The Path to Chipp

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I have been writing and thinking about how to use technology to improve communities and businesses since (at least) 2009.

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This exploration led me through social media education at 9 Clouds, entrepreneurship education in higher education, Web3 education at Metacrafters, and AI education at FiveMin.AI.

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The past five months, I have focused on a new product that makes it easy for anyone to build a business with AI

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That tool is now live! Chipp.AI.

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About Chipp

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Chipp helps anyone create a payment solution for their AI apps. With Chipp, more people can create and monetize their ideas.

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This company brings me back to the challenge I am always working to solve: How can I help more people learn to use technology to improve their lives?

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That’s what I’m excited to do, and now I get to do it with Chipp.

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Chipp’s mission is to help builders start building.

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This blog will be a big part of that. We will also offer workshops like tomorrow’s workshop: How to Monetize a Prompt.

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REGISTER FOR THE WORKSHOP

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Moving forward, you can expect tutorials, explorations of how AI will change business and education, and updates on our solution and the company. If you liked the tutorials, podcasts, and posts I’ve created in the past, you will love what we have in store for you at Chipp.

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But before we get ahead of ourselves, let me introduce Chipp and the amazing Chipp team!

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Meet the Team

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Chipp has a strong team that loves working together! We’re previous founders who are technically skilled and passionate educators.

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• Scott Meyer is the CEO of Chipp. Previously, he co-founded 9 Clouds, taught AI to developers with Metacrafters, and spent over a year writing and teaching AI to businesses and educators.
• Hunter Hodnett is the CTO of Chipp. Previously, he worked at Reddit, Amazon, Metacrafters, and founded Cottage to match technical talent with development projects.
• Andre Lacke is the Chief AI Officer of Chipp (CAO). He is the future of development, using AI to build AI. He is a software engineer specializing in AI applications and a contributor to the Lang Chain AI community.

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Besides the full-time team of three, Chipp is grateful to combine with the brilliance of two additional builders and founders.

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• Serj Hunt leads our UI/UX design and provides help building for the no-code community.
• Scott Holdman helps with product design and helped launch our first app Benchmark990.

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Instead of reading about us, let’s just roll the tape! Here’s our 1-minute introduction to the full-time team.

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How the Team Met

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Hunter is the connector, bringing the founding team together.

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Hunter and Scott worked together at Metacrafters, a learn-and-earn platform teaching developers web3 and AI. In this company, they worked together for almost a year building developer education.

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Previously, Hunter’s startup, Cottage, worked with Andre as a developer on various development projects. They worked together for almost a year.

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When Scott Meyer and Scott Holdman had the idea to build an AI solution, Hunter was still working at Metacrafters and recommended Andre. When Hunter officially left Metacrafters, he then joined the team.

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Together, Hunter, Andre, and Scott Meyer launched Chipp publicly on September 22nd with lots of help from Serj and Scott H.

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We’ve come a long way since then, so let’s check out Chipp in action.

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Chipp in Action

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Chipp is quickly iterating based on customer feedback. Here is the demo of Chipp that we submitted for our Y Combinator application on October 11th.

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Why We Built Chipp

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Our Why

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We want to support AI builders. Chipp helps us do that, which is why we are building this company.

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The Problem We Solve

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We are solving a problem we encountered and a problem millions of new builders and AI agents will face in the coming months: the need to easily integrate a pay-as-you-go payment solution, the same way OpenAI charges developers. By offering this product for free, we align incentives between builders, platforms, and investors. We accelerate the launch of new AI tools, help builders choose the best platform for their tools, and connect these builders with investors.

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How We Know This Matters

We know that people need Chipp through personal experience, market validation, and investor interviews. We have domain expertise as founders, AI app developers and teachers, and Lang Chain contributors.

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Andre, Scott, and Scott initially built an app to help nonprofits generate insights from tax data. The first OpenAI bill was a shock, so we built a custom pay-as-you-go payment solution.

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Over 150 developers downloaded our NPM package the first night, so we knew the payment solution was something other developers needed as well.

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Hunter then joined the team. As a previous founder with experience building and scaling apps globally at Amazon and Reddit, he helped us move from concept to deployment.

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With this core team, we launched Chipp and raised a pre-seed round.

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The Competition

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Developers use alternatives that are inferior to Chipp.

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Currently, no code and AI developers charge monthly subscriptions, build their own simple credit counters, ask users to enter their own OpenAI API key or open source their projects.

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We understand that monthly subscriptions create a barrier to adoption, and freemium models get expensive for developers. We also know that building a pay-per-use payment engine is time-consuming and often based on guessing at the best price. We solve these problems with price discovery and easy implementation. Chipp can measure what a user pays and how much they cost the developer, creating a complete view of the user value. This helps the developer increase conversion at the most profitable price. We even enable AI agents to pay one another - a trend we expect to see in the coming months.

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Payment solutions that provide monthly subscriptions - Stripe, Brain Tree, Adyen, Razorpay - are competitors and partners. Developers may choose to offer monthly subscriptions on an existing platform. Alternatively, they can use Chipp, which is built on top of Stripe, enabling monthly subscriptions and additional features like pay-as-you-go.

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We understand the need to have a 360-degree view of customers. Chipp enables builders of all technical levels to launch a product and understand their customers.

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With easy integrations on sites like Zapier and Bubble, we look forward to a future where anyone who can use ChatGPT can launch an AI product.

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More Adventures to Come

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We have a unique opportunity to live well and work smart with just a little bit of AI. AI builders will be the ones who create solutions unique to every business, community, and individual.

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Chipp is here to support them.

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Fortunately, if you know English, you can be an AI builder. English is the programming language of the future. Our tutorials and workshops will help you go from AI beginner to AI builder.

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That’s why we’re excited to say hi and thanks. Thanks for your interest. And personally, thanks for following me through a variety of explorations that have brought me to this point.

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More adventures await. We hope you’ll subscribe and join the fun.

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Let’s build!

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