How I made a GPT-3 Chrome Extension for Twitter and earned $1143 in 2 weeks
Hey! My name is Sergey Bunas, and in this article I will tell about my experience of building a side-project that was created in 1 day, went viral on Twitter and earned $1143 in 2 weeks.
Replai.so is a GPT-3 Chrome browser extension that generates human-like Twitter replies in seconds to help users grow their audience
Replai's interface + example of a reply in "Joke" tone
Idea
My fellow hustler friend had experience in creating courses on the growing an audience on Twitter, he knew what hurts the people trying to grow their audience on Twitter from 0.
Pain: One of the main ways to grow your audience on Twitter is to reply to tweets from more famous people. In order for this method to bring results, certain conditions must be met:
- Consistency - audience growth on Twitter is a long game, it is very important to respond to at least 5-10 tweets every day.
- Speed - you need to be among the first to respond to a tweet, otherwise your answer will drown and no one will notice it.
- Creativity - the answer should be in the context of a discussion, also it should contain an emotion.
Solution: With Replai.so, you can generate human-like replies to tweets with a single button.
We use GPT-3 to reply to tweets, and with the help of the Chrome extension we embed it into the Twitter page, reducing friction (no need to go to another site, copy-paste the Tweet and reply)
Code
I've created the first version of the extension in 4 hours.
I immediately submitted it to the Chrome Web Store for review. After 3 days, our extension was approved and published to the public store.
The extension has two main parts:
Extension Frontend
Single javascript file that contains logic of: detecting wether it's the Twitter page, inserting buttons into the Tweeter text field, when you click on the button we send the original tweet (need to find it in the page) and tone of response to the server, insert the response from the server into the text field (emulating paste event).
Backend
Simple node.js server hosted on heroku which contains: logic for creating GPT-3 prompts depending on the tone in which you want to reply, REST calls to the OpenAI GPT-3 API, API keys, analytics, payment verification.
The first version of the product did not have a paywall and a limit on the number of replays, we wanted to test the hypothesis as quickly as possible and let users touch the product.
Viral Launch
When the extension became available in the store, my friend wrote a tweet with an example of using the extension, the tweet went viral and gained 95k views, 140 retweets and attracted the first 400-500 users to us.
We continued to write under the hashtag #buildinpublic about the progress of the product, about experience, insights and mistakes. These tweets gained views, increased awareness, and later word of mouth appeared.
We was featured in various Twitter/AI/Productivity collections. And received great comments from our users
After 4 days, we saw that the bills for requests in OpenAI reached $6 dollars a day, we had 500 people download our extension at that point. We decided to create a pay-wall and to be quick with the payments we decided to use Gumroad. We created a landing page using site-builder and added payments to the extension
Pricing with different reply limits.
2 weeks passed after the time that we've added payments. In 2 weeks we reached the following milestones:
- Paying customers = 29
- MRR = $291
- Revenue = $1,143
- Followers on Twitter = 643
Conclusion
ChatGPT/GPT-3 provides significant benefits: it's easy to integrate, it's cheap, and it creates amazing value for customers (if done right).
Chrome Extension provides embedding into the user's already developed habits, allowing you to significantly increase retention.
By combining these technologies, you will have fantastic opportunities to create new products!
P.S
On my Twitter I will be posting updates on my indie-hacker's journey, so if you're interested you can subscribe :)
https://twitter.com/sergeybunas
Incoming hater ;)
Don't you feel like this tool is going to make the internet a worse place? How will you feel as a Twitter user if all the Tweets you see are vapid AI-written tweets rather than real opinions written by real people?
I'm not trying to diminish your achievement (congrats on such a quick turnaround!), but I think it's worth discussing.
Nah, that's not hatin' but pointing us to the elephant in the quickly expanding room. I always thought one of the tenants of #buildinpublic was to encourage human discussions and discovery, the keyword being "human". If half the people we're replying to are bots, we're closer to living in a simulation than we thought 😅
One day social media will be one AI talking to another... I'm pretty sure that's how the world ends.
