GPT-4 got me 5,000 followers in less than 48 hours...

GM Legends 👋

It’s been a BIG week. In this episode I’ll cover:

🤖 The latest news on GPT-4
🚀 How I used the latest news cycle to gain 5,000 followers in 48 hours
📖 Diary of a Founder: Do things that don’t scale
🎯 Building in Public: The Newsletter

Let’s get into it… 💯

🤖 GPT-4: Turning a drawing into a website, coding ‘Pong’ in 60 seconds & getting 90% on a Law exam

If you missed the latest news, OpenAi (the company behind ChatGPT & Dall-E) just released their latest update… GPT-4

The updates can now interpret context from images, code in almost any language and has had major upgrades across the board.

Within hours of the platform being released, users had already:

📝 Turned a sketch on a notepad into a functioning website

🏓 Made the game Pong in 60 seconds

🔍️ Become an Ethereum smart contract auditor

👨‍⚖️ Gone from barely passing The Bar Exam, to getting 90% on it

I wrote a thread with a quick breakdown and list of links to all of the above:

Following the initial hype, innovators kept innovating. I wrote a follow-up thread which covered…

📈 An entrepreneur starting a business with $100,

🤝 GPT hiring a human to get around CAPTCHA restrictions.

🎥 A programmer building an iPhone app that recommends movies (with trailers).

🔥 And much more…

You can catch the follow-up thread below (This ended up being my best performing thread of all time):

Out of all the usecases, my favourite was a guy taking a photo of his fridge and using the image to ask GPT-4 what recipes he can cook:

🖥️ How to get access to GPT-4:

• To use it with ChatGPT, you must pay for the premium subscription (I paid for it today, and it’s awesome).

• If you wanting to use the API to build apps, you can get on the waitlist here.

Billion dollar businesses will be created, and those who deeply learn the platform will cut their workload in half.

Don’t miss this next wave. Keep an eye on OpenAi.

🚀 Using the GPT-4 news cycle to gain 5,000 followers in 48 hours

I’ve written over 150 Twitter threads, and they’ve been almost entirely responsible for my growth from 2,000 to 20,000 followers.

After 150+, you start to see patterns. This week I went all in on one theory, and it paid off. Big time.

Something that I’ve noticed with thread writing is that a timely thread written poorly, will always outperform a well written thread that isn’t relevant right now.

When I saw the news blowing up about GPT-4, I stopped working and jumped on it immediately.

A thread that took me 30 mins to write, tripled the performance of my previous best thread, and got me 2,000 followers in 24 hours.

The next day, I was telling a friend about my thread blowing up and he said to me:

“That’s awesome, so what’s happened with GPT-4 today? Has there been any more news on it?”

This got me thinking 🤔

If it worked yesterday, could I double down on the news?

So I did. The result (as of writing):

• My best performing thread of all time (overtaking my previous best from the day before)

• 2.7m views

• 10,300 likes

• 1,773 retweets

• 3,000+ followers

💭 So how can you use this story?

Firstly, if you see a news story that is blowing up…

Stop what you’re doing and write a short 8-tweet thread immediately. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be timely.

But the biggest takeaway…

If you manage to go viral, double down on it.

Write a follow-up thread immediately the next day, and keep writing follow-ups until the momentum stops.

I’ve now written a third thread on the latest GPT-4 news and it is once again blowing up.

📖 Diary of a Founder: Do things that don’t scale

What do AirBnB, Reddit & Door Dash have in common?

Their founders gained their early users by manually onboarding them one at a time.

(Taking photos of houses, chatting in sub-reddit communities & delivering pizzas. The founders did the hard work themselves)

There’s a famous article called “Do things that don’t scale” by Paul Graham,

The founder of YCombinator - the accelerator behind Coinbase, Dropbox, AirBnB and many more.

The long story short is that the fastest way to grow, is through doing things that seem ‘slow’.

It’s counter-intuitive (which is why most people don’t do it), and it works.

Here’s how I’ve been experimenting with it, and the results so far.

❤️ Personalised Videos

The most effective marketing strategy for growing our project Bricktopians has always been sharing the project on Twitter spaces.

But under the “do things that don’t scale” philosophy, I asked myself “what could we do to take this up a notch?”

So, after every Twitter space, if I’ve seen people actively reacting with emojis, or if I’ve had a great conversation with a speaker,

I’ve spent 30 mins after the space sending personalised 1-on-1 video DMs, to say hey and start a closer connection.

📈 The Result:

Since adopting this new philosophy to relationship building in Web3, and building in public (which I’ll speak about in a future article),

We’ve made so many relationships that have led to bigger speaking opportunities, direct new purchases from people who enjoyed the videos & introductions that have massively boosted the growth of the project.

The impact of this is that we’ve been one of the only projects that has consistently grown between February and March.

As a founder, the part that has excited me the most has been the fact that this growth has been heavily accelerated by new holders joining the project for the first time.

I’m now experimenting with other ‘unscalable’ strategies that we can adopt and use to accelerate the growth of Bricktopians.

🧱 Bricktopians.

If you’re new to Bricktopians, here’s the TLDR:

• We’re a deflationary collection (1,500 burnt so far)

• Built by super computers (like those used by NASA)

• With a free mint launching in 2 weeks.

Every week I’ll be sharing a Bricktopian NFT, that has a special meaning to me.

To kick things off, I’m starting with our ‘Rainbow Pencilled Brick’

When we started our collection, this was the original ‘hero’ Brick to be used as our logo.

We later decided to make a last minute switch, and use the visually distinct characteristics of a ‘Snorkel’ Bricktopian to represent the collection.

Now, to this day I use a ‘non-rainbow’ pencilled version of the logo Brick as my personal PFP, in memory of how this collection started:

If you want to join one of the only projects that has grown in 2023.

Come and get a Bricktopian at:

🎯 Building the Newsletter

^{If you’re new here, one of the core principles of the content I share is that a newsletter is the most linear and simple business you can start in Web3. It has high sponsorship revenue and can go from being a side hustle to a full-time business in under a year. I am building this newsletter in public, to share the progress each week so that you can be a part of the journey. Now let’s get into it 👇}

This week has been my BIGGEST week of growth yet.

This Week:
Subscribers: 1,917 (+272 subscribers)
Open Rate: 49.9% (Slight dip below 50%, pushing to get that up in this week’s article)

Earlier this week, NFT GOD wrote an awesome thread about running his 20,000+ subscriber newsletter business

Check it out here:

One of the biggest pieces of information in this thread was transparency on his sponsorship deals.

He was getting paid $500 at 7,000 subscribers ($70+ per thousand subs).

This echos the opportunity that I outlined in my first article on starting a newsletter.

Quick Recap on tracking my current goals:

🚧 Get my newsletter earlier in the week: Right now this is definitely the most challenging goal.

🚂 1,919 / 2,000 Subscribers: We’re getting close now 👀

🚂 Expand the content categories: I’m currently happy with the current content categories, but am still working through other ways to experiment.

What an awesome week.

Let the grind continue 💯

— Alex

Thanks for reading this week’s episode of Grow Faster ❤️

I’ve been in Web3 for 8 years, ETH since $45 and am building on my NFT project Bricktopians every single day.

If you want to join my world, and be a part of a project that grows with me.

Grab a Bricktopian NFT and let me build for you.

Have a great weekend 💯

Bricktopians OpenSea

Chapter 1: Bricktopians