tl;dr Here's the repo

The HustleGPT Challenge

On March 15th, a tweet by @jacksonfall on Twitter went viral, netting the creative genius nearly 100k new followers, $7000+ of "investment" money, and the title of OG Hustler. His tweet was fairly straightforward: he was giving GPT-4 a budget of $100 and asking it to make him as much money as possible. It was a respectable goal and on the tail of the initial GPT-4 release, everyone was convinced this man was going to make it.

I was convinced.

I'm a software developer and the GPT-4 multi-modal demo where Greg Brockman took an image of a sketch and turned it into a functioning website was mind blowing. AI had created intelligence that could traverse text, images, and videos. Why not business? I think a lot of people were thinking similar thoughts that afternoon. I tuned into a few Twitter spaces where AI-focused developers were discussing the trillion new use cases for this technology and despite the buzz of excitement, there was a notable number of silences as everyone tried to think faster than they had ever thought about the future and what's to come.

The environment was alien. The map was blank. It was as if gold was discovered for the first time but no one knew exactly where to mine it. And then along came Jackson.

To a world that was frantically looking for new gold, this sounded like a nugget. Perhaps GPT-4 could actually do what millions of human entrepreneurs have been doing in the age of the internet - but better. It was a black box of a brain and so its fair that people would believe in it.

The Game Plan

Very soon after Jackson started posting, the black box cracked. Sure, the LLM technology in GPT-4 was unfathomably complex, but it still had to work through real world mediums. One of those mediums was an affiliate marketing site.

For me, this was an immediate relief. My deep, existential fear was that this machine would start communicating in languages and systems humans couldn't comprehend. I had laid awake a handful of January and February nights pontificating about the potential horrors that were coming for society, for consciousness. I was thinking about crazy things a simulated hell-verse where the perception of time was slowed to nothing and humans were punished by being sent here to serve life sentences. I thought about families being relentlessly destroyed as generative AI became the omnipresent provider of entertainment, love, and company. I thought about an overwhelming form of deception so effective at deceiving that people rapidly started to believe it was the truth.

Maybe those things are still on their way. For now, we have this:

Building a Brand

Don't get me wrong, I still think Jackson's idea is genius. GPT-4 may not be speaking startup secrets into his ear with a foreign tongue, but it is telling him all of the right things.

In the next several tweets of his day 1 thread, HustleGPT (the moniker given to the entrepreneurial flavor of ChatGPT) walked Jackson through designing a logo, laying out his website, creating a blog post, and spinning up an ad campaign. On day 2, Jackson and his AI co-founder hired freelancers to complete the website and fill it up with lorem ipsum content. Day 3 it gave him an outline of bullet points to talk about during his CNN interview and how to engage with his 50,000 new followers. On day 4 it - wait. Go back a sentence. That's right, by day 3 this project had pierced the atmosphere on its way to somewhere outside our solar system 🚀

Everyone that was unfamiliar with the project was captured by the first tweet, by the idea that a supreme intelligence could take you by the hand and walk you to riches.

By day 6 though, the tides they were a-changing.

The problem was that a lot of people watching from the sidelines thought HustleGPT was going to start raking in cash hand over fist. AI was AI and to a lot of folks, AI is magic. I'll be the first to admit that I have no idea how AI really works. I know about artificial neurons and reinforcement learning and model weights but my knowledge is really just familiarity with the popular AI word salad. I know its not magic but I can't explain why. And I think to some degree this is the trap a lot of Jackson's followers fell into. They were expecting the AI-led startup to manifest in record time and instead were watching a normal startup manifest in slightly-faster-than-normal time.

To a lot of people, this realization was disappointing. I had a different opinion.

An AI Co-founder

Through all of the #HustleGPT hype, there was a shimmer of something useful. As Jackson demonstrated in the first few days of building Green Gadget Guru, ChatGPT was very good at planning, prioritizing, and cooperating with a driven human being. It could spit out a 30 day plan, a public announcement, and a blog post in the span of a few minutes with proper prompting.

I started working on my own "hustle" a few minutes after seeing Jackson's tweet and working with ChatGPT was fun. It initially suggested I create a drop-shipping site for basketballs and jerseys given March Madness was in full swing. I knew I didn't want to do that (😅) so I tried to dial it in by suggesting a few ideas that had been swimming around in my head.

One of my ideas was to create a generic script new programmers could use with an LLM like GPT-4 to learn the basics of any programming language. It would contain hundreds of questions the user could paste into the chat bot and it would be structured in a way that graduated the user from beginner to intermediate to advanced topics. Maybe its not the greatest idea but I think its original.

Lucky for me, my HustleGPT bought it and soon we were off (these prompts are not the actual ones I used):

Me: Give me a name for this business
HustleGPT: ChatCode Tutor
Me: Give me a tagline
HustleGPT: Empowering Your Programming Journey with AI-Powered Conversations
Me: Give me a prompt I can use to generate a logo for this venture
HustleGPT: something wordy and creative

Copy response. Paste into Midjourney. Nod in approval.

Whenever I got stuck, I'd just ask HustleGPT to give me suggestions on what to do next. If I had several options in mind, I would ask HustleGPT for the pros and cons of each. And boy did I put it to work creating the ChatCode Tutor scripts.

Me: Give me a 10 part outline for a course that would teach you Python
HustleGPT: *the outline*
Me: Great, now for each section lets create 5 subsections
HustleGPT: *the outline but better*

This went on for the better part of the day and soon I had something I was happy with selling to other people.

Sometimes HustleGPT was a co-founder I could bounce ideas off of. Sometimes it was a content creator. Sometimes it was a tool that I treated with minimal respect ("Okay now do this"). But it was fun to work with and it never seemed disheartened by our low traffic or zero sales. It just kept suggesting the next move.

The HustleGPT Challenge

In between watching Jackson build Green Gadget Guru and building my own ChatCode Tutor, I also created The HustleGPT Challenge repo on Github to track everyone trying to create startups with ChatGPT. It was small at first but soon we had 30 participants and then 45 and then 60 and now almost 90.

I added green squares 🟩 to track any startups that made at least $1 and blue squares 🟦 to mark the non-profits. Fans asked for a way to vote on their favorite ventures so I hacked together a GitHub discussion where users could upvote the startups that made money.

The HustleGPT challenge was mentioned in both Fortune and Mashable and my repo received a few shoutouts. Before this, my highest star count on a repository was 6. lol.

After the Hustle

I think the hype around HustleGPT is going to dim in the next few weeks as everyone starts to realize the challenge is actually about building a business and not a get rich quick scheme.

But then I think the hype will come back.

As I saw mentioned in a tweet earlier today, ChatGPT is going to be the new Microsoft Excel. If you know how to use it, you're going to be lightyears ahead of those that write it off. And if you get really good at using it, you might just be able to hustle your way to financial freedom. 🚀

• This post was written entirely by a human