1.2 – Building Your First GPT - Step By Step Lesson

Lesson Overview

This lesson guides you through the process of building your first custom GPT entirely within ChatGPT’s web platform. You’ll start by accessing the right part of the ChatGPT workspace, where all your GPTs—personal, shared, or public—are managed and created. By walking through this hands-on activity, you’ll see how simple prompts can define the character, purpose, and boundaries of your new GPT.

Learning to build and configure a GPT is important for entrepreneurs and creators seeking a more focused AI experience than the default ChatGPT provides. Standard ChatGPT serves broad audiences, but with custom GPTs, you can train the AI to deliver highly specialized value, whether for customer support, product recommendations, or expert knowledge in a niche domain.

You’ll also uncover how to upload documents and set the GPT to use your proprietary or updated information, so your AI offers answers grounded in your expertise—not just the general web. Examples in this lesson center around building a GPT focused on AI tools and trends, but the workflow applies to any specialty. This lesson prepares you for further customization and more advanced features in later chapters.

Who This Is For

If you’re ready to move beyond using standard ChatGPT and want to create tailored AI solutions, this lesson is aimed at you.

• Entrepreneurs building branded AI assistants for their products or services
• Online educators curating and sharing up-to-date knowledge in their field
• Content creators who want to offer exclusive, interactive tools to their communities
• Business owners seeking to share internal expertise securely or showcase public expertise
• Anyone with unique information who wants control over their AI assistant’s data and behavior

Where This Fits in a Workflow

Building your first custom GPT is the starting point for deploying specialized AI tools in your workflow. You’ll use these skills early in a project, for example, when launching an automated knowledge base, creating a customer support assistant, or making a public-facing FAQ bot.

For instance, after defining your business’s area of expertise, you can build a GPT that answers prospective customer questions or provides staff with consistent policy information. You might later add more documents, refine the GPT’s instructions, or interact with feedback data—all flowing from the foundation you lay in this lesson. After building your first GPT, you’re set to configure, update, and deploy further bots for different tasks as your needs grow.

Technical & Workflow Benefits

Previously, sharing expertise or interactive business intelligence required custom development or slow manual response. With ChatGPT’s custom GPT builder, you eliminate the need for coding and quickly create, test, and share your expertise as a conversational AI.

Custom GPTs let you restrict responses to specific, up-to-date documents or enable only the capabilities you truly need (like web browsing or image creation). For example, an entrepreneur can create a GPT that answers product questions based only on the latest support manual—saving time and ensuring consistent, high-quality responses.

The builder’s interface shows real-time previews so you can immediately check if your GPT is responding as intended, rather than waiting for feedback after public launch. This reduces trial-and-error, minimizes miscommunication, and improves the reliability of the AI tool you share with others or use internally.

Practice Exercise

**Scenario:**
Suppose you have a list of your industry’s top tools or frequently asked questions saved as a PDF.

**Exercise Steps:**

1. Log in to your paid ChatGPT account and navigate to the My GPTs section, then start building a new GPT as demonstrated in the lesson.
2. Use the “Configure” tab to give your GPT a name, description, and upload your PDF as the knowledge base.
3. Test your GPT by asking it for a list of the top tools or FAQs, and compare its response to the content actually present in your PDF.

**Reflection:**
Did the GPT use the information from your uploaded file, or did it provide a generic answer? Think about what changes you could make (additional or updated documents, clearer instructions) to improve your GPT’s accuracy for future users.

Course Context Recap

This lesson showed you how to create and customize your first GPT, walking through interface basics and best practices for adding knowledge and setting up sharing controls. Previously, you were introduced to the essential concepts and requirements for custom GPTs. Looking ahead, you’ll learn about advanced customization options for instructions, actions, and connecting your GPT to external resources or workflows.

Continue to the next lesson to deepen your understanding and unlock the full power of custom GPTs for your entrepreneurial or creative projects. Explore the rest of the course to build increasingly valuable and precise AI tools tailored to your business or content needs.