[CASE STUDY] One Custom GPT. 600 Sign Ups. 2 Weeks.  ## Metadata - Author: [[The Amy Porterfield Show]] - Full Title: [CASE STUDY] One Custom GPT. 600 Sign Ups. 2 Weeks. - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/2846965c-2640-4ee2-84ae-893883e476fb ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Make AI Rely On Your Expertise** - Becca reframed AI from a threat into a tool that relies on her proprietary content. - Teaching AI her processes let it answer like her and scale support and revenue. Transcript: Becca Harpain Rely on me? What information do I have that I can amplify with AI? All of these ways that I considered myself smarter than the bot with those quick answers, I very quickly realized I could train AI on all of the course content I created. I could make it a student of my course and then it could answer questions on the fly the same way that I would. So I got to work and it turned into something incredible and I launched it to my community. Amy, I had over 600 people sign up in the first two weeks. ([Time 0:07:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7c7fbf1f-c4a8-405d-a158-f56367d28194)) - **Price Small And Simple For Early AI** - Price modestly for imperfect early-stage AI by offering a low one-time fee. - Use lifetime access to reduce friction and align with audience expectations. Transcript: Becca Harpain Not perfect. It makes mistakes. It likes to make things up. And I knew that I would need to be refining it over time. I knew that my audience would need to be patient with the answers because it wouldn't be right all of the time, but it would be right most of the time. And I didn't feel right charging a large amount of money for something that wasn't just perfect. I'm too much of a perfectionist for that. But I also have a really hard time with the constant subscription fees that we as online business owners have to pay. I come from way back in the days of the 90s where you buy a software program once and you're done. You don't have to buy it again. So it's a little bit of my own subscription bias. Yeah, it's a little bit of my own subscription bias there. I didn't want to rope people into that. But also the concept of ChatGPT being $25 a month, at least at the time of recording this, $25 a month for everything that it does. Selling this smaller subset for a similar price or even more expensive also didn't sound right. But the truth was at the end of the day, I wanted to create this bot that could help as many people as possible. And some $30 to get the one answer that you need sounded like a reasonable amount to me. ([Time 0:08:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/500961ae-51e3-4a1e-bab9-b6b781b1fd24)) - **Different Offers For Different Audiences** - Separate offers can serve different audience segments and revenue streams. - A course and a low-cost AI tool can coexist and target distinct customer needs. Transcript: Amy Porterfield Them. Okay, this is fantastic. You have a digital course for a specific ideal customer avatar. You have an AI bot for a different avatar. These are not the same avatars. They're not wanting the same thing. And I think that is brilliant. Those of ([Time 0:10:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/5e0c4a9e-d03e-4681-8bc4-4a66c3524aa7)) - **Encode Your Decision Process For The GPT** - Create decision-making protocols and map terminology to teach the bot how you think. - Use real audience questions to train the GPT on phrasing and edge cases. Transcript: Becca Harpain That wasn't the case. I needed to upload that information, yes. And I needed to upload my code database, absolutely. But I also needed to upload the individual things that I understood, but a bot wouldn't. The process of making a decision, the process of taking a question and understanding what they mean by this term versus this term, where it should look first and where it should look Second. Creating an actual process of how to answer and analyze a question was a really important part of making sure that this bot would work. I learned that over time, it definitely didn't happen immediately, but I'm very lucky, Amy, I have a large community on my YouTube channel, and they post anywhere from two to 20 comments A day. So I had a plethora of questions from people that would write in a way that they would when they were talking to a GPT, not in the way that I would. So I was able to find different terminology and different ways of phrasing things that I could train this AI to understand. So that decision-making process was a huge part of establishing the protocol it needed to follow to properly answer questions. ([Time 0:12:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/85dbebae-16d9-43ea-a24a-dc5ca0061038)) - **Train AI To Apply Your Point Of View** - Train AI to apply your expertise rather than merely regurgitate course content. - Be transparent that AI will sometimes be inaccurate and plan for ongoing refinement. Transcript: Becca Harpain That's a great question. I think I actually have two pieces of advice if we could do that. The first would definitely be going back to the original thought shift that I had, where instead of thinking about how AI can replace you, think about how AI can rely on the information That you have. So don't try to think of a model of intelligence that's just going to regurgitate information somewhere in your course. You need to think of a model of intelligence that applies your expertise and gives that extra edge that you can train it on based on your own expertise. That's a really, really important part. But the other thing to be really upfront about, which I recommend anyone considering creating a public facing GPT or any version of an AI is to be completely transparent that it will Not always be accurate. As much as we try, it will make things up sometimes. And a little side note on that as well. I spend every weekend, at least two to three hours on a Saturday or a Sunday, continuing to work with custom Cody to make it better. It doesn't get everything right. Things change in the Squarespace universe very often. And sometimes people will come up with new terms and I need to train Cody on what these new terms mean. I'll hear a new slang word that I wouldn't use before. And I need to make sure custom Cody understands what that word means just in case it's ever used in a chat. So AIs are never one and done and they're not always accurate. ([Time 0:17:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/87b976a9-ae7e-4f41-bb83-163d7988c550)) - **Launch Fast On Existing Platforms** - Use existing platforms (like ChatGPT custom GPTs) to launch fast and affordably. - Avoid building custom infrastructure unless you need advanced features. Transcript: Becca Harpain Now I did go down the rabbit hole in the very beginning of trying to develop my own. I did go to the open AI software platform. I hired a person off of Upwork to translate all my data to a JSON file and make prompt completion statements. And I looked into buying a server and tracking the thumbs up and thumbs down feedback and building this whole software