ChatGPT's Billion Dollar Lesson in Essentialism

Zac Hansen

2d • Resources

I think we just watched a multi-billion dollar lesson in essentialism.

So yesterday, OpenAI just rolled out GPT-5.5, and I’ve been playing with it inside ChatGPT.

My expectations were meh thinking everything would suck as usual with Open AI.

But I have to say my expectations were completely blown away.

Not "perfect".

But the $20/month model is better for some things I've seen than Claude Opus (which is quite pricy and slow compared to GPT)

However, this email ain't about flashy models and fomo.

The real lesson here is how Open AI got here.

Because for a while, ChatGPT was starting to feel like the losing model.

Not because they were dumb...

Because they were doing everything.

They were focusing on SO many products from an AI Video social network and all these other internal incentives.

I remember when Gemini launched their new AI model in November, Sam Altman realized they were going down the wrong path.

So he said something like:

"We're ONLY focusing on making our AI Models great, we're cutting everything else."

And so he made a bold mode and murdered Sora, their video creation model that hit #1 on the appstore at one point.

The disciplined pursuit of less really means killing products that could be making you buckets of money.

So they scraped it.

Essentialism is not “doing less” so you can feel calm.

It’s ruthlessly deleting everything that makes the main thing weaker (even if it's making money).

I had to relearn this the practical way this week myself.

Me and my partner Jack are scaling a publishing offer.

We’re around $60K in revenue this month, so far.

However, we hit a snag.

The offer was ripping up to 2K/day in sales earlier this month.

Then?

Dead.

At first, we started brainstorming the usual things...

Maybe change the headline....

Maybe reposition the page....

Maybe rebuild the whole front end with a different frame.

Or just burn the whole damn thing down and come back with something smarter.

Then I looked at the page and thought:

Why don’t we just go back to what worked?

Over time, we had slowly added more and more stuff to sell a $14.95 product.

More sections.

More explanations.

More “helpful” copy.

More friction.

So we did my favourite move:

We deleted a HUGE chunk of the page and reverted it closer to the version that worked four months ago.

Today, we’re looking at roughly 1.5x to 2x return on ad spend again.

It's hard to make cuts but it's often the only right move.

Sometimes it's team.

Or it could be a 💩 business model or an offer.

And a lot of folks come to me with a business with way too much going on.

Which is why next week I'm opening up a few spots to sit down with folks 1-on-1 to build them a plan.

A plan baked around essentialism.

Last time I launched this the spots sold out in 48 hours.

So if you want to get the details before the offer goes live, reply back with "Plan" and I'll send them your way on Monday.

Zac

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