I helped my friend build Quordle last year, and before he sold it, he was making a surprising amount off of just donations. Try sticking a kofi link up, it's a pretty quick change.
Quordle is great! Can I ask what it sold for?
Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
101–110 of 141 posts
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#102You've fallen into a trap categorising yourself as a "chat app". If you're not connecting 2 different end users to talk to each other then you shouldn't call yourself a chat app.
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#103That’s enough traffic to attract local sponsorships. I bet you could find local sponsors who can pay you on a monthly basis
Local radio stations and tv networks love this sort of thing. “Brought to you by and sponsored by KQED” accomplishes a lot in terms of PR, and they would likely be willing to fund it, at least at cost but likely quite a bit higher.
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#104Get 1-3 local businesses to buy a premium ad spot on your app. You can craft the ad with them and place it (side of the chat, top of the chat, etc). Charge them anywhere from $300-$1500 per-month. Get a few of those and that should cover you and then some.
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether this works depends on how comfortable the dev is picking up the phone. I had a local site and was just too terrified to do this, so I just kept my site up unmonetized (unlike OP it wasn't costing anything). One day two salespeople contacted me and suggested taking over ad sales, and managed to sell thousands (I think it was somewhere between $5k-$10k/month, but it was a long time ago) a month in ads for the s…
Yea this is important. A dev should absolutely not be picking up any kind of phone and talking to any kind of customer. This is a job for sales people. If some nervous dev could manage to make any kind of sale at all, then that means a trained professional salesperson can do probably 10x that much. Don’t think just because you are very smart you can do sales. This is like business people trying to “learn coding” so t…
This reads like you're suggesting to not even try. IME trying new things is a great way to learn. Also, if a dev can close a few sales, just the first few, then they'll know how to help their sales staff.
Try a little, see if you can grow.
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether this works depends on how comfortable the dev is picking up the phone. I had a local site and was just too terrified to do this, so I just kept my site up unmonetized (unlike OP it wasn't costing anything). One day two salespeople contacted me and suggested taking over ad sales, and managed to sell thousands (I think it was somewhere between $5k-$10k/month, but it was a long time ago) a month in ads for the s…
Yea this is important. A dev should absolutely not be picking up any kind of phone and talking to any kind of customer. This is a job for sales people. If some nervous dev could manage to make any kind of sale at all, then that means a trained professional salesperson can do probably 10x that much. Don’t think just because you are very smart you can do sales. This is like business people trying to “learn coding” so t…
I think you might be projecting a bit here with the whole "nervous devs should never try anything other than write code"..
OP can totally give some basic marketing a go. The product isn't turning even creating revenue - hiring marketing now, without at-least testing the water himself would be silly.
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether this works depends on how comfortable the dev is picking up the phone. I had a local site and was just too terrified to do this, so I just kept my site up unmonetized (unlike OP it wasn't costing anything). One day two salespeople contacted me and suggested taking over ad sales, and managed to sell thousands (I think it was somewhere between $5k-$10k/month, but it was a long time ago) a month in ads for the s…
Yea this is important. A dev should absolutely not be picking up any kind of phone and talking to any kind of customer. This is a job for sales people. If some nervous dev could manage to make any kind of sale at all, then that means a trained professional salesperson can do probably 10x that much. Don’t think just because you are very smart you can do sales. This is like business people trying to “learn coding” so t…
Lots of devs out there have great social skills which can translate well to sales. Sales is primarily communication and human connection and plenty of devs are capable of that.
Lots of devs start in sales because those jobs/careers are incredibly prevalent. Think basic sales jobs like retail, call centers, etc.
Lots of business people unironically "learn coding" to great success. Some even build "huge products" that solve big problems.
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Anecdotally, I know people who fall into all of these categories. I don't think we should condemn people to one function/talent... and, I don't think we need to talk down to cross-functional devs or business people.
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#108If you haven’t already: Start to store question and answer pairs and reuse the answer if the same question is asked multiple times. You could also compute embeddings for the questions (don’t have to be OpenAI embeddings), and reuse the answer if the question is sufficiently similar to a prevously asked question.
This removes half the magic of interacting with ChatGPT. Users will quickly realize they're interacting with a dumb database rather than an AI.
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#109Tell users that in order to use your service they have to give you their API key.
pretty sure a casual chat website that mandates that everyone give their phone number to OpenAI, activate their account, locate their API key (which is gibberish to most non-tech people) and come back and paste it would kill half the userbase, if not more
I'd be surprised if it didn't kill the app immediately, I rather set rate limiting and have the option to pay, or use your api key instead.
Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill
#110You could try to apply for grants. 20K+ chats sounds like a large number -- you must live in a 1M+ person metro area, right? It would probably be fairly easy to get a four figure grant from one agency or another. You could frame it as "localization of generative ai to the regional culture of X", or as a tourism thing, etc. You could also sell advertising the old-fashioned way -- ask local businesses or perhaps a loca…
Grants will take a long time to lock down I suspect. Maybe fine if you can float the cost for a few months and reimburse yourself out of grant funds later, but there's a lot of uncertainty. $50/day is pretty small relatively speaking, so just finding a local corporate sponsor and running an ad for them would probably work.
why pick up the phone if you could just put down a placeholder banner saying something like "do you want your company name here? write [an-email-address-thats-not-your-personal-mail]".
If the project is really becoming a local hit then you're bound to get contacted.