How I earned 500,000 by making access to ChatGPT.

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The article about how I almost missed the “boom” of ChatGPT but gained access to it and made money (and continue to earn). The project itself is currently declining, but I’ll discuss that at the end.

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Table of Contents:
– Who am I
– How the idea came about
– How the project was made from the technical side
– How I attracted my first clients
– Insight: cheating behavioral factors
– How the project grew
– Insight about subscriptions
– What were the problems?
– How Yandex killed SEO
– What are your plans next?
– Conclusions

Who am I

My name is Rostislav, and I am a Full-Stack developer. For those reading my content for the first time, here are links to other articles:

1. “5 Tips for Developers Before Starting Their Startup. Experience After 750,000 Rubles”
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2. “Solo Startup. Part 5. How Much Does the Project Bring in Now?”
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3. “Solo Startup. Part 3: Simplifying the Product”

Now my main project is a Telegram chat for the site (which additionally shows what city the user is writing from and when he is online).

If it is relevant to you or you want to connect to the affiliate program: ClickChat.

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How did the idea come about?

At the end of 2022, ChatGPT gained popularity. Everyone was talking, writing, sharing stories, and creating memes about it. I successfully ignored this moment, letting it pass me by.

In February, I stumbled upon a free ChatGPT bot on Telegram. I sent it a few messages, played around with it, and then forgot about it. Some time later, I realized that it could have been an excellent time to launch a project with ChatGPT.

Closer to mid-March, it struck me: ChatGPT has an API! Consequently, an idea emerged: what if I localize the API and resell it to legal entities? They would pay me in rubles, and I would purchase from OpenAI in dollars, pocketing the difference.

A couple of days later, I simplified the concept. Selling to B2B is complicated. There’s an easier way! I’ll sell directly to end-users. I just need to create a website, set up advertising, boost SEO, and the SaaS is ready. Subscriptions can be sold. I’ll focus mainly on SEO (spoiler: it worked).

And so, ChatGPT Me website was born. I deliberately chose a domain with “ChatGPT” to enhance SEO visibility for that search term.

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How the project was made from the technical side

From a technical perspective, everything is relatively straightforward: when a user makes a request in the chat, I forward the request to the OpenAI ChatGPT API and display the response to the user.

For subscription payments, users are allocated tokens that ChatGPT consumes. I use a tokenizer to analyze token consumption.

Revenue is derived from two components:

1. Unused tokens at the end of the month.
2. My percentage on top of the tokens I provide to the user.

The server-side is developed in NodeJS + NestJS. The main part of the website is built with NextJS, and the landing page is created using Svelte (I experimented to achieve maximum Google Page Speed). The PostgreSQL database is used, and Redis serves for caching and as a message broker. Nginx acts as the HTTP proxy server.

I developed the first version in about a month, albeit at a relatively slow pace due to limited time.

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How did I attract my first clients?

I initiated the promotion with the following actions:

1. Purchased links through SeoWizard and posted in various software catalogs.
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2. Launched advertising on Yandex.Direct (what surprised me was that at that time, few were advertising under the ChatGPT query).
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3. Wrote several articles on vc.ru, pikabu, and Habr. However, most of them were either deleted or downvoted almost immediately (fairly, but traffic is traffic).

I had notifications set up on Telegram for every new registration. I wasn’t particularly expecting a sudden success and didn’t realize at the time that this might not be the best solution. Overnight, the chat with notifications was flooded with messages, and the next day, my phone was buzzing every 20-30 minutes.

It looked like this:

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Many people were registering, but the payments were minimal. I had to disable registration notifications and keep only payment notifications:

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Overall, the launch turned out to be quite successful. In the first month of the project’s existence, I invested around 30,000 rubles and earned roughly the same amount. Breaking even is already a success!

For a moment, I even felt like a successful entrepreneur.

Insight: behavioural factors

From the very beginning, I understood the importance of allowing users to try the product. That’s why 10 free messages were available in the chat.

At some point, I analyzed and realized that students were registering massively just for the sake of 10 free messages. Here’s an example from this month; take a look at the emails (I don’t verify them through link confirmation):

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Sign-ups for free messages

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And these sign-ups… darn well boost behavioral factors for search engines! I gave a little freebie to the students, and in return, they gave me positions in SEO. It turns out to be a win-win situation.

How the project grew

After a few weeks, the site shot up in the SEO rankings for the query “ChatGPT,” and I decided to stop advertising. I only invested in purchasing links and gradually improved the chat.

Here’s the registration graph for all months from April:

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May shows a sharp increase in sign-ups due to SEO

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All this time I treated the project as a “temporary topic”, so I did not expect to earn millions. I just rejoiced at every peak and waited for all this happiness to end.

In early May and mid-July, the project was pushed to the top positions. These days, the number of subscriptions has been growing in some abnormal amounts. The notification had been on silent for a long time, and the chat looked like this:

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Messages for July

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On good days, the chat brought in 5,000 to 7,500 rubles. About 70% of the revenue was clear profit! I was really hoping that this would last forever (spoiler: it didn’t).

Insight about subscriptions

At some point, I noticed that registrations and subscriptions were increasing, but my payment to OpenAI remained consistently around 10,000 rubles. So, I decided to analyze how many people were actually using their tokens, even if only halfway.

