ChatGPT apps are about to be the next big distribution channel: Here’s how to build one

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My many-time collaborator—and author of my 2nd and 12th most popular posts of all time—is back, and it’s a banger. If you’re looking for alpha in growing your product, this post is for you. I’ll keep my intro short and get you right into the post.

For more from Colin, find him on LinkedIn, check out his killer course (get 15% off using that link!), and join this free Lightning Lesson on January 30th to get a hands-on, live look at building your first ChatGPT app.

P.S. You can listen to this post in convenient podcast form: Spotify / Apple / YouTube.

A few months ago, if you asked ChatGPT to help you book a flight to Paris, you’d get a helpful list of recommendations: airline breakdowns, price ranges, maybe some tips on timing. Then you’d leave ChatGPT, open a travel site, and start your search from scratch.

Now you can say, “Help me find a good flight to Paris from Toronto,” and an interactive widget appears directly inside your conversation. You browse flight options, compare prices, and book, all without ever leaving the chat.

The strategy is simple: instead of ChatGPT responding with text and sending the user elsewhere, it will now surface interactive widgets from third-party apps directly in a conversation, letting users transact inside of ChatGPT (and over time, OpenAI will likely take a small percentage of the transaction).

Launched in October at Dev Day, partners for ChatGPT’s apps already include large companies like Adobe, DoorDash, Canva, Figma, Booking.com, Coursera, Expedia, Spotify, and Zillow. Some of the biggest companies in the world are betting that chat will become a primary interface for their products.

ChatGPT apps represent a rare distribution opportunity, the kind that comes around once or twice a decade. The last comparable moments were the App Store in 2008, the rise of SEO in the early 2000s, and