What Online Educators Need to Know About Custom GPTs

Learning AI is great, but earning with AI is better. And so that's kind of what the goal is with, you know, building custom gpts.

This is the entrepreneur school podcast where we believe you can run a thriving business and still make your family a priority. This show is all about supporting you the emerging or early stage Entrepreneur on your journey from solopreneur to CEO while wearing all of the other hats in your life. My name is Kelly Sinclair, and I'm a brand and marketing strategist who started a business with two kids under three. I'm a corporate PR girl turned entrepreneur after I learned the hard way that life is too short to waste doing things that burn you out on this show, you'll hear inspiring stories from other business owners on their journey and learn strategies to help you grow a profitable business while making it all fit into the life that you want. Welcome to entrepreneur school

Hello. I'm so excited to have this chat and introduce you to my friend Wendy breaks. She is an AI strategist and educator on a mission to help ambitious online entrepreneurs sell more support better and scale faster without burning out. She has been diving deep into the world of custom gpts, and it shows coaches, course creators and Service Pros how to turn AI into income by building tools that boost client results and can create entirely new revenue streams, which is super exciting. So if you've ever wondered how to make AI work for your business without turning into a tech wizard? Hello. My hand is raised. Wendy is your go to And today, she's going to be sharing the three types of custom gbts every offer should have and how to get started. Welcome, Wendy.

Oh, my goodness gracious Kelly. Thank you so much for having me. I so appreciate this time with you and being able to talk about all things, AI. So it's such an exciting time for being an entrepreneur.

Oh my gosh, tell me about it. And then this is the, like, ever changing landscape where everything's different, like next week sometimes. So we are getting this, like, hot off the press. We're not recording it super far in advance, because you never know what could happen. Let's start with, like, your history in AI, because, you know, I'd love to hear different people's perspectives on when did it start for you, and when was the moment you realized, okay, this is going to change everything.

Oh my gosh, it was early. So we're talking, you know, and when I say early, one of the things that I love about AI is that when November 2022 rolled around, every entrepreneur basically got the same reset, and almost like AI, leveled the playing field a lot. So people that were that you perceived as being way farther along than you potentially were starting to fall backwards, depending on how fast you started to adopt AI when it first rolled out, right? And so this is such an exciting time. And then when it rolled out, I was like, I remember the first time I ever went to chatgpt, and I was like, I don't know what to do. Like, it was just a box, and I didn't understand the concept, and so I just moved away from it. And then a couple weeks later, I started hearing more and more about it, and this is like, you know, mid December right of 2022 and I started playing around, and I started seeing use cases, and I started, like, going down the Twitter, you know, rabbit hole, and subscribing to every single newsletter I could get my hands on to understand this, because I love to be an early adopter, and I love shiny new objects. And AI at the time was a shiny new object. And so what happened is, is I started to see pretty early on that there were some big gaps in my program called the micro audio summit system, and where people were starting to get slowed down with thinking about, like, What's the title of my Summit, and what types of speakers like, the stuff that I perceived as easy in my own course was what was like slowing people down. And so I started to see, like, a connection between, like, what if AI could make it faster for them. And now this was early on, so everybody was still kind of like, I don't know about AI, like, I don't know if I want to be using it. So, you know, I started just implementing it and using it when I was working with my clients and really getting good at what do I need to it to give me so I can remove the roadblock for my clients. And then mid 2023 happened, and some tools started to come out that allowed you to create what we now know as kind of like custom gpts. This was before chatgpt came out with custom GPT. I was like, really, it was 2023 Well, the. Yeah, they launched custom gpts in like November, December 2023, but earlier, there were some tools that started to allow you to build so I built them for my clients into my course. And at this point, I still wasn't sure how I was going to be able to monetize AI for myself, like I thought, if I can just get more people into the micro audio summit system and make it faster than it already is. That's super cool. But then people started to see what I had built for the micro audio summit system, and they're like, Yo, teach me how to do that from my course. And then, like, everything started to blossom from there. And then you all might remember that chat GPT had this, like, funky plug in store for a couple of months, and then they bailed on the plug in store and they rolled out custom gpts. And that's when I saw, like, the opportunity of a lifetime.

