071: Dive in
Let me see if I can persuade you to use ChatGPT more than you are
I’m assuming, based on Pew Research, most of you have heard of ChatGPT, but aren’t using it daily. Many of you haven’t even tried it yet.
You are just like my students.
This week’s homework requires my class to use ChatGPT to evaluate, improve, and then rank three startup business ideas. As assignments go, it’s general enough and early enough in the entrepreneurial process to add real value. You could alter many of the prompt formulas below to work on similar tasks in strategy, and creative development.
This post is the same verbiage I gave my students (so assume you’re studying creative entrepreneurship, okay?), and goes long for two reasons:
1️⃣ In January I’ll begin teaching a new course called “AI for Creative Entrepreneurs” at MCAD. I wanted to work out some preliminary onboarding for that curriculum. Two birds with one stone stuff.
2️⃣ As I’ve said before, using ChatGPT for the first few times works better if you can set aside preconceived notions of “intelligence” and old habits related to working with computers. I’ve tried here to walk through the pragmatic steps and the thought process behind them.
Let’s begin.
👏🏿👏🏽 You’re going to use ChatGPT!! 👏🏾👏🏼
I’m a firm believer generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be an invaluable tool for the entrepreneurial journey. They are especially useful in the early phase of idea/concept evaluation.
Last week’s assignment asked you to develop three startup/business ideas.
Our formula for a business idea begins with two ingredients:
1. A problem or opportunity worth addressing
Remember those episodes of How I Built This. In each case, the entrepreneur was inspired by a problem or opportunity that was significant, juicy, attractive, etc. If you’re stuck, try decoding Who’s It For? or What’s It For? Those two questions are central to problems/opportunities of significance.
2. The unique way your idea addresses the problem or opportunity. In other words, what’s the hook? Why should we keep listening to you? This is the brief description that inspires you to keep going.
So you should have three ideas, and each idea includes those two ingredients—the problem or idea worth addressing and your unique way to approach the problem or opportunity.
And it’s totally fine if your work, at this point, is unclear or murky. It’s just the beginning! It’s very rare for your definition of the problem/opportunity or your unique solution to be crystal clear at this point. After all, you’re an entrepreneur.
That’s why right now is a great time for a helpful, resourceful partner to join you. Welcome, ChatGPT.
Here’s the process I want you to follow:
1. Go to ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com)
2. Sign up and create an account or login. It’s free.
If you’re signing up you will receive a “verify email” email. Follow that process.
If you’re signing up, you’ll be asked to enter your first name, last name and birthday. Enter whatever you’re comfortable entering.
You’ll be asked to verify a phone number
3. Once you’ve verified, you’ll wind up on this screen...
4. And now you’re ready to use ChatGPT! This tool works like a chatbot. For our purposes, you’re going to type or paste in words in the “Send a message” form field, hit the arrow (or click “return” on your keyboard), and then ChatGPT will reply. And you and ChatGPT will go back and forth having a conversation.
Let’s talk about what it’s like to have a productive conversation with ChatGPT
I want you to assume ChatGPT is your intern, or a librarian, or an assistant. And you can assume they know a lot about whatever topic you need to explore. For example, if you want to explore the history of music record labels, or the types of people who own mopeds in the U.S., or the common pitfalls of packaging design...you can assume ChatGPT knows a lot about that topic and wants to help you.
While ChatGPT is commonly referred to as “artificial intelligence” it is a very specific kind of intelligence, which is not human intelligence. ChatGPT functions as a pattern recognition and pattern generation machine. But gosh golly gee does it sure seem like you’re communicating with what we infer as human intelligence.
What I mean is, ChatGPT will read the text you input and analyze the pattern of letters which form your words...and the pattern of words which form your sentences. Then, it reviews the unimaginably large corpus of data it has been trained on in search of patterns like the ones you just typed in. For example, if you typed in, “Help me evaluate these entrepreneurial concepts to decide which one is most relevant and likely to succeed,” ChatGPT is going to look for patterns (i.e. passages from books, term papers, cases studies) in its training data that include “entrepreneurial concepts” and “likely to succeed.”
It’s probably worth taking a moment to just say ChatGPT’s training data is literally everything. Every book. Every webpage. More or less. Don’t quote me. So it has a lot of raw material from which to match patterns like “entrepreneurial concepts” and “likely to succeed.”
So then ChatGPT is going to locate related patterns (i.e. imagine the Venn diagram of “entrepreneurial concepts” and “likely to succeed” drawn from words and sentences and contexts found in millions of biographies, scientific papers, case studies, etc.). And those related patterns—for example, words occurring before, after and in relation to “entrepreneurial concepts”—will fuel ChatGPT's response to you. It’s what you would do if you could read every possible source, identify useful patterns, and assemble a grammatical reply.
And all of this occurs in seconds.
That speed is why people think ChatGPT is thinking and “intelligent.” But now you know better.
It really helps to keep all of this in mind as you organize your process for interacting with ChatGPT. Think of ChatGPT as having a unique neurodivergence. The more you work the way it prefers to work, the happier you’ll be with its results.
Onward!
