I built a custom GPT (with ChatGPT's powerful new feature)

Plus: 3 ideas to build your own GPT

Hey Warrior,

OpenAI dropped a massive release this week and it got all the Twitter AI bros really excited (including yours truly).

Today I’ll be diving deeper into the biggest new feature: Custom GPTs.

I was lucky to get access yesterday and had a chance to play around with it.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

  • How to build a custom GPT

  • Why custom GPT’s are a big deal

  • 3 ideas to build your own custom GPT

Read time: 3 minutes

🔧 Tool of the week: Ahref

While building the website for my new course last week I was looking for good tools that can help me optimize my website’s SEO.

That’s when I came across Ahref Webmaster Tools (partner of this newsletter).

Ahref helps you to:

  • Monitor your SEO health

  • Understand your backlinks

  • Analyze the keywords that bring you traffic

If you want to improve your website’s SEO performance, I recommend you try out Ahref for free here.

🦾 How to build a custom GPT

A custom GPT is basically your own super specialized AI app.

Once you hit “Create a GPT” you’ll be greeted with two chat windows side-by-side. The one on the left is for development. The one on the right is to test out your new GPT (as you develop it).

You basically develop your GPT by just having a conversation with the “GPT Builder” assistant. It will ask you what your goals are and what other information it can use to customize your GPT.

To further refine your GPT, you can toggle into the “Configure” tab. Here you can:

  • Edit the main “instructions”. Think of this like your main prompt that defines the goals and actions of this custom chatbot.

  • Edit the conversation starters for the chat interface.

  • Knowledge section: Upload files to train the chatbot on specific data.

  • Capabilites & Actions: You can even define rules for the chatbot to interact with other applications through APIs.

When you’re ready, simply publish your custom GPT and then chat with it. It is now a ChatGPT version that is trained on the specific task you defined.

All in all this is a really intuitive experience that just works. The product team at OpenAI did a pretty amazing job with this.

I’ll be going deeper into some prompting tips when I’ve had more time to play around with it.

🧠 So why are custom GPTs a big deal?

There’s a reason why this feature has everyone buzzing. Custom GPTs are a paradim shift in programming and development. Here’s why:

1) Programming in natural language

When I built my GPT I felt like a 10x developer. I “programmed” an app just by talking to it. The barrier to being an app developer has been lowered massively.

We’re moving into a future where anyone with an idea can create an app in minutes or hours.

2) Every developer is also a prompt engineer.

You don’t need to learn Python or Javascript anymore to develop an app. Instead you just need to use the right prompts. Because the quality of your app depends on the quality of your instructions (i.e. prompts). And this is why prompt engineering will grow in importance (and this is why I write this newsletter).

3) Sharing you work with the world

The fact that you can share your GPT with others, makes it even more amazing. Instead of sharing prompts like before, the best prompters can now just create applications to solve specific problems and share them with everyone.

OpenAI has also announced that there will be a GPT store in the future, so you will be able to make money from these apps.

💡 3 Ideas to build your own custom GPT

Ok, enough about how great the new feature is.

You might be asking now, how can I apply this to my own business?

Here are 3 ideas to build your own GPT:

1) Personal assistant

You can build a personal assistant that handles your to-do list. Nick created one here:

2) Internal knowledge chatbot

Do you have a bunch of onboarding documents lying in word files or notion docs? Take them, upload them into your custom GPT and share this new GPT with fresh colleagues, who can now chat with the bot to have a simple onboarding experience.

3) Personalized content writer (for newsletters, tweets etc.)

AI is not a substitute for creative ideas and thoughts in writing. However, it can be a helpful tool for editing and drafting, which can save you a significant amount of time. For example, Rowan here created an X Optimizer GPT:

Thanks for reading!

We’re in Serbia this week, jumping from one Airbnb to the next. A bit stressful for us but fun for my son. He’s constantly got new things to explore (in this pic he just spotted the lights on the ceiling).

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