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Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

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Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#111

Post by danenania »

xwdv wrote: post #93
bemmu wrote: post #78

Earlier 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…

It's possible that selling advertising could be different, but in most domains, it's pretty well-accepted in startup land that founders (including technical founders) will have the highest close rates at the company, regardless of whether they're smooth talkers or have past sales experience. That's because no one you can hire is going to know or care as much about your product as you, the founder, and it shows. Professional sales people are not hired because they're better at sales, but because you can only scale so far with founders doing all the selling.

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#112

Post by cloogshicer »

dxhdr wrote: post #108
colinnordin wrote: post #18

If 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.

I don't see what the problem is if it's only on the exact same prompt.

I assume only a small percentage of users would put in the same prompt twice, and even then, why would they be upset at getting the same response?

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#113

Post by hutzlibu »

411111111111111 wrote: post #110
stanleydrew wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is likely the most easy way.

Alternativly or additionally you can ask for donations on that banner. And a link where OP explains his situation, no profit, just costs, but like to keep the thing running.

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#114

Post by vineyardmike »

xwdv wrote: post #93
bemmu wrote: post #78

Earlier 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 isn’t a multi-billion dollar business selling ad space. It’s a one (wo)man project. That one person absolutely can pick up the phone. Will they be as effective as a professional? Probably not, but they only need $50 a day!

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#115

Post by nunez »

reissbaker wrote: post #74

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.

Holy fuck y'all are awesome. Thanks for quordle; I play it every night before I go to sleep!

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#116

Post by stndef »

ibizabear wrote: post #52
stndef wrote: post #26

Is it GlasgowGPT by any chance? Either way, there's definitely an opportunity for funding. In the case of Glasgow, there's a huge populous out there that are descendants of folk from the city/country taking pride in it (arguably more than a bunch of us that live here!) and like to get in on the banter. That's certainly an avenue worth exploring if there's a similar relationship with folks or families of folks that em…

Haha yes it is! And appreciate the suggestion, that's a good idea that I'll look into. I've plastered a big banner up and will see if anyone goes for it, from locally or elsewhere. Cheers

Hope it's of help! Had fun with it the other day, though was telt I was English for preferring salt and pepper over salt and sauce, haha!

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#117

Post by xwdv »

djbusby wrote: post #105
xwdv wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish people didn’t have such a knee jerk reaction to my advice, but for many years I too believed a dev should at least try to wear many hats.

All it took was seeing how professionals always do the job far better to change my mind. It doesn’t matter if a dev picks up some skills, if you plan to be a dev then a dev is all you’ll ever be, focus on the development and let sales worry about sales.

I see a lot of founders struggle with delegation. It seems they would rather juggle things they don’t do well instead of learning to trust and onboard people who can do things they don’t specialize in.

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#118

Post by laratied »

gbasin wrote: post #89
irfn wrote: post #88

Not sure what you run this on and why its $50/day but sounds like a lot. Convert your server cost to a pay as you go model. You are currently paying even for time when your server is idle. Containerise your app and run on something like AWS Lambda which has a pay for what you use model. - s3 is cheap for storing your model data and as long as you are just reading that should be fine. - AWS Lambda has 1 million free i…

the primary cost would be the OpenAI GPT-3.5-turbo API, which is ~ $0.002 per 1k tokens

I have made a chatbot like this and I am not a software engineer.

The whole thing is trivial to make. The system prompt is trivial. I would even say it was harder to make a geocities page in the 90s than to make a chatbot like this.

3.5 turbo is great to play with but at scale it is brutal cost wise.

The real issue though is anyone who already has a working 3.5 turbo chatbot can knock this off in the next 5 minutes by just changing the system prompt.

I think this is the future though. The labor is pretty much trivial, the capital for tokens at scale is what matters.

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#119

Post by swores »

trog wrote: post #46
zuprau wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was it Coca Cola or Pepsi? The last time my family and I sat down for our usual blind test dinner everyone agreed Pepsi tasted better.

This is hilarious and people modding you down have missed the joke.

Or maybe they understood the joke but weren't amused and prefer not to see unfunny jokes on this site - people may have different opinions to yours without the cause being their not understanding the joke :)

Re: Ask HN: My GPT project has become a local hit but I can't afford the bill

#120

Post by jayparth »

xwdv wrote: post #117
djbusby wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish people didn’t have such a knee jerk reaction to my advice, but for many years I too believed a dev should at least try to wear many hats. All it took was seeing how professionals always do the job far better to change my mind. It doesn’t matter if a dev picks up some skills, if you plan to be a dev then a dev is all you’ll ever be, focus on the development and let sales worry about sales. I see a lot of founde…

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