Category Archives: LearnGPT

LearnGPT is now EmergentMind

Photo by Suzanne Williams

Naming things is hard.

Shortly after ChatGPT launched at the end of November, I decided to build a site to share ChatGPT examples and eventually be the home to educational content to help people learn more about GPT.

To my surprise, there were a lot of relevant available .com domain names related to GPT, so I registered a bunch and asked for suggestions on Twitter for which to use for the site:

And so I chose LearnGPT and for the last month and a half that’s been the name of the site.

On its surface, it’s a great name for a site focused on teaching people about GPT.

But, it has some issues:

  • People kept referring to the site as “Learn” in conversation because saying “Learn GPT” is clunky. “How’s ‘learn’ doing?” (looking at you Dave…)
  • In two years will we still be talking about GPT or one of the many other Large Language Models (LLM) coming out? Incorporating content on the site about them would be awkward if the name of the site referenced GPT.
  • And most importantly, the name “Learn GPT” meant that the site would forever be constrained to being an educational site about GPT. That likely meant monetizing it down the road via an info product which wasn’t interesting to me at all, so much so that it almost led me to shut the site down.

The hunt for a new name

I wrote a little Ruby script to search for available .ai domain names, hoping to find one to rename LearnGPT to:

… but unregistered quality .ai domains are few and far between, so that approach didn’t lead to any good candidates for a new site name.

Then it occurred to me… I already own a great domain I can use for the site.

EmergentMind

Around 2014 I got very interested in the concept of emergence and created a site called Emergent Mind to build little projects to explore the space more. In the end I wound up creating 10 interactive visualizations: Boids, Game of Life, Cellular Automata, Tree Growing, Biomorophs, The Evolution of Color, Animorphs, Forming a Planet, The Perceptron, and Neural Network.

You can still play around with them if you’d like courtesy of Archive.org:

EmergentMind archive

It dawned on me recently that the name “Emergent Mind” was a great description for the end result of these Large Language Models like GPT: a mind of sorts that emerges from the machine learning process.

I didn’t own the Twitter handle @EmergentMind but thankfully its owner was kind of enough to give it to me for free which solidified my decision to use it as the new name for LearnGPT.

What’s next for EmergentMind?

In the course of integrating GPT into Preceden recently, I realized just how difficult prompt engineering can be. You might have some task in mind for GPT or another LLM, but what’s the best way to ask the question to get a great answer? It’s as much of an art as a science, and I think there’s an opportunity to build a community around this nascent skill.

So, instead of focusing on GPT, I’ve decided to focus on building a site for people interested in prompt engineering. Imagine educational content, tools, and a Stack Overflow-like community all built from the ground up, infused with AI, to help people learn to communicate with these new AI technologies more effectively.

And the name is flexible enough that if that prompt engineering direction doesn’t make sense long term (will prompt engineering still be a thing in a few years?), it’s easy enough to pivot without another name change.

Here we go 🚀.

Turning Down $7k for a Side Project I Announced Two Weeks Ago I was Shutting Down

That’s a lot of flip flops 🤣 (#)

About two weeks ago I announced I was shutting down LearnGPT. After the announcement, I received a lot of interest from people interested in taking it over, so I decided to try to sell it instead of shutting it down. I wound up receiving two offers, one for $6.5k and one for $7k, and the person who made the lower offer later said they’d be willing to offer more, so figure I might have gotten $8k-$9k after some negotiation. But, after a lot of deliberation, I turned down both offers.

The problem with LearnGPT

At the beginning of the year I finally went full time on my SaaS business, Preceden. I also had recently launched LearnGPT, a site for browsing, sharing, and discussing interesting ChatGPT prompts. But after a few weeks of working on it, I found myself not interested in working on it anymore for a variety of reasons:

  • I had 2 contractors working on it (one adding content to the site, one marketing it) and their combined burn rate was several thousand dollars a month. Not the end of the world, but…
  • The clearest path to making money from LearnGPT was to create and sell an info product, something I had zero interest in writing or hiring someone to write
  • LearnGPT was consuming a lot of headspace and time, and I was losing a lot of sleep trying to figure out what to do with it
  • I wasn’t terribly excited about my short term plans for it (adding a News and Apps section), which would wind up making it very similar to /r/ChatGPT.
  • I have a lot of plans for Preceden, and every minute I spent working on LearnGPT would take me away from that, the thing that’s actually making money and supporting my family right now.
  • It started to feel like a job and I started to resent it for that reason (remember, I just left my contracting job).

I also just had a friend who sold his SaaS business and he estimated it took him about 150 hours to go through the whole process. I didn’t want to spend a bunch of time trying to sell a pre-revenue site, which is why I elected to just shut it down, but after the acquisition interest started coming in, I decided to try to sell it quickly and then switch back to focusing on Preceden.

But, in the end, I decided not to sell, despite the two decent offers.

Why not sell?

