How ChatGPT Helped Me Build My First Digital Product

In April of 2024, I released my first digital product. And I couldn’t have done it without ChatGPT.

It’s not an ebook full of cliché phrases or vague, misleading statistics.

It’s not a piece of “artwork” from the uncanny valley with too many fingers and lines that lead to nowhere.

It’s a spreadsheet: The Freelance Service Package Builder, a simple calculator that helps freelancers and independent service providers package their services and determine how many packages they need to sell to meet their income goals.

To use my spreadsheet, a user fills in a table with their preferred hourly rate, the services they offer, and the time it takes to complete each service. Then, in separate tables, they build service packages by selecting the appropriate services from dropdown menus and entering the quantity of each service.

The spreadsheet references the price chart and calculates the price of each item in a package based on the selected service, the quantity, and the service’s price.

Where does ChatGPT come in?

It helped me with the formulas.

I searched forums for a formula that automatically pulls data from the price chart based on the corresponding dropdown selection, multiplies it by the entered quantity, and returns the product as the item’s service price.

I’m still learning to use formulas in Google Sheets, and I was having trouble parsing the forum answers to determine if the provided formulas would do what I needed. So, instead, I explained to ChatGPT what I wanted my formula to do.

ChatGPT gave me this response:

I adjusted the formula to include the correct cell and sheet names and tweaked the formula so an empty cell would be returned if there’s an error in the formula.

This is the finished formula for the spreadsheet:

=IF(F5="" , "", IFERROR(VLOOKUP(F5, $B$7:$D$12, 3, FALSE) * G5, "")

I tested my adjusted formula with a few copywriting services and made-up prices.

And it worked!

Here's a demonstration of the pricing spreadsheet:

Generative AI may have a long way to go when it comes to copywriting, novel writing, basic algebra, art, and many, many other pursuits. But if I ever need help building a spreadsheet, I know where to go for a simple, thorough explanation of formulas.

You win this round, AI.