Hmm, I love that. And if anybody hears the phrase custom GPT, and immediately thinks that's above my tech pay grade. How do you explain what that actually is In plain terms, in a way that you know business owners should care?

Yeah, yeah. So and it is. It feels techy. It feels like, if you don't have like a tech heart, or you don't feel like a tech nerd or a Tech Ninja, you might feel a little bit like that's, that's not for me. I'm a health coach, or I'm a, you know, I'm a life coach, I'm a business coach. I don't need that. And basically, what a custom GPT is is built inside of chat GPT. So think about chat GPT is this humongous brain, and then inside of it, you can build these like smaller brains that do very specific, personalized things for yourself, for your clients, for your customers, for your students, etc, etc. So here's how I like to think about it. It's a pre trained and by pre trained, I mean it's pre programmed. It's already built with the prompts and with the instructions that it needs to fulfill a unique set of tasks without going off the rails. And you know, if you start to kind of you never know what you're going to get when you put in a prompt. It's getting better and better. But when you build custom gpts, you're thinking about creating a super brain inside of the mega super brain, and so it takes a lot of that guesswork out of it for yourself and for your clients, because you can give it knowledge docs that you know, tell it specifics about a course that you have, or an offer that you have, you can ask it to do certain things, like Create fitness plans for your clients, and all these things it can do just by the client dropping in a little bit of information and not having to think of a mega prompt or start from scratch every time. And that's really what I love about custom gpts, is you think about it doing 75% of the heavy lifting for you. Yeah,

I freaking love them. I and I will say for those who are listening, who are like, who's all new and crazy and techy and stuff, I am not the early adopter, and I also learned how to build these recently. But the most important, like, fun part of it, is when they actually work and they do exactly what you want it to do, like I've talked on this podcast before about tools that I have that help me produce my podcast, in terms of, I just upload my transcript and I get an automatic like, show notes, titles, with SEO, like, all of these things in like five seconds. And to me, one of the biggest values, just as a as a busy mom and entrepreneur, is the time savings. This allows you to do a lot more and a lot less time. Don't you agree?

Oh my gosh, totally. And I talk to people all the time that feel like, oh, it's going to be hard, oh, I'm not tech savvy, oh, I'm not an early adopter. And then they go and like you, they build like, 12 custom gpts in a week. Because once you build the first one, it's a no brainer after that, and I always like to say that building custom gpts is not a techie thing to do. It's a logic thing, and a GPT is like the smartest five year old you'll you'll ever meet, as long as you can give it specific, clear directions on what you want it to give you, not tech directions, but just like directions, like you'd give a five year old on how to brush its teeth. For instance, you can build custom gpts, and you can do it fast, and you can do it accurately, and you can clear the path for yourself. You can clear the path for your clients and students, and the sky's the limit, right? You're only at that point once you learn how, then the big problem is, what do I build first? Like people get overwhelmed with there's so many opportunities, so many ideas, what am I going to build first?

Right? And you have three types that you think that every online experience needs. So as far as I'm guessing, that's in terms of helping people like who have courses or offers or services that they provide, in order to enhance that for both probably the time savings of the service provider and the like you were talking about roadblocks being removed for your clients.

