gofri Why two g's? When I was a kid my grandma called me Gofri, and the family picked it up. She said the G hard, almost twice, so I write it twice.
retired

WhatsApp shop assistant

for
Independent
when
2019
Problem
Small shops that sold over WhatsApp.
My contribution
Built the product, integrations and hosting alone.
Delivered
Two paying entrepreneurs used it for approximately one year. No sales or revenue totals tracked.
Result
Two paying entrepreneurs used it for approximately one year.
Status
retired · 2019

~1 yeartwo paying entrepreneurs used it

Hi! Do you still have the linen shirt in blue?

shop product API → blue linen shirt: in stock → prompt

Yes, the blue linen shirt is in stock. It is 100% linen.
A shop's availability question, answered from its own product datareconstruction, illustrative

how it answers

From a message to a reply

  1. 1WhatsApp messagea customer asks about availability or what a product is made of
  2. 2Product APIthe shop's current availability is fetched
  3. 3Injected into the promptthe answer is grounded in that data
  4. 4Modelwrites the reply
  5. 5Reply on WhatsAppsent from a server I ran on my own computer

models

Two models, one pipeline

  1. T5 firstthe model behind the first replies
  2. GPT-3 laterthe model I moved to for replies

lesson

Sell the time back, not the novelty

I first pitched future-facing AI. Owners wanted time back for work that earns money, so selling saved time worked better than novelty.

ending

Roughly a year, then it faded

One shop closed and the other stopped using it, and I stopped maintaining it. A message could go unanswered if a person had the chat open or the model failed.

ownership

Who did what, and when

  1. built aloneproduct, integrations and hosting
  2. two paying shopsabout one year
  3. one shop closedthe other stopped using it
  4. retiredI stopped maintaining it
  • MeThe product, the integrations and the hosting
  • Two shop ownersPaying users who relied on it for customer questions
  • EmployeesNone
  • Model trainingNo contribution established
  • Sales and hours savedNot tracked

What shipped

Two paying entrepreneurs used it for approximately one year.

no sales or revenue were tracked
  • Two paying entrepreneurs used it for approximately one year.
Method and caveats

No sales were tracked and there are no revenue totals. It ran on my own computer acting as a server, not a confirmed cloud deployment.

  • Two paying users for roughly a year: my own account
  • No sales, revenue or hours-saved figures were tracked
  • The chat above is a reconstruction