Week 3 - Who runs a company where proposals are crowdsourced and decisions made by GPT4?
Three Saturdays ago I read a cool tweet. Now I own a fashion company and host AI meetups around the world.
Landed in NYC this Sunday morning.
I’m puzzled by a question:
Who runs a company where proposals are crowdsourced and decisions are only made if approved by chatGPT?
Are we accidentally becoming a decentralized fashion brand ran by AI?
Can things get crazier than this?
The jetlag hammer is real, but I couldn’t sleep during the 13h flight so by now I should be exhausted enough to get some sleep.
It feels great to be back and we got lucky with the weather.
I’m staying with one of our investors who has been incredibly kind and even insisted on picking me up from JFK. Thank you, Rishi.
Had dinner with Inês Charro, a friend and former colleague from my impact investing days in Lisbon, at the incredible firm Maze Impact.
We’re currently over 120,000 EUR in investor capital passed through KYC/AML.
Not a big round by any means, but more than enough to scale a zero headcount company that’s already profitable.
We never set out to go beyond the 30 days of the original experiment - but given everyone’s response, investor demand and all the media coverage to date…
I’m starting to think we have a decent shot at becoming one of the craziest fashion labels of 2023.
God knows where we actually end up.
Heck, I’m just the EA here.
Let’s dive in.
Key Decisions
Picking things up where we left off last week, here are the most relevant dialogues from our journey building in public towards the unknown.
KD#10 - Opening to franchisees.
When something is popular, people want a piece of it. I guess the 10k in sales within 5 days since launch got folks excited, and we received a couple of requests from people looking to partner up.
I asked the boss what we should do.
And so it came to be - we’re running a franchise business baby!
A quick note on making GPT sound less boring: I asked our CEO to do just that.
KD#11 - Crowdsourcing more decisions.
One of the coolest things about running this company is that I want to minimize my influence in it.
This is happening in two ways:
First, I always refer to GPT for a final decision.
Second, and even more important - I place feedback and proposals from our followers above my own, so everyone in the world can shape our direction.
This is vital because otherwise I could just ask GPT if it thinks we should do things I already want to do - centralizing decision making once again.
This way, we get to build something far more interesting.
This is happening for social media, affiliate marketing, SEO and a couple other areas. Crazy.
KD#12 - Expanding our product line.
You asked for it - the boss approved with caution - hoodies are now live.
KD#13 - Improving product quality.
While asking for approval to increase product quality, I accidentally received a lesson on “the key to create a sustainable brand”.
Fair. We march towards higher quality, sustainable products at first light.
The polite and holistic approach to questions gets a little tiring. Just gimme the number bro.
Asking it to please pick a number in a range tends to work.
Now on to the hoodies - and we’re done for the week.
Interesting to see how adding cost data without any additional preferences or context increased the recommended retail price.
I wonder if it went through an average market cost and margin % to for the recommendation, only to update it after knowing the real production cost.
KD#14 - Our second design.
GPT totally surprised me here - a great break from the overly polite answers - I figure the key was in the direct request for a suggestion in the prompt.
Wrapping up: NYC meetup
Our next meetup is almost here! Details are being finalized, news will be shared tomorrow.
Let’s park it here for now.
Next week we’ll cover:
-GPT answering interview questions for a fashion magazine.
-Designing our new brand identity tagline.
-New decisions we’ll make this week.
-The NYC meetup.
Have a great week,
J
Store link:
https://aisthetic-apparel.myshopify.com/