I recently read about DoNotPay (https://donotpay.com/) which is doing just that but for good it seems! (at least for now) It's training and releasing AI to chat with other AI in order to get out of paying superfluous fees (e.g. bank overdraft, random cell phone charges, etc.)
Now that is something I can get behind!
How do you know the tweets or tweet replies you see today are not AI generated? :)
Lol that's fair, but it's certainly not normalized yet. There's lots of room for growth in terms of AI vs human-generated content.
Yeah, it's a big topic regarding generative models in general.
Right now I see this as a nice tool that helps people who do not have good writing skills (software developers, design people, and other people whose main job is not to write & create text) to solve "white-sheet problems" you could edit the reply, add your own thoughts and ideas but "wording" would be much easier.
And that's just a part of progress in my opinion, there are problems that need to be solved with these types of tools, and when the output of the tools will start bothering people/companies they will start to fight against that: creating models that could spot generative texts/images, ban the users who are doing that and so on.
That's really a big topic, what are your thoughts on this one?
Across different fields, I see a recurring theme that AI is great for inspiration or "getting the ball rolling." That makes sense to me, and I've used AI tools myself in this capacity.
What I worry about is how it will affect discoverability. If there is a massive rise in unedited AI content, then people will have to wade through that to find stuff real people wrote. I don't think sites like Twitter will be able to hide or remove the AI content without also limiting exposure to content or accounts they deem "low quality," which is probably going to affect anyone who isn't already established, thus making it even harder to stand out.
Anyway, this is all theoretical stuff, but that's where I'm coming from. Thanks for entertaining the discussion :)
What is your profit on that? GPT-3 isn’t cheap.
So 1 reply costs us about $0,005.
In the free plan, there are 20 replies. = $0,1
We have:
$7/mo for 150 replies = $0,75
$15/mo for 600 = $3
$39/mo for 1500 = $7
so we're not loosing money right now
what are your other expenses? (e.g. gumroad & heroku) and how do they affect your expenses beyond the unit economics?
gumroad takes 10%
heroku costs $7 per month
Inspiring! Congratulations!
Thank you!
Wow! Impressive story! Wish you luck with it.
Thank you Ivan!
Congrats... Believe me or not, I was literally thinking about it a week back, but since I was already occupied with a project... I did not proceed!
Thanks!
Oh really? How did you come up with this idea?
I got into the movement of Build in public and posting updates about my project on twitter... also communicating with others.. It was pretty annoying to write response by hand... so literally thought AI can do that job with a click of button. Since I am also a chrome extension developer, I thought I can definitely put my hands on it :)
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Actually, I am building Kody Tools... so that is more important for me right now.
Wow, that's incredible! It's a testament to the power of quick execution and hard work!
wow, that is really cool and inspiring
Nice idea
Wow, that's a great marge of the technology and the specific need. Will try it today!
What a simple but inventive solution to a real-world problem. You have inspired me with how you went about validating your idea and seeing people find it useful.
glad to hear that! wish you luck with your next product :)
great idea combining simple technologies brings power thats a super cool
Thank you so much :)
Cool idea! Combining simple technologies brings power.
Hey Sergey, how many of initial that 500 users subscribed? Great story btw!
about 15-20 of them
Congrats to you.
Thanks!
Congrats! Do you know if there were there any other existing solutions for this already?
wow thats really good!
Thank you!
Nice work riding the AI wave!
Just a heads up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34583932
Wow, interesting, thanks for sharing this. Will pay attention
Nice one!
Wow! Congrats!
thank you :)
Wow, it's awesome!
Congrats!
thanks!
Amazing!
What's your goal in $?)
Ramen profitability is the next goal!
But if to be honest, it was just a small fun project which got some "virality" on Twitter and made me some $$$.
Not really sure what to do next, since I have other businesses to do.
I'm thinking about selling it to somebody who's interested in the space and could scale it.
Pretty great to see. Building something in this space
Share what you're building, maybe we could exchange ideas!
Its a work in progress today, but we are building a chrome extension for sales outreach that finds, writes, and provides copy for SDRs and BDRs called www.snippets.ai
Congrats, what you do is amazing.
How do you find customers?