One path I hadn’t fully considered was the possibility of pivoting LearnGPT into something that would excite me enough to continue working on. I was so stuck on this idea of needing to create an info product to monetize the site that I didn’t consider my other options. The reality is I had (and have) a lot of options:

  • What if I lowered its burn rate? It might mean less marketing efforts, but it would reduce the pressure on me to monetize the site, allowing me to work on it for fun instead of treating it as a new business that I had to monetize.
  • What if I just worked on it when it excited me enough to work on it (vs blocking time off on my calendar to devote to it)?
  • Is there a path to building a product here (which is what I really enjoy doing)?
  • Can I change to the focus away from ChatGPT examples toward something that’s going to be interesting and motivating for me to work on long term?

Thankfully, after a lot of brainstorming and mulling over my options, I’ve arrived at a tentative vision for the site that does excite me, but it’s going to require a lot of changes.

Later today I’m going to make the first of those changes: changing LearnGPT’s name.

More on that in my next post :).

LearnGPT is for sale. Contact me if you’re interested.

Photo by Vitaly Taranov

On Friday I announced that I intended to shut down LearnGPT to focus on Preceden, my main business. I didn’t plan to sell LearnGPT because I didn’t think a month-old, pre-revenue project like this would be able to sell for enough to warrant going through a sale.

It’s been three days and to my great surprise, I’ve had 9 people reach out about taking over and/or buying LearnGPT and that’s without me even saying it was for sale.

Given all of the interest, it does make sense to sell it and find a new owner who can take it to the next level, which I’m thrilled about.

If you think you might be a good fit and want to learn more, email me at matthew.h.mazur@gmail.com and I’ll send you a document with additional information to help you decide whether or not to make an offer.

A few key points that might save some back and forth:

  • The site is built with Ruby on Rails so you’ll either need to be a Rails developer or have access to one
  • I’m accepting offers until end of Friday, January 20th, then will pick someone to move forward with based on the offer amount and how good of a fit it is
  • Minimum offer is $5k
  • I’m looking to close the deal quickly, ideally completing the sale, transferring the assets, and completing training by the end of next Friday, January 27th

If you check all of these boxes, drop me a note and I’ll send you the additional information.

Cheers!

Indie Hacking Week 1 Recap: Starting TimelineGPT, Ending LearnGPT

Today marks the end of my first week of full-time indie hacking. I feel like I’m getting in a good groove as far as my daily routine, but I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet how much flexibility I have in terms of my daily schedule. For example, I’m still waking up early to workout and still mostly working 9am-5pm, despite having the flexibility to make my own hours. That said, keeping a normal routine and structuring my workday like a normal job might work best for me. We’ll see.

Preceden

On the Preceden front, I started work on a promising new feature that uses GPT to suggest events to add to your timeline.

For example, imagine you want to create a timeline of World War II. In the past, you would have to research and manually add events to your Preceden timeline to populate it. With this new feature, you can hit a button and it will generate a list of suggestions for World War II or any other topic:

And with the click of another button, you can add those suggestions to your timeline:

Neat, right?

Preceden’s free plan limits users to 10 events per timeline, so making it easier to populate timelines should lead to more paid conversions and help me grow the business.

And while trickier to do, eventually I’d love for this to support project planning too. Imagine being able to say you want to plan a marketing campaign for your SaaS and it automatically generates tasks and suggests dates.

The v1 will be an in-app tool that people can use, but after I work out the kinks I’ll likely make it a standalone tool that logged out users can use, with an option to sign up to continue working on whatever timeline the tool generates for them.

Codename for this whole project: TimelineGPT :).

LearnGPT

Shortly after ChatGPT launched in late November, I launched LearnGPT.com, a site for browsing, sharing, and discussing ChatGPT prompts:

On launch day I posted it on HackerNews where it received over 350 upvotes and earlier this month it made it to the top 10 again thanks to an interesting prompt about a leaf falling that someone posted.

My initial vision for the site was to start with prompts, then expand it into GPT news, tutorials, apps, and more, and eventually offer paid courses to monetize the site.

There’s this famous graph showing the typical path that a successful startup takes over its lifetime. I’ve added an arrow showing where LearnGPT is in this journey:

I honestly believe that with a lot of work, I could push LearnGPT past this “trough of sorrow” and build it into a big business along the lines of PyImageSearch or WPBeginner.

But, continuing with it would consume a lot of time and headspace that I could be putting into Preceden.

And unlike other products I’ve started, LearnGPT would require building a community and creating a lot of unique content which doesn’t terribly excite me. I enjoy building products, and writing a lot of content or managing people to write that content is not something I want to spend my days working on.

I considered trying to sell LearnGPT to someone better suited to take it to the next level, but because it’s pre-revenue (and actually burning money thanks to the contractors I’ve had helping with it), it’s not likely to fetch much, and would likely require a fair amount of time to finalize the deal, so I’m just going to throw up a banner about the closure, turn off new sign ups, and shut down the site in a week or two.

And with that, I’ll finally, truly be full time on Preceden and not splitting my time with contracting or other projects.

Onward 🚀