The Uber conversation that built GPTease turns 2 today

Two years ago I was sitting in the back of an Uber in Lisbon, Portugal, venting to my best friend (as we all do) about a problem that was making me furious..

ChatGPT had just blown up, and everyone was talking about it, this was bigger than the iPhone, bigger than the .com era, it was the next big thing, and we all felt it... but instead of being excited, like everyone else, I was so frustrated! Every time I typed a prompt related to my work, I got back the same fkn response..

“I can’t help with that request.”

It wasn’t just frustrating, it was insulting, because even though my work is real and legal, I was (yet again) not allowed to use the same tools that mainstream creators got to use.

My first thought was, “someone in the industry is going to create an adult version, they have the resources” so I waited.. but nobody did.

So there I was, in the back of this Uber, on my way to lunch, venting about it to my best friend.. and then she said something so simple it almost annoyed me..

“why not just build one?”

We sat in that Uber talking about it for the rest of the ride, and by the time we pulled up to the restaurant, it had a name, GPTease. The whole thing had fully formed in the back of a stranger’s car, in another country.. it was electrifying, and I’m getting chills again, writing about it now.

I’ve shared my thoughts on the loneliness that we experience in this industry.. but what I don’t talk about enough is how conferences changed this solitude for me. I’ve been attending adult industry conferences in both the US and Europe, back to back, for the past 4 years, and those rooms are where everything in my business has accelerated. The right people show up there, and that is also where the right conversations happen.. in fact, my GPTease business partner / developer was someone I met at one of those conferences.

I want to talk about the feeling of terror and excitement because they tend to feel the same in the body. What I’ve learned to listen to instead is what lives underneath the feeling.

Let me explain, good passion is expansive, energizing and generous, it wants to give something.

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Harmful passion, on the other hand, feels urgent, anxiety inducing, and spikes around approval, escape, and comes with a sense of scarcity, it is dressed up as enthusiasm but is rooted in ego.

One is intuition, the other is fear. In the back of that Uber, everything felt expansive.. and that is still the clearest signal I know.

I had never built a piece of technology in my life.. the last time I wrote code was when MySpace was still relevant haha IYKYK.. but I trusted myself enough to take action with GPTease, to work with a developer, and to make it public, which we did!

And then I found myself frustrated again this year.. and not because GPTease had failed, but because I knew it could be better, it needed to be better, because you asked it to be better.. and the only way to do that was to tear it down and start over…

My business partner and I have always communicated well, even when there is pushback, even when we disagree, and that trust is genuinely the reason we work.

But trust does not make the conversation easy. Asking people who have poured themselves into something to start over from scratch is painful no matter how well you communicate. I sat with the decision before I brought it to him. I meditated on the vision until I was not just confident in it but ready to defend every corner of it, because my team trusts me and I do not take that lightly.

Then the GPTease rebuild happened.. It took long nights, and long mornings.. I’m back to my 5am deep work sessions, and 12+ hour days.. Every piece of feedback from every creator who had ever messaged me… all of it went into what GPTease is today.

And before I walk you through what is new, I want to be clear about something. Everything I am about to describe is sitting in your account right now, at no extra cost, no upgrade required. You asked for better, so here it is:

The thing I want you to understand about why I built this, and why I rebuilt it, is that it has never been separate from everything else I do. SWCEO, SWR Data, GPTease, they are all the same ecosystem built on the same value, which is the fact that we do not gatekeep. I want to make as many adult creators as successful as possible. I am involved in legislation, data, research and now AI because I believe in this work and I believe in the people doing it. When feedback comes in, whether it is praise or criticism, I use it to make things better, for you, and for me, because I’m still a creator at the end of the day, and I still need this tool to work the way I need it to work.

Here is the thing I did not expect 2 years ago..

I always saw myself as a creator first… that was the identity I led with, the one I was most comfortable in, but something shifted in the last 6 months... I started seeing myself differently, not just as a creator, but as an operator. Someone who actually enjoys the operations side of running a technology company, who has gotten good at it, who has built something real and can look at the decisions that went into it and feel genuinely proud of the call she made..

I am proud of the skills I’ve built, the relationships I have formed, and the creators I have watched succeed because this tool existed.

cheers to us, we built something real,
MelRose

P.S. GPTease is waiting for you. Go find what I left in there, including the easter eggs, and when something surprises you, say so on X, in the YouTube comments or inside CEO Society. Your feedback is what builds this.