked in content marketing and SEO for software companies.
Ash ended up launching 6 software companies before starting Living Cozy, but none of them took off 😕
He writes…
It seemed like software was the easiest route to go from zero to 1 and build something but in reality playing to my strengths was the best route.
His strengths were content marketing and SEO, skills he honed at his day job.
So…
In 2020… he started a new [side] project: compiling a curated list of e-commerce brands in the home goods space…
In one weekend, he built a website using Webflow, a no-code platform. He called it Living Cozy.
And…
He made his first revenue 6 weeks later when a user purchased bedding through an affiliate link on his site.
📝 Ash writes…
That was a really big moment. It made me believe, if I can get more traffic to this website I can drive revenue.
Then…
After about six months, Living Cozy was getting tens of thousands of pageviews, and by the end of 2020, Read felt like it was truly taking off.
Ash ran Living Cozy as a side project for a couple of years, which was tough…
The time constraints were a huge challenge, he said.
“The way I got over this challenge was by being ruthless with prioritization and only focusing on the tasks that I knew would scale the business”
🥳 He finally quit his day job in November 2022…
That shift enabled him to focus on building deeper relationships with brands. The company already had affiliate relationships with about 100 brands
Ash tweeted last September…
Living Cozy has been acquired.
The internet is flooded with content and Living Cozy managed to stand out by doing things the right way and taking no shortcuts.
Last words from Ash…
It took me quite a long time to learn to actually just lean into your strengths when you’re building a business.
His strengths were things he was already doing well at his day job.
Do you have a strength like that you can lean into? 🤔
🗂 $100,000 Selling 💩 In A Box
From the archive, published May 2022…
That’s ShitExpress.com, a service that lets you anonymously send different kinds of animal poop to “the people who annoy you the most.”
It launched in 2014 and got some early coverage by VICE, which reported that the business did more than $10,000 in sales the first month.
Crazy thing is, payment was only accepted in Bitcoin, which has gone up about 120x in value since 2014 🚀
3 years after launch, ShitExpress blogged: 2 Tonnes of Horse Shit, $100k in Revenue and 6,000 Happy Recipients
There’s also a blog post about starting the business, which contains lines like “Shit Explosion on My Vacation” and a commenter asking…
I’ve got 4 horses that produce 8-12 piles a day. Can I become a drop-ship distributor for you?
More recently, ShitExpress is trying to sell NFTs, and grow their TikTok with models singing and dancing about the service 🤣
$50K/Month From Only 8 Customers
Ever heard of Doxci? 🧐
They sell fancy-sounding software…
Doxci uses Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automatically read, process, and complete tasks associated with enterprise documents.
In an interview last year, Doxci co-founder Austin Ambrozi revealed that the business was earning $50,000 per month from just 8 customers within 2 years of launch 🚀
Austin explains…
One of our clients is an insurance company.
They get all of their applications for coverage to a designated email inbox. Typically, whenever someone applies for insurance, they send in some supplementary documents, you know, a proof of address, driver's license, a couple of things like that.
So, Doxci will monitor the email inbox. It will read whenever an email comes in for applying for coverage… It'll read each of the corresponding documents. It'll then calculate a rate that can be offered to the prospect based on the information provided.
And then… it'll automatically draft an email back to them saying, "Hey, you know, this is the rate that we can offer you. If you submit X, Y, and Z pieces of additional information, we might be able to offer you a better rate."
It sends the email, and that whole process is now automated and doesn't require human involvement at all.
Yeah, not the easiest product to build.
But the interesting part to me is that they only have 8 customers.
So they're charging an average of $6250/month per customer 🤯
They don't even have a pricing page on their website; looks like you have to book a consultation to get that info.
Goes to show that you don't need a lot of customers to make a lot of money.
As long as you're solving a painful enough problem for customers with plenty of money to spend, the sky's the limit 📈
Related…
$1M/Year Asking People How Much Money They Make
Hannah Williams and James Daniels are the couple behind Salary Transparent Street 💰
They started in 2021 by posting TikTok interviews with people on the street, asking how much money they make.
And last year alone the business apparently did $1 million in revenue, mainly from partnerships with companies like Indeed and Capital One 😳
In a recent interview, Hannah reveals how they got started…
I found out that I was underpaid at my job.
In 2021, I started a new job as a senior data analyst and I was making $90,000.
Shortly after starting the job, my only other colleague on my team was let go, and all his responsibilities became my responsibilities… I realized that I was probably underpaid... As I did more market research, I found out that I was underpaid about $20,000 to $25,000, compared to what my peers were making in my market.
When I asked for a raise, I was denied.
🧐 So she went looking for another job, and eventually landed an interview…
I had done all my market research, I knew that I could earn between $100,000 to $120,000. I was going to ask for $105,000, but I didn’t know what the company’s budget was…
I had nothing to lose so I asked, “Would you mind sharing the budget with me?”
She [HR] was like, “Our budget is about $115,000.” I said, “Perfect, that sounds great to me.”
💡 That was a light bulb moment for Hannah…
Even though I felt like I’d done a lot of market research… I was still going to ask for $10,000 less than they were offering. And they weren’t going to tell me that they had saved $10,000 on me—they weren’t going to offer that to me in goodwill.
Then…
I had seen some people doing street interviews, and I was like, it might be a really cool idea to just go ask people on the street how much they make… And so I got my husband to come out with me in Georgetown one day, and we filmed it. It went viral. And the rest is history.
🤑 Monetizing with partnerships works well for them…
Choosing not to sell anything to our audience and making sure everything is free is a very deliberate choice that we made to build trust with our audience. Because as a consumer of content, I hate being sold to.
An early partner video they did…
So it's just more free content posted to their usual channels, but highlighting a brand they've partnered with.
Hannah's career advice at the end of another video 👀
Say yes to a lot of opportunities that make you uncomfortable. That’s the best way to learn and the best way to figure out what you like to do and what you don’t like to do.
I reckon there’s lots of opportunity to emulate Salary Transparent Street.
The same concept could work well in other countries and languages. Or you could niche down to a specific industry or profession.
The other day I saw a finance app in the UK 🇬🇧 asking people in London how much money they make. Their video has 80k likes, and it's not even their main thing.
Alternatively, you could try building a niche website showing salary info.
Resources for that 👇
Joe Davies’ keyword research video + 600 researched keywords to target
Ian Nuttall’s US wage statistics dataset
🗂 He Landed A $100K Freelance Client
From the archive, published February 2022…
Developer Jovan Cicmil reveals how in this article.
In a word: networking 🤝
Jovan has been freelancing since 2011 and it seems he’s always made an effort to build his network of clients and peers (ie. other developers).
The more clients he served and served well, the more referrals he would get. And the more he helped other developers, the more they would send work and recommendations his way.
This combination of experience and referrals from both previous clients and colleagues resulted in me blowing all the other candidates out of the water (client’s words, not mine) and landing the sort of client freelancers dream about.
How can you go the extra mile on a client project or help out another freelancer today? 🤔
🔎 freelancing | permalink
…
Thanks to Fardeen Khan for helping me write and research today's newsletter.
Hasta la próxima, rock on with your legendary self 💪
Niall Doherty – Canillo, Andorra
eBiz Facts (follow on twitter)
P.S. Want to launch a VA business in the next 30 days?
Check out The Savvy System, a top-rated course for building a virtual assistant business 😍
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