Yeah, I do, and I think about it like this, like you can build gpts For your own you. So a lot of us have built like our own. I have a copywriter Pro that knows everything about my brands and my offers, and so anytime I want to start a conversation with a GPT, I usually will open up that custom GPT that's Wendy's copywriter Pro. So you can build for yourself, then you can build into existing like offers and courses to enhance and get your clients to the finish line quicker. You can build for new offers. So before we started recording, you talked to me, and you told me that you have built something that I'm going to talk about in a minute, what I would call a standalone custom GPT that you can sell new income stream. And you can also offer custom gpts as a service if you are a service provider. So when I think about building custom gpts for your offer, your course, your program to help your clients get to the finish line faster and have a much more marketable and income producing offer. I think about these three custom gpts that you want to build, and these are kind of like how I describe how to think about building them. And the first one is, I call it a foundational GPT, and the second one is an add on. And then the third is that standalone. And so in a nutshell, a foundational GPT is like, if you have a course and it's teaching all about PR invisibility. Usually, when I think of foundational gpts, I call it that module one work. So it's all that deep work that you want your client to do, that they've probably done before, that they don't want to do the research, the this, the that, the stuff that burns them out early on so they never get to the finish line of your course. So you build this foundational GPT for that main thing that they need to be able to uncover in order to move forward and get success in your offer. And if you build just that one foundational GPT that, in and of itself, is going to be huge for whoever is like going through your offer, right? So after you have that foundational GPT, and then it supports your client, it gives them a bunch of information back then I love to talk about, like add ons, so as you're thinking about, like a course or a program, then there's all these, like exercises and tactics and strategies and workbooks and swipe files and all the minutia that we've put into our courses over the years, right? Which is all, by the way, now becoming a little bit obsolete, and you can start to build add on gpts. And add on gpts are usually take some of the outputs and information from the foundational GPT and then you move that information forward, you drop it into an add on GPT, and now they're starting to get into action, and they're doing the exercises, and they're getting the things done. So add ons are very closely connected to a foundational GPT, and then you can build standalones. And standalones are like, what you can sell is a low ticket offer, what you can sell or put into a bundle or a summit or a lead magnet. Standalones can also go into your programs and courses, but they might not necessarily need the user to do the foundational GPT first, an add on you that user always has to do the foundational GPT first. A standalone GPT is where you can start making money quickly by creating new standalone gpts on whatever your topic is, and starting to sell them and give them out. I have a couple that I put into bundles and summit says, you know, resources and whatnot, and they're amazing. They're just amazing for growth, yeah,

okay, I want to dig into this a little bit more, because when you were talking about the foundational one, I was thinking about a course that I created a number of years ago, and how, like the initial work is, like has anything to do with your brand, really has a lot of self discovery involved in terms of understanding who you are, what you're all about, who you're for, And then trying to turn that into messaging. And I'm like, I just made something that was like, hi, we just met. Like, what are your deepest, dark, like, deepest desires and beliefs about yourself that you probably don't even know? And so I can see what you're saying about how some of that, like upfront work that you need somebody to go through, can be really challenging and also therefore cause them to quit, which means they don't get results. You don't get referrals, all of that stuff, kind of negative outcomes of that. Can you go through maybe an example of like, how did you discover that this was the needed piece, and what does that look like? Maybe inside of one of your own programs? Yeah. Yeah,

so it's so interesting because I work with a lot of people that are in the marketing, messaging, copywriting field or industries, and what I find is that they come to me and they're like, I want to learn how to build a GPT that writes social media posts for my clients. And so I'll give you a real life example, one of my clients came to me and she said, just that, like, I've got this awesome social media framework. I want to turn it into a custom GPT. And I said, Okay, well, that's great, but what do your clients need to know and do and prepare before so they have the stuff to put into the GPT so they can write the post? And that's when she was like, wait, what? And so I said, I think we need to move go back to the beginning a little bit more and create that foundational GPT that gives them content writing ideas based on their target audience, based on their offer, based on the benefits that their particular offer offers, and based on her proprietary methodology for how she teaches messaging, because every messaging coach kind of has their own twist to it, right? And so the goal is you have to take your proprietary frameworks, create the custom GPT, then it's going to give you, or give the user, all of that rich information so they don't have to, you know, spend five hours, 10 hours, 20 hours, doing all that market research and all those calls and all that stuff that they don't really have time for. Like, they didn't come to your program to spend a ton of time. They came to your program to get results faster, right? Because you're the expert, not them, we don't need to make them the expert,

yes, but Right, if they're not using it properly, or they're just getting, like, the surface level stuff, which is kind of like, what the sexiness of having a GPT that will, like, you know, create all your social media posts for you in five minutes a week, like that. Sounds great, but, you know, as a visibility strategist, I would be like, but why are you doing that? And what are you saying, like, what's the strategy behind it? What's the point of it? All of those things, then you're still not producing that, like, level of quality,