It turned out that only 2.5% of users had ever spent 50% of their available monthly token limit. Despite peak subscriptions exceeding 90,000 rubles per month.

So, roughly 90% of people were essentially giving me money without fully utilizing what they had purchased. This was an incredible insight for me, and it dawned on me the entire benefit of SaaS services.

Now, imagine how much gyms make with monthly memberships or services like Yandex.Plus (although I do use Yandex.Plus).

Moral of the story: making money from subscriptions is the easiest. Subscribing to a small amount is psychologically easy, but over 5-10 months, it accumulates into a substantial sum almost unnoticed.

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What were the problems?

And now a bit about the challenges. In my opinion, this project brought in easy money, but it’s important to mention the moments where I messed up.

1. Dropped the User Database (epic fail!):
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   Registration through the website is done via email. In the beginning, I didn’t validate fields much, and it was possible to enter two identical emails with different capitalisation.
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   For example, two different emails for the system: “rostislav@mail.ru” and “Rostislav@mail.ru”.
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   At some point, a user couldn’t log into the right account because she used a capital letter in the email. I decided to fix the email registration case by converting everything to lowercase. However, this user specifically asked me to manually change her email. So, I went into the database to update the email manually using an SQL script. I first wrote a WHERE script to check for only one email. Then, for the same WHERE, I wrote the UPDATE script.
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   Apparently, I forgot to close a bracket somewhere. I ran it. Within a second, all ~25,000 emails became NULL. At that moment, I felt a cold sweat, and I froze for two minutes. But the backups were in place, and I recovered. I went to change into a dry T-shirt.
   
   – Lesson 1: Even experience and precautions don’t always save you from childish mistakes.
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   – Lesson 2: Make backups.
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2. Publication on RuStore:
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   At some point, I decided to create a mobile application to appear in RuStore under the “ChatGPT” query. Since there were no such applications, the idea had a chance of success and could provide an additional source of traffic. I quickly learned React Native, hastily made the application, went to publish it, and… RuStore didn’t allow the use of the name ChatGPT.
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   Fair, but sad. I published it under a different name. After a week, I deleted the application because there were very few registrations, and the application was an eyesore.
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3. Servers in Moscow:
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   Initially, the API worked fine for all regions. At some point, OpenAI decided to block access from Russia, including for the API. I had to urgently move to the Netherlands (on new servers, I mean). Due to the domain redirection, there was a day of downtime. This situation should have been anticipated in advance.

How Yandex killed SEO

In September, I expected a rapid project growth because schools and universities were reopening. My target audience once again needed access to boundless information! “I’ll buy myself a car with this money!” — I thought at some point. But on August 30th, I received this notification in Yandex Webmaster:

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You are “mimicking”.
“Violations and security threats on the website http://chatgpt-me.ru, its individual sections or pages.”…

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At first, I didn’t understand what it was. Then, I Googled it and found out that “mimicry” is when a website tries to impersonate another popular site.

I’m not pretending to be ChatGPT (nor do I look like it), I’m just using their name almost honestly for SEO promotion. Odd… 😁

I contacted Yandex support to figure out what was wrong. However, their support didn’t provide much help. They simply said it’s all search algorithms, and I should figure it out myself. “If you fix everything, your site will return to search results in 30 days.”

Thirty days without appearing in search results is almost a death sentence for the project, leading to a shift of all positions to competitors (and by September, there were already plenty of such chat projects). In general, the situation emerged where the site was knocked out of the search results, and no one could clearly say what needed fixing.

I tried various methods, like rewriting the text, removing the word “ChatGPT” from the title, and so on. In the end, nothing helped.

From this moment, the project’s gradual decline began.

Since I treated the project as a “temporary thing” and expected something like this, I was a bit sad for a couple of days and then calmed down. Perhaps Yandex did the right thing (after all, such algorithms are not invented for nothing). Moreover, Yandex sometimes acts faster than Google, and all its services (almost) are pretty cool.

The only thing I would have liked in this situation is a clear explanation of what exactly was wrong and assistance in fixing the site, not “wait 30 days and figure it out yourself through trial and error.”

After all, if a genuinely serious site ends up mistakenly blocked in this way, it will cause a lot of problems for the owner with no way to seek help.

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What are my plans next?

The site has occasional registrations, and there are around 60,000 rubles in subscriptions per month. That’s why I’m maintaining the project, not actively developing new features. When subscriptions completely dwindle, and servers become more expensive, I’ll close it. But I feel that this will be a year or more from now, if not later.

Conclusions

Over the past six months, I launched a project and managed to earn from it. This time, my experience helped me make the project profitable almost from the start. I gained valuable insights, encountered new challenges, and solidified my understanding that opportunities are everywhere (even though some said, “Why create a site with ChatGPT? There are already plenty of bots, and you can just use a VPN”).

Currently, my main project is a Telegram chat for the website. It’s more reliable and interesting, and there’s profit as well. So, I continue to invest all my available efforts into its development. I’ll share more about how I’m expanding ClickChat in the upcoming articles.

I hope my experience inspires you to start (or continue) something of your own.

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And give it a like. You know, like a brother. ❤️

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