program. And I spent a few months trying to develop it at this high level. And then I very quickly realized after those few months, that was not the way to make it affordable and deployable to my community. I was stopping myself from giving them the information that they could have had access to from getting them the help that they needed, because I was trying to literally build a software Program that I didn't need to build. So I went the easy route. And when chat GPT said, okay, anybody with a free account can access a custom GPT. I realized this is my moment, make it a custom GPT, get it out there on that platform. It's not going to have all the bells and whistles, but it'll be affordable and it'll be usable. So that's why I went that route. ([Time 0:20:54](https://share.snipd.com/snip/7a3eefd6-d735-4b6a-814c-2ab2ae5cfeda)) - **Sold The Bot Via A Notion Dashboard** - Becca sold access by creating a Notion page with instructions and a buy link to deploy quickly. - She accepted link-sharing risk to prioritize speed and accessibility for her audience. Transcript: Becca Harpain To create that minimum viable product and just get it out to my community. I ended up creating a digital product and here's how this actually worked. I built a page in Notion and I set the page to be able to share with anybody in the link that has the link. And inside Notion, I included how to access custom Kodi, a little note about how to add it to your sidebar, some troubleshooting tips for how to have the best chat, what to do if you don't, And a little option for how to send me feedback about the conversations that you're having. And I literally just sold a link to this Notion dashboard so I could deploy it as fast as possible. Amy Porterfield That's fantastic. Again, I love getting scrappy. So that's perfect. Now, another way you could do it, and this is something that we are going to do with Digital Course Academy is use a tool called formwise.ai. So So F-O formwise.ai. And essentially, you can upload your custom GPTs into this tool and either direct your students there, or what is kind of cool, you can sell it from this site as well. So there's lots of options. I'm sure there's going to be 10 more that pop up by the time this episode gets out there. So just wanted to mention there's some different ways that you can do this. I'm absolutely going to look into that, Amy. That sounds awesome. Yeah. Awesome. Perfect. Becca Harpain Because there's one other caveat to how I sell it this way that I definitely think doing it this fast way, it helped to get it out to my community quickly, but it was not necessarily the Best route to go. ([Time 0:22:24](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6debfd56-0761-49aa-a525-cb2828b29b70)) - **Show, Don't Tell: Demo The Bot Often** - Market the bot by demonstrating it in action and embedding short previews in regular content. - Use weekly YouTube tutorials with a demo clip to drive curiosity and signups. Transcript: Amy Porterfield Or are you going to tell me like, I mean, my audience is super tech savvy, so I didn't need to do that? Becca Harpain You know, you think that they would be, but I'll be honest, I still get pushback from people saying, oh, I'm never going to use AI. AI is not for my business. AI is the worst. They're going to steal my clients and all that kind of stuff. And every time I have one of those conversations, I definitely see where they're coming from. I felt really, I felt threatened by AI initially when it came out and I realized it could code. But I like to remind myself that that is definitely the attitude that people had when cars were first invented. And there are plenty of people out there that would still be in a horse and buggy if they could. And that's exactly where we're at with AI. This is the future of the way things are working, at least the foreseeable future for the next few years. And I needed to find a way to integrate it into what we do. And so the early adopters are the ones that I've definitely working with when it comes to custom coding, but marketing it to them, showing how it works has really been the catalyst of What's caused such an excitement about it in my community. It's really been what's helped me sell it. Now, the content I share every single week is a YouTube video where I teach one small piece of code, how to customize one tiny thing about your Squarespace website. And at the end of all of my videos, since I launched Custom Cody, is a little preview of what it's like to chat with Custom Cody to let them know that there is an AI out there that knows Squarespace, Knows it better than ChatGPT and can answer their questions 24-7. ([Time 0:25:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9c08c117-6b81-4850-9321-7d04f55221e9)) - **AI Keeps Support Running During Maternity Leave** - Becca built Custom Cody so her community could get expert Squarespace help while she takes maternity leave. - The bot lets her support students and delegate inbox tasks without hiring a technical expert. Transcript: Becca Harpain Will transform, but transition. Yes, absolutely. That was a really big reason behind the decision of creating this AI that could essentially answer questions that I wouldn't be able to is being a one woman show here inside the square. When I go on my self-funded maternity leave in a few months, there's not going to be someone around to answer questions the way that I do. Providing support to my community is a really important part of my job. And I say it my job, but I still provide this support for free. Many of the times when people will comment on a video or send me an email with a question, My goal is to help people help themselves. And when I'm not here on the other side of the screen to answer their questions, I still want them to be able to get the answers they need without having to wait for me to come back a few months From now. ([Time 0:28:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3d1d391d-d259-49b5-8dcb-0fce891c4fbc)) - **Use AI To Prepare AI-Ready Content** - Talk to AI about your course and audience to generate ideas and formatting it needs. - Ask AI to reformat your content so a GPT can read and use it effectively. Transcript: Becca Harpain Remember that chat GPT is for chatting. Ask AI for help. Ask AI your questions. Tell AI exactly what your course is about and what your audience is like and ask it how it sees itself fitting into that ecosystem. Ask AI to help you create ideas and ask AI to help you format your content in a way that it will better understand. Taking my massive code collection, I had to understand how to tell AI to use that information in its responses. And I asked AI, what's the best way for me to give you this data? Then it told me, so I said, okay, here's all the data. Can you format this for me in a way that a GPT will be able to read? And it did. AI is a tool. And if you use it as a tool by having a friendly chat about literally any topic related to your business, it can be incredibly helpful. ([Time 0:31:36](https://share.snipd.com/snip/539f454c-b556-48eb-b25a-aba534283e0d))