because they haven't done that foundational work. And so that foundational work becomes your first GPT, your first custom GPT, and it helps them get all that information out. The reality is, is that chat GPT knows everything that LLM it already knows all of the desire. So let me give you a real life example. The first custom GPT that I started selling is called the email profit framework, okay? And you fill out a quick form, and then you drop the information in, and it's like six questions. It's like, well, who's your target audience? What do you do? Naming your offer, blah, blah, blah. You copy it into that custom GPT, and then it gives you fears, desires, goals, copy outlines for copy that you could write based on the benefits of your offer, unique angles, et cetera, et cetera. And I thought that's great. So if I used that as like some of my foundational work, right? And I focus on that because it's specific to my offer, it's specific to my target audience, and it's specific to the skill and the benefits that I want them to get. And so I have that information, but is that information deep enough? That's the big burning question. So then I built another custom GPT that I said, Okay, well, what if I wanted to go deeper? What is deeper? What does deeper look like? So to me, deeper looks like you don't just have a target audience. You have buyer personas within that target audience. So a target audience can be women in menopause that have gut health problems, for instance. But now you can go deeper, women in menopause who have gut health problems, and then define five buyer personas who have young children at home, who are trying to keep up with their grandkids who just got divorced and want to start a new life, right? So you start to get more granular with your gpts, and then you can really get to that foundational heart. And then from there, you have those add ons that then take that information and voila, right posts, right, blog posts, right, podcast topic, ideas, rights, whatever you want it to write. Okay,

so I feel like you've uncovered something really important in recognizing the the need to have that foundational insights and knowledge and experience for somebody who's trying to learn something from you, like in this case, where we're talking to people who are listening to this podcast, who have courses, or do group programs, or even like provide services to people. What is your take on the risks of this whole custom? G. GPT thing blowing up. Like, so many are being created. Like, I've created 12. So madness is happening, clearly, about, like, just what that means in terms of how we're serving people, like, what's your take on that?

Well, I always like to think about, what are those human only tasks that GPT still can't do for me, right? And the human only task that GPT still can't do for me is people still want human interaction, right? So if I can, let me give you a real life example, let's say you do intensives, okay? And so in order to book an intensive, the user, the client of yours, has to fill out this super long form, but and then you have to spend time like evaluating the form and trying to figure it out, and maybe there's some pre work, and especially if you're in, like, online coaching, you know, program creation, one to one coaching, you're gonna even service based businesses, there's a lot of pre work that we would have to do, like, hours sometimes to, like, figure out, like, what do they mean when they said this, this and this? Well, what if, and you have a really great example of it in your own workflow here, what if you can not only shorten the cycle of or the time that it takes the user to fill out the form. What if you can make the form shorter and your time to evaluate the form shorter by feeding it all into a custom GPT that gets you to your intensive so much faster? Then when you actually do that human work, where you hop on Zoom, when you record the interview, when you you know do the coaching, you already have a basis for the work that that person needs to do and how you want to coach them. You've now spent 20 minutes looking over what the custom GPT gave you based on how you do your intensive based on your own intensive framework, and so now you're getting the client closer to the results faster, instead of having to listen to the client, like lamb Balon for an hour and a half, and then you kind of get off the call and you're like, what just happened? You're already getting them into action. They're leaving with action. So you've shortened the cycle of the form on the front end for them. You've shortened the pre work for yourself, and you've lightened your load for the intensive.

Yeah, I see so much value in that. And even also, like, I've used chat GPT just to help me build more thorough strategies than I could ever build in the amount. Like I used to work at a PR firm, and we would bill about 20 hours to put together a communication plan, right? I can do this same thing in like three hours now, with a lot of back and forth in reigning into AI, asking it, to tweak things in certain ways and whatnot, based on how I would actually create it. And create something so thorough and detailed for a client that they actually get you know exactly what to do for the next 90 days, with a timeline and all the goals and how all the pieces fit together, and which pieces are plug and play, and they can move around and everything. And I feel like we just went off. I wanted to come back to what I think I really wanted to ask you, which is, remember 2020 when everybody and their dog made an online course, and online courses were just like, the hot thing, right? Because it was like, Huh? I don't know. We were just craving information or whatever it was. It was just the whole, like, era of online education really took off in that kind of timing, and now, now we're on the back end of that, five years later, and people are more hesitant. They're questioning the value they've been burned. They've bought crappy courses because people have thrown them together really quickly. Do you see a risk? Or what is your like future predicting on custom gpts and AI tools, and the potential for it to kind of play out similarly? Yeah,

