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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

#121

Post by Larrikin »

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…

I read your original comment as steeped in sarcasm that a single developer should even attempt to sully their good name by engaging in marketing. Actually surprised you were being serious.

OP has a product he enjoyed making, is providing real world utility, and that he isn't trying to turn in to a billion dollar company. The obvious solution is for him to pick up a phone, send out a few emails, and generally reach out to the local business community instead of sitting back and waiting to see if it will magically make money and he can hire a sales person to do those tasks instead for his hobby project that has grown too expensive for a single person but would barely qualify for justification at a business.

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

#123

Post by swyx »

yumraj wrote: post #97

Go ping some Angel and VC investors. Tell them you’ve proven the hypothesis and achieved product market fit by showing the data from this one city and say you’re raising capital to take it to the next step. Good luck!!

lol, this is the worst possible idea when you dont actually want to build a business out of it. take all the fun out of a side project and add a lifetime of stress and regrets.

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

#125

Post by cjbprime »

austhrow743 wrote: post #21

There will be local businesses with fairly aggressive marketing. Tons of billboards, on buses, local newspaper, etc. Should be easy to find because they're the ones advertising everywhere. Call them up one by one and say "hey I run [project] that everyone has been using lately, would you be interested in having your business name listed as a sponsor? It'll be shown on 1/4 page loads which is currently 5000 times a da…

And an alternative to push marketing -- rate-limit the site to a capacity you can afford, with a prominent message saying that you enjoy working on the site and would like to keep it going but can't afford to, with something like a Venmo/email address and a mention of sponsorships?

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

#127

Post by skoocda »

Reach out to a monetization partner. They'll have dozens of ways to help find ad demand quickly. It will be more work than AdSense, but it will work- unlike AdSense. Here's a list of options: https://www.google.com/ads/publisher/partners/find-a-partner

Look for resellers or programmatic direct services to get started.

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

#128

Post by baobabKoodaa »

raesene9 wrote: post #43

Assuming this is GlasgowGPT (based on the timing of that bot taking off on /r/glasgow and this post, and your username), a challenge you'd likely have with advertising is that the content from the bot is, whilst funny, not very SFW. One option to get the costs down would be to use a local LLM. It isn't likely to be as fast/good as GPT-3.5 but at least would give you a fixed cost per month (hosting). If you had local…

Not sure why you think local LLM would be fixed cost. Those things are very GPU heavy and you need to run multiple instances to serve multiple concurrent users, scaling up and down according to traffic.

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

#129

Post by nborwankar »

austhrow743 wrote: post #21

There will be local businesses with fairly aggressive marketing. Tons of billboards, on buses, local newspaper, etc. Should be easy to find because they're the ones advertising everywhere. Call them up one by one and say "hey I run [project] that everyone has been using lately, would you be interested in having your business name listed as a sponsor? It'll be shown on 1/4 page loads which is currently 5000 times a da…

Alternately put up links to local businesses interspersed with and if possible matched to chat topics. Count the click throughs and email a weekly report to businesses if the numbers are significant. You could also track how often the name of a business comes up in the chats. But this may take a few months to bear fruit. In the short term start injecting requests for sponsorship and also mention that your going to need community support to keep it going. Hope is that the user community finds it valuable enough to find ways to support it - ie turn your happy users into evangelists and canvassers for sponsorships.

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

#130

Post by yumraj »

swyx wrote: post #123
yumraj wrote: post #97

Go ping some Angel and VC investors. Tell them you’ve proven the hypothesis and achieved product market fit by showing the data from this one city and say you’re raising capital to take it to the next step. Good luck!!

lol, this is the worst possible idea when you dont actually want to build a business out of it. take all the fun out of a side project and add a lifetime of stress and regrets.

Maybe, maybe not.

Regarding regret, missed opportunities can also lead to regrets, especially if someone were to take OP's concept and create a clone and it actually becomes big.

We all need to pay bills at one time or the other.

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