Why ChatGPT Is a Game Changer in Software Development for Startups?

Startups are hard. They are risky and need the total commitment of the team’s resources and time. Startups operate under financial constraints from the fundraisers or owner’s money trying to meet the critical stages of the startup’s growth. There are three of them that startups may go through in their life cycle: 

• Seed 
• Stage B
• Release (or Stage A) 

Seed and Stage B are the most demanding in terms of development and product design. Stage A focuses more on marketing and promotion when the development team prioritizes product support and maintenance during the scaling and active user acquisition. 

Startups’ roads from the Seed to the Release stage are difficult. But, there are many instruments to cut expenses, boost product deliverability, and minimize the time to market. ChatGPT is one of such tool. Do not fool yourself with news about “How ChatGPT will kill/steal…”. Stay with us in this article to discover more about how your startup can win its lucky ticket to the Unicorns by being more agile and efficient, using ChatGPT in all development stages for your product. 

Using ChatGPT to create the startup from a concept or idea

Startups are built around the idea or the concept of doing something in a new way. Or about revolutionizing the industry as it is. You have to research the market and possible competitors to validate this idea or concept. 

For this part of the article, we’ve discussed market research with Oleh Henaliuk, our Head of Business Analytics. His team research and consult startups in the seed stage to help them with their strategic perspective in the market. Oleh’s team also tries to foresee potential drawbacks for the startups on Stages B&A. 

Here are his words about how they worked without ChatGPT and how they are doing it now. He also suggests some tips for the startupers:

This tool helps a lot with the research of the niche and key players. Yes, it can not be used as an only tool for a team, but it greatly cuts down the time needed for the research and primary data collection, allowing us to focus right on the business model and positioning of the competitors in the market.

How to use ChatGPT for front- and back-end development

Startup development requires successful planning and product architecture. If you lack experience in planning the product development process, ChatGPT may be a helpful tool for open questions and expertise build-up. You may get the right idea about the product development lifecycle (PDLC) and constant improvement & continuous delivery (CI/CD). 

From the development perspective, ChatGPT is a comfortable tool for code tasks. When you or your team works on repetitive code elements that require little qualification but a lot of time, ChatGPT will help you to automize this process. For years before, startups practiced free (or with symbolic reward) internships, trying to hire junior specialists to perform low-expertize tasks. Though this approach has obvious benefits, your team and experienced developers still put some time and effort into freshmen’ education and onboarding. 

ChatGPT may provide the functions of the junior developers at the Seed and B stages, effectively substituting them in your team. At the same time, it is a great help to your developers. ChatGPT provides even more functionality for code revision and rewriting from the AI than Visual Studio Code or any other alternative. 

Our development team tested the ChatGPT for front and back. Our Head of Blockchain Development Arsenii Ovsianykov and his team gave us this comment:

ChatGPT has great knowledge and delivers a lot of needed information. But on a practical level, it is more like a Junior Development Specialist; we send an instruction with the code, and they deliver it. We send more precise instructions with the next interaction, gradually improving the parts of the code. We run 3-5 interactions before we get a formidable result to work with.

• ⁠Please, write a smart contract for Solidity that allows users to make deferred payments and charges a commission for the operation.⁠

• Please, redesign the contract to allow users to pay with any token and not only with the national currency.⁠

• ⁠
• Please, redesign the contract and add two functions.Function 1 is for the user. There are such requirements:1. User enters data about which token and in what quantity he wants to send or native currency…2. The platform commission must be charged in native currency; the user pays the commission in native currency when requesting a deferred payment.3. This function has to contain receiver data and the time stamp of the moment when the payment should be sent.Function 2 is for the manager. This function has to allow you to start a custom payment if the current timestamp is greater than the one specified by the user when creating an order in the first function.⁠

• ⁠

• As a bonus, ChatGPT can help to prepare code documentation. It is unlikely that it will be impeccable. However, it helps with the basics, and it is easier to double-check and improve than to write from scratch.⁠

• Please, write security tests for this contract using Hardhat.⁠

The final point from Arsenii: 

In general, its work can be estimated as qualitative for 70-80%. What is left usually is to refactor the code in certain places and add minor details that AI missed. So, I would compare its abilities with a diligent trainee who may not understand the whole picture. Still, they show a pretty good result once they have proper guidance and precise commands on what to redo. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is network congestion which is instead an unpleasant factor. Sometimes, the AI may interrupt a response in the middle of a conversation and may not always continue accurately. Although, in most cases, it manages to do so.

ChatGPT is a helpful tool for startups in Stage B when you need to automate the creation process and free up experienced coders from the routine work with documentation and recurring development tasks. However, this tool requires the exact knowledge of the product architecture, as it only helps with code creation.