Master ChatGPT in 40 Days: Week One

I’ve been listening to The Survival Podcast for a long time, probably since close to the beginning of the show. I can remember listening on my iPod in my car, on my way to work or driving from office to office, while Jack Spirko was recording the show in his car on the way to work. Anyway, I digress. Jack is now on the fifth cohort of his ChatGPT course, Master ChatGPT in 40 Days, and I decided to give it a try. If you follow this blog you know I lean on Claude Code heavily, and before Claude I was using the ChatGPT web interface.

I’ve been working on setting up a few businesses. I’ve made a couple of Garmin watch apps (Wrist RNG is the one I’ve written about), I’m trying to grow two YouTube channels, HushLittleHedgehog and BusyWorkLabs, and I built PreparedGround with Claude Code. So when I bought the course I decided to point it at PreparedGround.

Hopefully the course helps me increase visibility for the site. I’ve already discovered where to find my page analytics, and I might set up an email marketing list. That’s something ChatGPT recommended through one of the course prompts, and I notice Jack does it with his own businesses too.

How the course works

One prompt a day, Monday through Friday, for 40 days, delivered through a private Telegram group. You run the prompt against your own business, then post what you got back to the group for feedback from Jack and the other students. It’s pitched at 15 to 30 minutes a day, costs $300, and each cohort is capped at 100 people.

I think there are about 50 of us in the class. The Telegram group isn’t so busy with discussion and questions that I can’t catch up on it after work. We also get an email with a follow-up summary of the day’s lesson, which is nice when you’re behind, and Jack has been releasing a private video for each day.

ChatGPT vs. Claude, one week in

With the first week of the class in the books, I’ve made some interesting observations about the two platforms. First, ChatGPT seems to follow the rules I set in prompts much better than Claude does. When I started I was running the lessons through both, but that ended quickly. Claude’s answers to the first few prompts were much more long-winded, which meant that much more time spent reading and comparing. Maybe I’ll do a full walkthrough with Claude at a later date.

I don’t think I’ll be sharing any of the prompts, because they feel like the main part of the course, but I will say there have been a few that I’m using nearly immediately at work (with Claude).

After working through the week’s lessons I had a random question, unrelated to the class, and asked ChatGPT because I already had it open. For the class we set up a ChatGPT Project to work in, but some of the “rules” from the setup must have landed in ChatGPT’s memory rather than staying inside the project, because the first thing it did was ask:

Before I answer, how do you want it formatted: short or long, list or paragraph, and casual or formal?

That was one of the first setup prompts from the class: tell ChatGPT to open every new chat by asking that. I’m not sure I’ll stick with it, but I may add something like it to my Claude instructions too. Sometimes I just want a short answer and sometimes I want a bit more.

Thirty minutes a night

I spent about 30 minutes a night on the class, which is what Jack said it would take. Work and family pushed the last two lessons to Saturday night, but that’s OK, I got them done. Now I have work to do on PreparedGround. I’m adding a how-to section to the site (with Claude, as I write this) to give Google more keywords to find and more content to show up in search.

What’s next

I’m not sure what the coming weeks are going to cover, but I’m looking forward to it!

Thanks for reading.

This post was written by hacksforcoffee.