TextGPT: A Profitable Weekend Project
Hey everyone, Franco here and I want to share with everyone the story of how my weekend project, TextGPT, turned into a profitable side business.
For years, I've been toying with the idea of a SMS-based application. I find SMS to be so frictionless and easy to adopt. A few weeks ago, I had the idea of building an SMS-based AI chatbot that would be easy to use and highly effective. I wanted to create a chatbot that could be accessed through a messaging app without the need to download an app or visit a website. With the help of OpenAI's GPT architecture, I was able to build TextGPT in just a weekend.
The stack is simple, using Remix I can manage both the front and backend from a single codebase. Supabase handles auth with OTP and database storage. OpenAI does the magic. Lastly, Twilio manages all the sms traffic.
After I launched TextGPT, I started promoting it on social media and within my network. To my surprise, the response was overwhelmingly positive. People loved the idea of being able to communicate with an AI chatbot through SMS. They've called it "their friendly bot", "midnight therapist", "venting partner", and more.
As the word about TextGPT spread, I started receiving inquiries from folks that wanted to "white label" TextGPT and put their own spin on it. They saw the potential of using TextGPT to create their own personalize sms experience.
In just over 30 days, TextGPT has generated over $800 in revenue and has over 1000 users. It's been amazing to see how my weekend project has turned into a profitable business opportunity.
Overall, I'm thrilled with the success of TextGPT and I'm excited about the future possibilities that it holds. This experience has taught me that even the smallest weekend project can turn into a profitable business opportunity if you have the right idea and are willing to put in the work. So if you have an idea for a project that you're passionate about, go ahead and give it a try - you never know where it might take you!
Congrats! Looks like an interesting project!!!
thanks!
Congrats Franco, so great to see!
One question: what was your tactic to reach these early adopters? Did the launch on PH generate this first wave of customers? Anyway, great to read your success story!
That random PH launch for sure helped. I think it was a chain of events, the PH Launch got people to look, then 3-4 AI listing sites picked it up, then even some random online news/publication sites picked it up.
Other than that, I have joined a lot of online communities and have been talking about it a decent amount. Adding new features too, like the long term memory keeps the conversation going.
What was your approach for reaching out to these communities that made them receptive to your product? Overall, great work on the product, looks like a clean UX
It was mostly organic. I submitted it to one, futuretools.io, since I think its the most popular. The rest, picked it up organically.
Congratulations !!!!!!!
Could you please help me how can i make Writeme( https://writeme.ai/ ) as successful as like yours.
I would love to but currently very tied up in projects + my regular 9-5.
Sorry! Wish you the best with writeme.ai
good deal i think paid off in a couple of days i am a freelancer
Congratulations! This is really interesting!
thanks!
Such a unique idea to let people interface with your application through SMS, without building a front-end! Kudos for coming up with this.
Thanks! It's been a fun project to build.
There is a frontend, but it's minimal. Just to manage some preferences, etc.
I read and thought to myself, why only SMS, after all, the limitation to the number of characters in a response is very bad. Then I thought about WhatsApp and became interested in their API, but after checking it turned out that using their API at the level of such an idea is completely impossible. What other ways of contacting ChatGPT can you still imagine?
Your Product Looks Great
Thanks!
Congrats! Could you expand more on how you marketed and got the word out?
Havent done anything marketing for it other than twitter and some indie dev communities.
I was hunted on PH by a random person before it was even ready which drove a decent amount of traffic. Ill be launching it on PH myself again later this month.
Since AI is the buzz now, it got organically picked up by a few ai listing sites like futuretool and theresanaiforthat, that has helped a lot too.
I remember seeing your tweet. Congrats!
Thanks!
Congrats! Curious how you collect payments after the 25 free messages.
There is a dashboard that users can manage their account and purchases.
When they hit their 25 messages, they are asked to reload their account. I am using stripe to sell the bundles.
Congrats! Definitely a good achievement for a weekend project.
I've been thinking about white labeling, could you share more about your experience? What percentage of your revenue comes from this business model?
Thanks!
I haven't actually done any white label offers yet. I can report back.
Congratulations, what a great idea!
What kinds of messages have your users sent, have they only experienced your product so far or have you observed recurrent use over several days, a real adoption?
Ive already seen some repeat customers, buying more message bundles.
No idea about the messages, they are encrypted and hashed in the db.
Congrats for the achievement! Out of curiosity, how much expensive has been to use openai's API? From those 800 in revenue, how much is going to openai?
My march bill was $22, so far April MTD is $29 so a bit higher since I moved to GPT-4.
The big expense here is Twilio. Costs around $8 for every 1000 message segments (~155 characters).
So far, I've spent around $140 in messages, phone numbers and some smaller one time costs.
Thanks for the answer! So the net profit for now seems pretty nice. And cool that you had early access to GPT-4 API, this does in fact make some difference.
Yeah no worries. Trying to be transparent.
Been considering switching to a subscription based model instead of the current package model. Still up in the air about it.
congratulations and thanks for sharing :) . Since you mentioned remix, do you have any experience in nextjs ? any idea how it compares to remix.
I have been working with remix for a while now so I have a lot of boilerplate set up code ready to go.
I have also used next but in my opinion, the loader/action api is much cleaner and easier to deal with vs getserverprops/getstaticprops/getstaticpaths on the nextjs side.
My single favorite remix feature is nested routing. Something you can only do in next 13 using the unstable app directory. You can also deploy remix apps on vercel now with zero config, which is an added benefit.
Congrats!
Congratulations on making TextGPT profitable, I can take lots of learning from this. Keep going.
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Honestly, it wasn't super straight forward at first. Their UI is terrible.
But basically, its a phone number, messaging service and webhook (on my end) to receive messages. I don't reply right away with the twiml xml crap, I just use their node sdk to reply to the messages.