this is such a loaded question, because I mean fundamentally, and I've been talking about this for months, and people are were, at first, were looking at me like, I was crazy town. And now people are like, okay, maybe you're not, like, the whole course and online course and program industry has changed, whether people want to realize it or not, and it's changed with speed. And creating a course with a bunch of templates and swipe files is very 2018, I'm just going to say it. If you want to build something now that's actually relevant, you will have to add AI into it, because I had a call with somebody the other day, and she has an agency, and she was telling me that her clients are like wondering why it's still taking them so long, and it's because they're not using AI yet her clients are getting fidgety and frustrated because they want results fast. Faster, and everybody knows that you can get results faster. So even, like, as far as last year, when people were like, hire me because I'm a copywriter that doesn't use AI, Well, honestly, I'm never going to hire a copywriter that doesn't use AI, and most people aren't going to anymore, because AI is faster, and AI has more good ideas than one human's brain, and so it is fundamentally going to change, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so focused on helping people learn how to build custom gpts. Because I truly think that if you have a course or a program it needs custom gpts, you should focus on getting your clients to the finish line 75% faster than they can get there. Now, again, they don't come to you to learn everything that you know. That's our ego thinking that we're so smart and we need to impart all this brilliant knowledge that we have on them. They want the result. They want the benefit. They don't want your knowledge. They want the result of your knowledge. They pay you the big bucks for the result so that they can get to success faster. And so we have to think about this concept. And even I kind of get sucked into like learning about AI, but now I want to teach people how to like learning AI is great, but earning with AI is better. And so that's kind of what the goal is with, you know, building custom gpts. And I think a lot of people are gonna, you know, realize that being relevant means including AI, and we'll see what happens over the next couple years. You know, it's gonna be a little bit crazy. It's gonna be a little crazy town.

Oh, it's, it's just so wild. How fast things actually change. Like, sometimes you go in there, there's a whole new feature. They rearrange things, projects. Is there projects? Isn't there? Whatever? It just keeps, like, looking different, and that's because we're still very much in, like, the beta of a lot of it, but it has improved significantly, even since I've started using it, which is only probably within the last year, I would say like it used to suck. Used to suck a lot. You get crappy, you know, rocket ship emojis and everything that you did, everything would say next level and whatever. And now you can really get it to know you and speak like you, and I feel quite confident that the tools that I have made while, like you said about the ego, it's a bit it's a bit hard to think, Oh, I ploned myself, and now you don't need me. But then there's still the whole, you know, what can a human add to this that is really just going to enhance the whole experience overall, versus just, you know, you can go play with my Valerie, the visibility auditor. She'll give you ideas, but if you really want to, like, talk through what your visibility strategy should be, you're going to need Kelly still, right?

So you know, to your point about people don't need you anymore, because now they can use Valerie, The Visibility Coach, right? There is still that human element that we need to keep in mind, and that back and forth and somebody there that is kind of like that sounding board and chat G P T is great for that. I have conversations that with the audio version of my chat, G P T every single morning. The problem is sometimes it's more like a cheerleader than a strategist, and it can get a little bit too everything you do is awesome, and so they're actually fixing that right now as at the time of this recording. And so I do feel like there's a time and a place for it, but here's what's important to note, and it's something that you said when chatgpt first came out, it was very much this beta thing. Remember, it was like 2.0 and then we went to 3.0 and everybody was like, so excited, right? Like 3.0 and then now we're at 4.5 so the point is, what is my point? My point is that in the early days, we figured out that we could quickly offer our clients speed and our self speed. But as it's gotten better, now we can offer our clients speed plus personalization. And when you start to layer in that personalization piece, whether you're building custom gpts for your clients, whether they're they have their memory turned on, and it's starting to learn more about how they talk and their how they talk and type and communicate in their cadence. It's getting more personalized towards us. And so those two things together is what's really going to change the online coaching industry. I think that people will have more luck with courses if they build them with AI into them, so that people can get to the finish line quicker, because if it can take you an hour, don't force your client to spend three. And that's the bottom line. And you know, going back to all that module one work, right? All that deep work, nobody has the time or energy for that deep work. It's just the reality of it.

