🔨Introducing "Can I Fix It Myself?" - A GPT for The Busy Homeowner
Product Playing with a GPT Agent
One of my favorite use cases for ChatGPT over the past year has been to ask it what to do about household problems.
When our garage door stopped working, I needed a hit list of things to try myself, so I didn’t look silly if I brought in the repairman.
When we had water damage earlier this year, I was travelling and Helen needed to know what to do urgently first.
For the busy professional who is sorta good at house stuff, the internet is a C+ resource - all too often the SEO of a random plumbing agency in Topeka, Kansas dominates internet search results.
So over the weekend, I created my first AI agent (or “GPT” as OpenAI calls it): “Can I Fix It Myself?” It’s ChatGPT tailored to respect your busy lifestyle, treat you like someone who likes product manager-level clarity on house projects, and synthesizes the world’s information about house repairs for you.
If you have a ChatGPT Plus Subscription, you can try it out yourself: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-98u0wGbTM-can-i-fix-it-myself. You can send feedback or cool chat experiences with it to mindthebeet@gmail.com or find me on LinkedIn.
Here’s an example of the tone, clarity, and assumption-of-expertise I was going for:
I had our youngest daughter provide some wicked cover art for Mind The Beet’s first agent:
Product Play in Action
Who knows where “Can I fix it myself?” will go. Honestly, there isn’t much value added from me beyond grounding, naming, and now, I suppose, more free word-of-mouth for Open AI.
But, holy cow, the reduced barriers to entry and time to value are amazing! Let me tell you about my weekend: Helen was travelling - so I was on my own with the kids - and I had two performance reviews to write. The kids and I also had a serious goal to beat the Wind Temple together in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. In short, busy! The fact that I could create a GPT, announced earlier this week in Sam Altman’s keynote at the Open AI Dev Days, and get a feel for the paradigm is truly groundbreaking. I started during Sunday morning cartoons, refined during kid’s swim practice, and published while distracting the kids with drawing the above-mentioned cover art.
As we all figure out how to adapt to a changing tech sector with the Era of AI, there is a learning here - AI will enable more experimentation, cheaper and quicker, than ever before. Sneaking product play into the in between moments is more doable than ever before. Contributing to new ecosystems will be open to more people than ever before. Yes, this is a cycle repeating itself again in our tech sector, but it’s exciting to be back at the start and to remember how to act and lead differently for this moment. Onwards!