Leveraging AI as a Web3 Builder
An anecdote of how ChatGPT helped me with Sales and Dev work
TLDR:
We at Token Page are building a product for Web3 Artists to sell directly to their collectors without the need for platforms like Superare.
ChatGPT helped me with a Sales task in finding 1000+ leads, and with the Dev task of programmatically parsing this list into a spreadsheet.
AI is a complete paradigm shift. Regardless of your role in Web3, you can 10x your productivity by leveraging AI as a business assistant to solve problems.
I’m currently travelling and have had less time to write a post this week, which is why I am releasing this post on Friday rather than the usual Thursday. I decided to write this week about an anecdotal example of how ChatGPT helped me recently, as I knew it would be faster to write than diving into deep Web3 concepts.
I think this simple anecdote highlights just how powerful AI is even at this early stage. ChatGPT’s help genuinely gave me a lot of clarity on how AI can be leveraged as a powerful tool to augment one’s capabilities as a builder in Web3 today.
Also, everyone and their mother has been writing posts about AI lately so I guess its my turn…
We’re building a product!
Firstly, my cofounder Krishan and I are in the early stages of building a product for Web3 artists at our startup Token Page. We’ve built primarily for others in Web3 over the last two years with great projects like Creepz, the Sprite Club mint, Swapshop for Seedphrase, and an artist hub for Trym Ruud with his Rude Boys collection.
We’ve come to believe that what we built for Trym has potential to scale as its own product and move us from building primarily for others to building for ourselves, which is our long-term goal.
Our current hypothesis is that Web3 Artists who’ve reached a certain level of success and amassed an audience are stuck using generic platforms like Superare or Foundation to sell their art who take significant cuts on sales. This is the case for even top 10 artists like XCopy. While these platforms originally helped raise the status of these artists, they’ve stopped raising the bar and are now in a race to the bottom extracting more and more from artists.
This clearly sucks - artists and their collectors deserve better.
We built a hub for Trym and his art. There’s a landing page telling his story and a gallery (shown below) where you can see all his individual pieces and dive deeper into collectors and what they own. We’ll also be releasing soon an on-chain reward mechanism and most importantly a sales process embedded directly on his site disinter-mediating the platforms.
Web3 by nature disinter-mediates middle-men. We strongly believe artists shouldn’t have to give a 15% cut to platforms like Superare in return for a generic and mediocre experience for selling their art, instead artists should be able to sell directly through their own website. However, this is just our hypothesis and we need to see if artists feel the same and there’s genuine demand.
AI for Lead Generation
Given that we’re now looking for Web3 artists, I needed to generate some leads to reach out to and gauge their interest for our product. I’d been using Twitter to find leads by searching through followers of other big artists and platforms. However, this proved to be very slow and give unreliable results.
Importantly I also wanted to have an idea of sales volume that artists have had as that’s indicative of the stage that artist is at in their own personal journey. We’ve found most early stage artists are more interested in growing sales volumes so platforms like Superare and Foundation are great for visibility and are worth the 15% cut. It’s the larger artists that are further along their journey who’ve already amassed an audience that don’t need the platforms any more.
Given that my current methods for finding new artists were slow I decided to ask ChatGPT for help to see if it might give me some guidance. I took it as a light-hearted exercise and didn’t genuinely expect much from it. However, after exchanging a few messages I asked the question below:
The first 3 suggestions were things I was already doing, however the 4th suggestion of using third-party tools was something I had never considered before. I looked at cryptoart.io and both quickly and surprisingly found that they have an auto-updating list of the top 10,000 Web3 artists by sales volume!
Incredibly, through a simple exchange with my AI powered aid I was able to get a list of literally 10,000 artists, with easily 1000+ leads that fall into the category I was looking for. ChatGPT helped me do a Sales oriented task better than I was able to do on my own and better than if I'd hired someone to create this list for myself.
Shout out to Richard Chen for creating this incredibly useful site in the first place!
AI for Writing code
Having found this list of potential leads at cryptoart.io I now needed to digest it into a format that I could work with and get my VA to find their contact details so I could reach out to them.
I knew I needed to write a little script to scrape this list into a CSV format so that I could import it into a Google Sheets. As a dev I could have just fiddled around on google and found the most apt libraries to help me here, but instead I wanted to see what ChatGPT could do for a non-coder and see if it could write the entire code.
Through a series of prompts ChatGPT quickly guided me towards some Python code that would scrape a site using the BeautifulSoup library. However, cryptoart.io generates its artist list on the fly, so I asked ChatGPT how it would get this list on the fly and it suggested using a “headless browser” with the Selenium library.
This was honestly a great solution. I continued with the prompts and ran into a few errors along the way including indexing and other small bugs that were easily fixed just by inputting the errors as the next prompt into ChatGPT.
I fed in some examples of the HTML output I was getting from cryptoart.io and eventually it gave me a purpose built script that iterated over the entire list and gave me the exact CSV output I wanted!
It wasn’t very generic code as it mentioned the exact divs within the HTML, so in its current form it wouldn’t work for another site with a different HTML set up. However, it didn’t need to be generic, it just needed to solve my problem, and in less than a couple of hours I had a scraper purpose-built for cryptoart.io/artists that downloaded all the list of artists and put them into a Google Sheet for me!
Become super-powered with AI
I began unsure of how I might find good Web3 Artists as potential leads for our new product, and ended up with a full on spreadsheet with 1000+ leads! This was achieved in a couple of session with ChatGPT’s help and just asking the right questions.
While this is a simple anecdotal example, it’s still an incredibly powerful one of how you can go from not knowing how to solve a specific problem to executing a specific solution with the aid of an AI. ChatGPT acted both as a Sales assistant helping me to find leads in the first place, and after as a Development assistant helping me write specific code to parse that list.
In truth, ChatGPT is a Sales assistant, Dev assistant, and thousands of other assistants all wrapped up in one. As a Web3 builder it all just depends on you to ask the right questions to leverage the AI.
Its impossible to predict what role AI will take in the long-term but its already evolving very fast. With GPT-4 already out and Google getting in the game with Bard, one can only imagine how rapidly this technology will evolve! This week we’ve even seen a group of successful entrepreneurs write a petition to pause AI’s rapid growth to ensure we are taking the right steps to mitigate all the risks.
All in all, AI is one of the most significant evolutions of our time and it’s here to stay, so as a builder in Web3 (or in fact any space) make sure to leverage it as a business assistant and beyond to give yourself superpowers and multiply your productivity.
That’s it for this week… keep building builders!