Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, people have asked what the chatbot can do for them, with applications ranging from generating marketing copy to writing code. But when 26-year-old Dhanvin Sriram started having conversations with ChatGPT, he wanted to take it a step further, thinking about ways to make this bot his business partner.
Sriram worked as a financial analyst before trying out ChatGPT, and he says, “I was hooked. I knew this was going to be the next big thing, and I wanted to do something with it, but wasn’t sure exactly what.”
He had conversations with friends working on tools to pair with ChatGPT and followed online discussions intently. One day, something occurred to him: “ChatGPT is only as good as the prompts you give it, and there was no place like a database that you could go to find these prompts.”
Sriram went deep on ChatGPT Reddit and Twitter threads, pulling prompts that people said were effective for different applications, and compiling them on a website called PromptVibes. The site has a simple fill-in-the-blank search bar that says: “I’m a ___ looking to___ about___.”
Within three or four months, his website hit 100,000 unique visitors. Sriram says, “This was like zero pain traffic, it just caught on. I think if you build something that actually solves people’s problems, they’ll start posting on Instagram and TikTok, and you’ll get organic growth.”
He started writing a newsletter and using a pop-up on the PromptVibes site to ask visitors if they wanted to subscribe. The subscribers started piling up fast, but he’d read online that he should hold off on trying to monetize until he hit 5,000 subscribers.
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Once he hit that critical mass of subscribers, he started selling ads. He sent out the newsletter five times a week and sold two ad spots for each letter. The ad revenue was trickling in the first couple of months, but once he hit 10,000 subscribers this past August, he was consistently making $2,000 to $3,000 a month.
Now he’s making $4,000 a month and is on track to double that. He’s also been thinking about other ways to build a successful business, and not too long ago, he discovered his golden goose: “I figured out a prompt that helps me generate prompts.”
Around this prompt, he’s built a paid version of PromptVibes, which includes a Google Chrome plugin that lets you store and organize your prompts. The software will be launching soon with three membership tiers: $4.99 a month, $9.99 a month, and $19.99 a month.
Sriram guesses that if 3 percent of his newsletter subscribers convert to the middle-tier membership, “That’s about 600 people, paying $9.99 a month, which is another $5K a month.”
Ultimately PromptVibes is doing so well that Sriram has quit his full-time job. Being his own boss isn’t always easy, but it’s thrilling, he says. “It’s definitely a roller coaster because when it’s going well, you feel amazing. But sometimes things, especially when you’re building software, hit a delay and then you’re like, okay, what am I doing?”