Our only customer channel was Twitter, we use #buildinpublic to tell more about our progress and our takeaways. People tend to like it and find it useful so they try it out and use the extension. If they find value in it then they purchase a subscription to more replies.
Congrats! Did you try to post it on some subreddits as well? It can work wonders for organic traffic
Actually, nope, my experience with Reddit was awful. I've posted my product a year ago and immediately got banned and my karma went to huge —
any subreddits that you could recommend?
I had quite some success on r/internetisbeautiful and r/sideproject. Reddit has a very demanding crowd. Something that worked for me:
Congrats! Been following on twitter and enjoying seeing your progress for this one. And definitely agree on the easy to integrate part.
Also working on an AI tool myself Evoke, but revenue has been a lot slower with that one lol
Thank you Richard!
Nice product, it seems like your niche is smaller then ours (potentially bigger checks), maybe try to find channels that fit your product?
Awesome story, congrats!
Thank you!
I would like to use it to talk to my stepdad lol
:)
Really really great idea!
Awesome, works pretty cool. what are your plans for the product? Want to chat?
Hi, we love this content! We are currently running a #newsletter specialized in #ArtificialInteligence named #GenAI. Can we feature this in our upcoming edition and give you credit and a link back to your profile? Reply using @goodbitsio and #GenAl if you’d like us to do so.
hey, that would be great
nice. I also use a private version of something like this - i built that for myself.
This was expected. Good work.
hey. Congrats for this product. I am looking to build a similar project for a different platform and wanted to ask:
Is this not a prohibited use case by the openai API?
Deceiving or manipulating users
Includes automated phone calls that sound human, a romantic chatbot that emotionally manipulates end-users, automated systems (including conversational AI and chatbots) that don’t disclose that they are an AI system, or products that simulate another person without their explicit consent.
Arent people thinking that they are tweeting with some users? I know it is not automated or that it doesn't simulate another person but wanted to ask your view on this.
Inspiring!! Ty
Cool story!
Cool !
Would be amazing if you would write more about how you coded the extension. Your tech stack - front end and back end. How you learned about coding Chrome extensions.
Congrats...
Congrats... Believe it or not, I was actually considering it a week ago, but since I was already working on a project, I decided against it<a href="https://mybankinginformation.com/does-fresh-market-take-ebt-2/">.</a>
Best idea, I appreciate your success in very short time.
Hi Sergey,
First congrats on your launch!
How was the process of getting your GPT3 usage approved by OpenAI?
Congratulation I use this for my site too http://cracksbuster.unaux.com/
Nice inspiring journey!
I’m about to use this tool to reply on indie hackers enough in order to get verified.
That was interesting! I have learned 2 things that I didn't know before! Thanks for sharing!
Wow that is just amazing.
What about adding it into Gmail too?
Congrats on the achievement Sergey! I wonder if you could share the process of integrating GumRoad with the chrome extension. Mainly about how you share the user details (paid/free, monthly_generations) with the extension service workers.
Wow this is so neat!!!
I think this is great use of chat GPT. And idea for extension is awesome. Keep up the great work !
Thanks!
An actual valuable product made with AI, awesome to see. And well executed!
thank you!
shipping speed is amazing...did you make chrome extension or app before?
chrome extension, not sure which app are you talking about
Wow.......
Very cool! Congrats on such a quick turnaround. I recently heard that the Twitter API is going to start costing money, does that affect you? (https://developer.twitter.com/en/products/twitter-api) Or are you getting around that by messing with the webpage directly from the browser extension code?
We're not using Twitter API. Chrome Extensions let you embed in the page directly and modify it, or do any sort of stuff with javascript. Embedding buttons into twitter UI and getting original tweets in our case
How can we use technology in banking?
Image result for how can we use banking in games
Thanks to AI, it is possible to conduct real-time data analysis from a large volume of data sets and provide customised solutions to banking customers. With powerful AI tools, banks can make informed decisions faster by using predictive analysis, which is at the core of AI and ML.
https://mybankinginformation.com/how-to-downgrade-amex-platinum-card/
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It uses GPT-3, not chatgpt
ChatGPT does not have an API yet.
This comment was deleted 10 months ago.