Update on disastrous ChatGPT business work migration. Cautionary tale for ChatGPT users

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Aside from the holidays, I have spent the last 30 days in full business recovery mode following a disastrous workspace migration in ChatGPT on November 30th. I didn’t want to come back until I had something positive to report.

Over the summer, before joining the AI Advantage I launched my startup using a ChatGPT Plus account tied to my personal email. As a (now) professional founder, I eventually realized it was necessary to separate my personal data from my business for IP protection, liability, and future HIPAA compliance with the app I’m building. When I started my ChatGPT account I hadn’t even thought about starting a company yet. Everything was mixed up. All my personal topics and my business building topics were in one account. Which is not a good thing. I knew enough to upgrade to a ChatGPT plus account when I started iterating business ideas, because I did not want them being trained on any of open AI models.

I did everything by the book. I followed the documentation and even used ChatGPT to build a migration checklist. What happened next took my business out at the knees.

ChatGPT wiped out every last bit of my data. Their support was nonexistent—no apology, no refund, and no path to recovery. $632.00 spent for a two year Business Workspace and nothing to show for it, everything gone.

While my "founder discipline" meant I had backed up my core IP and design docs locally, I lost months of context and chat logs that served as the backbone of my cognitive scaffolding system. It was a disaster of epic proportions.

I’ll admit it: I cried. Sobbed actually. I’m normally not a crier, but I had worked so damn hard for several months building something that I know is going to help people.

I refused to let it be the end. I have spent December reconstituting my operations from the ground up, but I didn't go back to what broke.

After learning that this has happened to dozens, if not hundreds of other founders and businesses, I migrated my entire company to Google Business Workspace (Enterprise Standard) and Gemini. The difference in professional stability and support has been night and day. Because of this move, I’ve recovered enough momentum to stay on track for our first product launch this January.

My Advice to this Community

If you are building a business, don't make the same mistake I did. *** Don't wait to separate your personal and business data.*** do it FIRST. Start off on the correct footing.

Don’t risk your "cognitive scaffolding" on a platform that doesn't offer the enterprise-grade reliability or human support that a founder needs when things go wrong.

I now understand why OpenAI declared “Code Red”. They can’t even keep up with operations such as customer support. When I dug a little deeper, I discovered that they only have 241 employees for nearly 1 billion users. Their support is extremely lacking bordering on farcical. They’re relying on AI for support, but it doesn’t actually help.

There are only a few options to get to a real person and I had to go all the way to the executive suite (yes, I went there!!!) to even get listened to and it took 18 days and 33 emails. In the end, the solution that they offer me still didn’t help and they basically threw their hands up up in the air and said “sorry.”

Onward to January. I will be launching my first products in about a week.

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