Hey - I’m Ivan; I’m a VC and founder. My day job is investing in great founders, and I moonlight building a private GTM community called Revenue Squared. I also dabbled in building stuff and launched a Startup Pitch Deck GPT to the OpenAI App Store that recently crossed 10K+ conversations.
In this edition I’ll show you the following:
1. How to build a basic GPT for your use-case
2. How to build something outside OpenAI’s walled garden, even if you don´t know how to code.
3. How to build a great pitch deck using my GPT!
🌊 Pitch Deck GPT
Like half the world, I’ve been playing around a lot with OpenAI lately.
What’s most impressive about this technology is how it lowers barriers to entry for developing a bunch of different skills - but also how fast it enables you to move.
As usual, the best way to learn is to try to build stuff, so here’s a quick 360 tutorial.
OpenAI: Beginner Vs Intermediate Mode
Easy Mode - GPT Builders: Cool, but largely gimmicky things. You can set them up very quickly, but can’t do much beyond OpenAI’s designated playground.
Intermediate / Advanced Mode - Assistant API: This side is super interesting, basically the business building side. It allows you to do the same as GPT builder, creating an assistant, and make calls to it from pretty much wherever you want.
Level 1: GPT Builder
Lets build a startup pitch deck co-pilot GPT - to help founders with story-building.
Step 1 - Login to ChatGPT and subscribe to Pro ($20/month, worth it). Click on “explore”, then “Create a GPT”:
Step 2 - Create: give your GPT high-level instructions. Answer GPT Builder’s questions, and give it a high-level mission, approach and tone. You can also ask it to design a quick logo through Dall-e.
Step 3 - Configure: click on the bottom right to expand the text box. Give specific step-by-step instructions following this schema:
Step 4 - Train: You can either upload PDF documents directly in the configure tab, or drag and drop them unto the prompt interface with an instruction to learn. To train Startup Pitch GPT I used both methods (sometimes the system still struggles to capture text from longer PDF files / images). You can also “Create Actions” - which lets your GPT retrieve information or take actions outside of ChatGPT - but lets keep it super simple for Level 1.
Step 5 - Deploy: Share it with the world by clicking on the top right Update to public button and voilà! You have trained a GPT on YouTube, Facebook, Uber and other pitch decks + vc frameworks to help founders with their pitch decks.
👉 Try it, upload your pitch deck or slide.
Level 2: Assistant API
This is going to feel a little more in the weeds - but its worth it.
Imagine you own an ecommerce store - you want to build a virtual sales assistant.
You want this sales assistant to be trained on your sales material, your ICP, the types of products that might convert best and so on.
What the Assistant API lets you do is build your own GPT (using OpenAI’s API) and breaking it free from the OpenAI gardens, so you can deploy it anywhere you want - effectively deploying an AI Sales Assistant on your site.
This looks more complicated than it is, but it is actually pretty simple. Here’s an attempt at simplifying this YouTube tutorial by Liam Ottley that will help you pick up this skill super fast:
Quick project: Startup Pitch Deck Assistant
For the sake of this tutorial, lets build a Startup Pitch Deck Assistant - a friendly chatbot that will help you build better pitch decks when you land on our website:
Step 1 - Setup Backend & Knowledge Base:
Open Replit for your Backend (free)
Add your knowledge doc: this is essentially the training information for whatever you want to chat with. Just upload a Microsoft Word doc:
Step 2 - Setup Main.py file: You’ll see a “main.py” file where we have our API endpoints that will talk to from voiceflow (hang in there, it comes later).
Step 3 - Create OpenAI API key:
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