sometimes I can't believe I spent 3 years writing a book BEFORE chatGPT came out :) Many of you know that for my book, THE COLD START PROBLEM, focused on tech marketing, that I spent nights and weekends for 3 years to put it together. The first step was to write a large outline, ich was then turned into 30-50 pages. Then eventually each of those pages was turned into paragraphs that covered 10x pages each, so that the final product was about 400. This process of successive outlining was incredibly time consuming, and there were many points where it felt like... THERE MUST BE A BETTER WAY. It's fun to play with ChatGPT and see the alternate universe where I had the tool to work on it. It'd be so so much easier... To demonstrate a bit how much easier it is to develop the topics around a book, here's a prompt I used around the idea of writing a book about pivoting your product. Here goes: "I want to read a new book about Startups and the problem of pivoting from one product to another when the product is not able to find product market fit. I want to use some case studies of successful pivots for example, Justin TV to twitch or Microsoft programming, languages to operating systems or slack from their video game to the communication software. I want to create an outline that includes the concept of pivoting how to decide when to pivot the potential ways to execute, the pivot short, falls in executing a pivot incorrectly, and how to Judge success. For example, sometimes when a pivot is done incorrectly, it’s because it’s involving too large of a team and the company actually needs to fire quite a lot of people. Please take this invite, and create a book outline. Please include 10 major sections, and then five points underneath each of the sections that and then be developed in more detail." The result is not perfect but OMG it's pretty damn good. I attached the image. You could imagine now taking each of these sections and having it further filled out by ChatGPT, while you focus on making everything hang together. And which examples make sense. I think this would have radically shortened the time it took me to write a 100,000 word book. Maybe still a year, if you wanted to really handcraft things and edit at the end, but nevertheless a dramatic speedup Great to really try it out.