5. It’s time to write your first prompt related to this week's homework assignment.
(Remember you defined two ingredients for each entrepreneurial idea—problem/opportunity, and unique idea. Keep those handy, since you’ll be cut/pasting them soon.)
😉 Prompting 101: Write them somewhere else and paste the text into ChatGPT
You’re going to want to play with the words before you hand them over to ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s interface is not built for nuanced word processing. Clicking “return” to create a paragraph break actually means “submit,” which can be frustrating. I advise writing and editing all prompts in some other program first, and once you’re ready, cut/paste into ChatGPT. Then hit Submit.
First we need to instruct ChatGPT for our distinct purposes. We need to tell it what role it is playing for us, and what context we’re working in. Same thing you’d do with a human intern or assistant.
PROMPT 1 (Cut/Paste):
Let’s take a deep breath and solve this task step by step. You are a deeply experienced entrepreneur, with vast knowledge of startup process, culture and best practices. I am your partner. I’m going to provide three startup business ideas. Each idea will include the problem or opportunity the business idea is rooted in, and then a description of the business idea itself. Please acknowledge you understand our task before we begin.
Cut and paste the paragraph above into ChatGPT and hit return.
I bet you’ve got questions around that first sentence. There’s data to suggest beginning with “let’s take a deep breath and solve this task step by step” helps ChatGPT focus and generate more useful responses. Same with humans, no?
You’ll get a reply that might look something like this...
Fun, right?
Time to pull up the words you wrote for this week’s homework. You’ll be cut/pasting.
PROMPT 2:
My first idea is [cut/paste the words which describe your unique idea] which is inspired by [cut/paste the problem or opportunity you’ve defined]. Don’t respond to this idea yet. Just acknowledge you understand it. Then I’ll give you my second and third business ideas.
Hit return.
Now ChatGPT will analyze your words and respond. It should ask you to supply your second and third ideas.
PROMPT 3:
Here is my second idea: [cut/paste the words which describe your second unique idea] which is inspired by [cut/paste the problem or opportunity you’ve defined]. And here is my third idea: [cut/paste the words which describe your third unique idea] which is inspired by [cut/paste the problem or opportunity you've defined]. Please acknowledge that you have all three of my startup business ideas. Then we can begin our work together.
ChatGPT should reply by summarizing your three ideas. And it will likely ask you what you want to do next.
Congratulations—you’ve begun a conversation which will hopefully prove illuminating, inspiring and useful.
PROMPT 4:
Now that you have my three startup business ideas I want you to help me improve them. Are there any questions you have before we dive deeper?
Reply to ChatGPT’s questions. Go back and forth as much as you need to clarify.
PROMPT 5:
Let’s return to my three business ideas. And let’s remember you are a deeply experienced entrepreneur, with vast knowledge of startup process, culture and best practices. Take each of my three startup business ideas one at a time and tell me how I can improve them.
And you're off to the races.
(Why did I repeat the bit telling ChatGPT what role it’s playing? Because ChatGPT is young and it forgets context often. I find it helps to cut/paste centering instructions every 5-8 replies.)
Feel free to ask ChatGPT why it suggested things, or replied the way it did.
Hopefully you’re getting a sense of how the ChatGPT process works. You set roles and the context, then provided a scenario. And ChatGPT works alongside you.
PRO TIP: If you don't know what to do next, ask ChatGPT what it would do!
I’m not sure what to do next with this task. What do you recommend?
It’s possible ChatGPT might suggest oddball or clearly inaccurate ideas. This is referred to as “hallucinations.” Humans do this, too, right? You can choose to ignore these replies, or correct ChatGPT and re-direct its focus.
Wow. This is a long homework assignment.
Apologies. A big part of this week’s homework included getting you engaged in ChatGPT for the first time.
Once you’ve had a few interactions with the tool, I want you to work on achieving the following...
🔬⚒️ TASK 1: Use ChatGPT to improve your three startup ideas.
Work with ChatGPT to evaluate your problem or opportunity. What evidence exists to help inform and validate your theory? Ask ChatGPT for help.
My question for you next week will be—What advice did ChatGPT give you that helped refine or improve your ideas?
🤔 TASK 2: After you’ve worked with ChatGPT to improve your ideas, ask it to evaluate all three ideas and tell you which has the best chances of success, and why.
It might defer, and say it can’t offer an opinion. You can insist. Try telling ChatGPT you know it has the ability to rank ideas, and that you would really appreciate it ranking the three ideas by their chances of success (or a different criteria you prefer).
PROMPT IDEA
Now that you’ve helped me improve these three startup business ideas, I want your opinion. Because you are a deeply experienced entrepreneur, with vast knowledge of startup process, culture and best practices, I want you to tell me which idea has the best chances of success, and why.
Your homework is to print out examples of how ChatGPT helped you improve your startup business ideas, as well as the rationale ChatGPT provided to help you select the most promising idea.
Here are two resources from Kris at All About AI who offers lots of succinct, useful direction for developing effective prompt writing. Or maybe it’s advice for your relationship with ChatGPT?
The 5 Best Prompt Engineering Tips for Beginners
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering (video)
And this is just the beginning.
I’d love to hear how you either developed a relationship with ChatGPT, or how you’ve demonstrated your skills to others.