I grew ChatGPTBot on Twitter to 84k followers – how to monetize?
Over the past 3 months, I've been running https://twitter.com/ChatGPTBot, a Twitter bot that responds to @ mentions on twitter with ChatGPT's response.
It's currently at 84k followers and growing very quickly.
It's open source btw, and I'm also the author of the underlying chatgpt npm package.
👉 My problem is that I'm not sure what the best path forward would be for monetizing this bot and/or the audience I've grown.
So I'm turning to you – my fellow indie hackers for advice.
What should I do with this twitter bot, and how should I monetize this incredible audience it's built?
Thanks! 🙏
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Nice to see this. I write at Micro SaaS Ideas and here are my thoughts.
Sponsors / affiliate links + info products 🔥 Great ideas && thanks @upenv 🙏
Hi, Trevis!
I'm a business intelligence analyst, so this type of problem are my everyday tasks.
Your current problem is that you don't know the best path to monetize, but the underlying problem is that you need to map all your value delivery flow and identify the costs of each step. From there, you can define better your problem and solve it.
For example, if your costs are directly related to the amount of ChatGPT requests that people send, you need to attach your income to it, or you are putting yourself in disadvantage compared with future competitors.
And of course, once you have your underlying problem well defined, let ChatGPT brings you some ideas :P
Makes sense; appreciate the insights, @eolivera 🙏
This comment was deleted 6 months ago.
I'm glad that it was useful! That type of analysis is called 'root cause analysis', and if you are an image-first person, you can use tools like 'Ishikawa' or 'Fishbone' diagrams + Draw.io to analyze it 👍
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Well, you can search for books on problem-solving. I've read a lot, but I don't remember their titles.
These types of books aim to 'teach' the soft skill of solving problems with creativity (I put 'teach' in quotation marks because a soft skill isn't learned solely by reading). They provide you with ideas, but you need to expose yourself to environments where you can put these concepts into practice.
That's where experience comes into play!
I think something like this is hard to monetize. What would likely be better would be:
Using this to market other products. So each time someone posts a query to the bot, have it say "also, check out a new project from the founder x!"
Use it for adspace. Make it so ppl can purchase promotional posts that come with the replies for the bot.
Also, curious to hear, do you have any plans for image generation? If so, I'd check out Evoke, we have a pretty good AI API backend
Agreed; def planning on using it as a marketing / promotional channel.
Checking out Evoke now; how does it compare w/ Replicate & HuggingFace? (I've already used them a bunch at this point)
Right now, Evoke is cheaper and faster than replicate and huggingface. For now, we just offer base stable diffusion 1.5 with some tuning in the background to ensure better images
But we're releasing an API soon that will produce much better images.
Feel free to check out our discord or follow me on twitter for updates.
You can start building AI tools and sell them to your audience. Congrats! This is a huge achievement.
That's pretty cool. I made an AI tool but for Linkedin. Would love to dicuss sponsored posts.
Awesome; can you DM me on twitter? https://twitter.com/transitive_bs
Send me a link to your AI tool :)
Hey! You can do affiliates or sponsored post, I'd be interested! I recently launched a ChatGPT Starter Kit. Contact me in DM if you're interested ;). Best of luck!
Definitely interested :)
What kind of actions did the bot have? You mention it replied to mentions but that would imply people mentioned you at a all - which no-one does with a new account, how did you train the bot from the first 1-10k followers?
It seems you've tried to look like an official ChatGPT account which is smart, but keep in mind OpenAI legal team is pretty agressive - I would try to steer away from using their logo etc.
Great points.
The bot grew 100% organically since I released the first version a few days after ChatGPT launched and was going super viral. I seeded some example usage on the top chatgpt-related twitter threads showing how to use it by example in the early days, but I haven't done that for months. Twitter's autocomplete did most of the work early on. Now it's mainly very large accounts using the bot which sparks other users to try it out. I have a weighting heuristic to prioritize responding to really large accounts before other users which has worked out really well.
Agreed re:legal. I've already spoken to a rep from their team unofficially about it.
I cant give you monetize suggestions, but as a developer, I am impressed. Kudos!
Among other things, you have built an audience and it will help you launch your own next big X, where
X could be a book, service, or newsletter or thingamagij.
You are in the unqiue place where you have built up an audience.
Sponsorships ?
A Simple Text in the profile linking to sponsors for a fixed amount of time?
This weeks sponsor - The All New Exciting AI Blogging Tool - OHMYBLOG.AI
How about partnering with hackers launching apps within the ChatGPT ecosystem? For example I'm sure this person would appreciate the partnership: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/please-vet-my-startup-idea-chatgpt-client-for-teams-d3bdbeec77
Influencers already monetise their following, why not follow the same path?
You can begin building artificial intelligence technologies and selling them to your intended audience. Congrats! This is a fantastic achievement.
Hey, we can set a promotional deal with you if you're open for offer. Please email me through email address mentioned in my profile. Or give me your email address.
Would you be interested in promoting a paid AI tool? If so, I have a product that I would like to promote and I can personally contact you to discuss it further.
Interesting what did he post?