Inside ChatGPT: The fastest growing product in history | Nick Turley (OpenAI)
Nick Turley, Head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, explains how a 10-day hackathon became the fastest-growing consumer product in history with 700M weekly users.
- ChatGPT was built in 10 days by a volunteer hackathon team and nearly shut down after the holiday launch before retention data changed everything.
- 700 million weekly active users — roughly 10% of the global population — with OpenAI targeting 1 billion soon.
- Retention curve “smiles”: users drop off then return months later using the product more, which Turley calls extremely rare.
- GPT-5 launches free to all users; OpenAI deliberately chose not to gate the frontier model behind its paid tier.
- The $20/month price point was set using a Van Westendorp willingness-to-pay survey run in OpenAI’s Discord.
- “Is it maximally accelerated?” is an internal forcing function — now a Slack emoji — to cut blockers and compress timelines.
- Ship unpolished rather than wait: in AI, product properties are emergent, so you cannot know what to polish until after launch.
- ChatGPT search is now driving more traffic to Lenny’s newsletter than Twitter, signaling a major shift in content distribution.
2025-08-09 · Watch on YouTube
