AI ideas that made money
Day 22 / 366
ChatGPT got popular around this time last year, and with the API came lots of opportunists who were quick to create simple yet effective apps that made them lots of money. I wanted to list some of them here just to show how you don’t always need a great idea to succeed.
TypingMind
This app was just a JS web app that let you use ChatGPT using the API. The thing is that initially, the ChatGPT web app had a lot of issues.
- Responses were streamed and not displayed all at once
- There was no way to search through your previous chat sessions
- There was no way to store and reuse prompts
So this app just created a better UI that fixed all of these issues. The best part is, that it required you to put in your own OpenAI API key, and all calls to the API were done locally from your browser, so no server compute was required.
The person who developed this was able to sell this for a one-time fee of around 20$ (it’s gone up now, 39$–79$) and he made 100s of thousands of dollars with it quickly.
GPT chrome extension
Another type of app that made a lot of money was Chrome extensions. Since most people used ChatGPT on their desktop browsers, having an extension to do a common task easily was very useful.
One such Chrome extension simply turned any text input on the website you are currently on into an AI input, i.e. you could type a prompt in it and it will auto-filled by the response from ChatGPT.
Again, this required you to use your API key, so it had 0 operating cost. The developer built it once and sold it for a 100% profit.
When the demand for the extension started going down, he started selling the source code for the app as well! I wish I remembered his Twitter account so that I could give you the actual figures.
The bottom line is that it's not always about having a unique idea, or a billion-dollar one. If you are well prepared, when the opportunity comes, you just have to execute well.