In a recent interview on the My First Million podcast, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan emphasized the importance of a social media following for the early-stage entrepreneur.
Such a statement will be intuitive to many, but here’s an informative YouTube playlist from Greg Isenberg that can help drive the point home if you need some convincing.
Given the importance of growing a social media following, and my complete lack thereof, we're going to start our series by leaning on AI to help us generate some ideas for tweets (X posts?).
Note that the post continues below today’s video!
Starting in familiar territory
I’m sure that everyone reading this has used ChatGPT at this point for some sort of content creation task. The idea of our tweet generator is to create an app that makes it easier and faster to do what you’ve likely already done via ChatGPT.
If you wanted ChatGPT to write you a tweet, you might do something like the following:
Pick a topic
“flyline, a tool for querying data lakes from Excel”
Enter instructions (the “prompt”) into ChatGPT’s text box
“Can you please turn the following topic into a tweet that is likely to go viral?”
See what it comes up with, personalize or adjust it, and then post it to X:
This is simple and effective, and if all you need help with is some tweet generation, this is probably just fine for you. But, remember, our goal is to create the infrastructure for the first billion dollar solopreneur. We’re going to need a whole suite of apps that remove repeat work and keep us on the right track in order to do accomplish this. We’ll add important features, like a database, in later stages, but for now, let’s start by making sure that we have a clearly defined tweet idea generator.
App structure
This initial app will be dedicated to making new posts. We’ll add functionality for generating replies tomorrow.
If you consider the “prompt” that we gave to ChatGPT above (see the above image), you’ll see that we can break it down into three parts: topics, guidance, and a template:
Guidance
“I'd like help generating a marketing-style tweet that can be used on a project page. Our goal is to go viral.”
Template
“Can you please make sure the tweet has the following structure:
Line 1: Problem
Line 2: Agitation
Line 3: Solution”
Topics
“The tweet is about flyline, a tool (excel add-in) for querying data lakes from Excel
Because topics, guidance and template seem to be a comprehensive formula for creating a new tweet, we’re going to build our app around these options. This should help us ramp up quickly next time we feel like getting X’treme.
We’ll also add a field for the total number of posts that we want to generate, ensuring that we can iterate through options quickly.
Once we’ve filled out our topics, guidance, template and the number of tweets that we want to generate, we’ll submit the data to a large language model via the OpenAI API and wait for the magic to happen. The model will return responses, which we’ll display on the front end, and then we’ll be off and running (ahem - off and tweeting, I mean).
Here’s a screenshot of today’s feature. You can’t see it, but I also added a page for saving tweet templates as well.
Not bad for a first pass, right? As I’ve already mentioned, we’ll refine and improve on these outputs as time goes on. Things like better prompting, adding context, and the ability to switch between models could make a big difference, but this is a strong start to our solopreneur suite.
Thanks for reading, see you tomorrow!