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!
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