How Nick Turley’s 10-Day Sprint Took ChatGPT from 0 to 100M Users and a $12B Run Rate
Inside the AI pivot that made ChatGPT the fastest-adopted consumer product in history
On November 29, 2022, ChatGPT didn’t exist.
On December 9, 2022, it had over a million users.
Two months later, 100 million monthly users.
By 2025, a $12B annual run rate.
All because of a 10-day sprint — and one product decision led by a guy you’ve probably never heard of: Nick Turley.
In 2020, OpenAI’s GPT-3 wowed developers but barely registered with the public.
It was a brilliant language model… locked behind an API and a clunky Playground interface. You needed to know what a “prompt” was. You needed to know how to talk to the machine.
That meant GPT-3’s audience was tiny. Technologists loved it. Everyone else? Didn’t bother.
Fast forward to late 2022.
John Schulman’s research team had fine-tuned a new version, GPT-3.5, that could follow instructions better.
Nick Turley saw the opportunity:
“What if we wrapped this in a dead-simple chat interface and just… let everyone try it?”
OpenAI pulled engineers, designers, and researchers into what Turley calls a hackathon-style sprint. Ten days later, they shipped a basic web app — a text box, a chat history, and a “Send” button. No coding. No waitlist. No onboarding friction.
The result?
0 → 1M users in 5 days
100M monthly active users in 2 months — the fastest app growth in history
$12B annualized revenue by 2025, thanks to ChatGPT Plus subscriptions and enterprise licensing
This wasn’t a more “powerful” AI launch. GPT-3.5 was already built.
It was a UX shift — a bet that removing complexity and letting people “just chat” would open the floodgates.
It did.
Most AI products don’t fail because the model is bad.
They fail because the experience sucks.
GPT-3 and ChatGPT had the same brain.
Only one had a front door people wanted to walk through.
And the doors keep opening.
Now it speaks back — people take it on walks, through parks, into everyday life.
ChatGPT is quietly becoming what Her imagined —
a companion you don’t open an app to use,
but one that’s simply… there.
Ask yourself:
If 90% of your market tried your product tomorrow, would they “get it” in the first 30 seconds?
If not, you’re leaving millions — maybe billions — on the table.
If you want to fix that, join my free 20-Day Anti-Corp Product Sprint.
It’s designed to take your product from “powerful but ignored” to “simple, obvious, and impossible to put down” — with exercises that fit into a single hour each day.
👉 Join the Sprint and make your product impossible to ignore