Dropshipping Tokens
October 22, 2024
I spent half a day going down the rabbit hole of dropshipping on Shopify, and I finally understood
Back in the early 2010s, physical goods became really cheap and really accessible via AliExpress. Dropshipping became cheap because you, as a seller, would hear about some product (like charcoal toothpaste from China) that might perform well. You’d set up an online storefront for it (Shopify), and then you’d see if you could generate leads (Facebook / Google ads) at a price lower than what you could sell the product for.
As long as you had positive unit economics, you were in the clear since there was essentially no upfront cost. Everything was ethereal. No inventory, no product, no tech that needed to be built. You rented everything, had the product delivered after you had the cash in hand, and got to run a business with no overhead.
Many GPT wrappers are just this. GPT wrappers get a lot of hate, and most of it is for good reason. GPT wrappers shouldn’t be venture-backed companies, but they can fill the same niche that dropshipping sites in the mid-2010s filled.
You find a market that could benefit from AI (for example, tax professionals), build a product that mostly is ChatGPT (which is the AliExpress in this scenario), but with a few additional bells and whistles attached (the equivalent of nice marketing and a friendly online storefront for e-commerce, but in this case, it is nice marketing and some minor features like “trained on your docs” or “RAG” or “highlights relevant info to your field”), then try to go get leads and see if you can manufacture a +EV subscription model.
You don’t build the hard tech, you don’t need to do a ton of extra work besides just connecting everything together and creating a great marketing + UX. OpenAI provides the cheap, cheap tokens, and you mark them up for the dressing you put on them and hopefully turn a profit. You win by owning the end customer and experience.
There’s going to be tons of businesses that are built like this. If you can speak to the customer (literally and figuratively), then you can own the customer, and you can dropship tokens to the tune of $1M+ in profit.