I. Oh my gosh, it's so many good points in there. I feel like, Yeah, everybody has rewind the last 90 seconds and replay that. And also, just a quick point on the whole cheerleader thing. I didn't realize that it was doing that until I heard somebody else talking about how they've, like, tried to train their chat GPT to be like, a more of a devil's advocate and, like, provide that type of feedback to them. I was like, Oh, I really did just think I was so smart all the time. And now I'll be like, what do you see are the risk? And it's like, Oh, you're so smart to ask that. And it's still doing it in a cheerleadery way. But I like it because it's also how I talk, because I'm always like, Oh, I love that. And it's it's always saying, Oh,

I'm laughing, because this past week, I spent a lot of time writing a new email sequence for a program I'm launching, and it kept saying, now you're thinking like a real strategist, oh yeah, I got that one today too. I'm like, thank you. But you know what I like about that is that people are more likely to succeed when they have positive reinforcement. At least I am, like, when I feel like I'm on the right track, I'm more likely to keep going. And so it, I think it does have its place for that. I will say, though, and like, it's like, it's told you, I do ask, like, Okay, well, where are my blind spots with this? What are the cons of these things that we've talked about. And then it'll say, now you're thinking like a true marketing strategist or a true business advisor. And then it'll but then it really will tell me what the blind spots are, and it'll usually then compare the negatives to the positives. And then I can see where what I need to do right,

and you can assess whether you want to move forward with that, like, rate your own risk, you know, of, Oh, I really didn't think about that. That would have been really bad if I didn't think about that. Or, oh, it's not really a big deal. I'll just move forward as planned. Kind of thing, exactly. I've loved this conversation so much, Wendy, and you really, I think if anybody in the back of their mind was thinking, oh, you know, like, is it a good idea? Should we use that? Like, there's a whole other fold of conversations about, you know, ethics and whatnot, as far as, like, how you bring that into your life? But like, just as I think I've said to you in in our side chats, because we have each other on Voxer, like, my kids are never going to live a day without a calculator. So do they really need to learn all of the math without the calculator? You know, like, it's a tool that's there to support you in doing what you're doing, the way we have spell check on every word processing tool that we also have. So like, yes, we need to get some foundations in there, but this is the world that we live in, and we live in a world that has AI in it, and I'm on Team embrace or be left behind, and I love how you've applied that into this. And I've got my wheels turning now about all these courses that I've built in the past that didn't take off the way that I want, that I can now reimagine with supportive AI, and now, you know, they'll come out being very more advanced and timely than they perhaps were. Maybe they were ahead of their time, you know. And AI was the thing that was needed to make it happen. So everybody stay tuned. Exciting things are coming. Wendy, please tell everyone where to connect with you, if you have any exciting things that you want to share as we sign off today, yeah,

I think the best place to start if you are thinking about building custom gpts And thinking about like, strategically how to build custom gpts, because a lot of people can build custom gpts, but you want to do it strategically so that you don't waste your own time in the process of building right. The best place to start and define me is to watch my from prompts to profit two dot L masterclass, and you can watch it on 1.5 speed. It's super good. But it goes through and it goes deeper into the three types of custom gpts that we've touched on today. It has real life examples. And the other thing inside there is, I go through my proprietary custom building framework so that you can get a vibe on it, and you can see like that I have clients that always said, like, I'm never going to use AI have now built nine custom gpts in a week. And so that's the best place to start, and it's a free masterclass, and so I guess you'll probably link it somewhere.

You can go to show notes below. You'll see it right there. Yeah,

so thank you so much for having this conversation with me. I know we could be talking about this for like the next three hours. Yeah,

maybe you'll have to come on like once a month to keep up to date. Maybe quarterly. Anyways, would be good. All right, thanks so much. Wendy,

thank you.

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