How I built my first open source project with ChatGPT and Next.js — 10k users in 24 hours

Jun 12, 2023

This was the project that turned me from "someone who reads about building" into "someone who actually ships." I opened a fresh Next.js repo, wired it up to the OpenAI API, deployed to Vercel, posted it on Twitter, and watched the traffic come in.

The stack

Next.js — App Router, server actions for the OpenAI calls
Tailwind — because I didn't want to think about CSS
Vercel — one-click deploy, free tier, done
OpenAI API — gpt-3.5-turbo at the time

What I didn't expect

10k users in 24 hours means 10k API calls, which means real money — which I hadn't planned for. I ended up writing a whole follow-up post on the cost breakdown.

The bigger lesson: shipping something small and public beats planning something big and private. Every single person who used the tool gave me more signal in a day than months of lurking in Discord servers.