Successful Software

Investigating ChatGPT for advertising my software

Andy Brice — Tue, 12 May 2026 16:46:53 +0000

There is a common pattern with paid digital advertising channels. New platforms appear with opportunities for cheap ads. Over time, more and more advertisers start to use the platform. Supply and demand drives up the price per click. The platform owners also do everything they can to nudge click prices ever higher. Consequently ad prices rise until companies selling inexpensive products (like mine) can’t afford to bid high enough to get any clicks. But usually a new platform comes along and the dance starts again.

I’ve seen this play out over the 20 odd years that I have been using Google Adwords. In the early days I could get a decent number of clicks at an affordable price. But the price has risen now to the point where I get very few clicks for any price I am prepared to pay. I need a new advertising channel. I tried advertising on Reddit, but that was a resounding failure. I wondered if it might be worth advertising in the new hotness, ChatGPT. So I did some investigating. Here is what I have found out so far, from reading their documentation and other sources.

ChatGPT advertising is structured in a similar way to Google Adwords, with campaigns, ads, auction bids and conversion tracking. But, instead of matching keywords in search terms, you describe contexts in which your ads should appear. This should be less hassle than defining hundreds of search keywords. But it is hard to know how well targetted the ads will be or how well they will convert into sales. Some experimentation is required to answer that.

The ad format is fairly simple: name, headline, short description and small a image.

You can currently only advertise to customers on free plans based in USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

In their own documentation, ChatGPT says: “Advertisers can set custom max bids for their CPC campaigns. We recommend a starting max bid of $3-5 USD per click.”. Yikes. I know they have massive costs to subsidize, but there is no way I can make a profit at $3 per click for my $99 data wrangling software Easy Data Transform. Given a typical 1% conversion rate I would be paying $300 per sale. However, bid recommendations are always very self serving, and can be taken with a large pinch of salt. It is likely that you can get clicks much cheaper. Especially given that there are currently relatively few advertisers compared to the number of users.

So far, so good.

The fly in the ointment is the minimum spend. $50k (down from $250k!). Ah. Maybe not. That minimum commitment may come down over time. But, by the time it is low enough for me to experiment, the bids will almost certainly be too expensive for it to be profitable to someone selling $99 software licenses. The search for affordable advertising channels continues.

** Update 29-May-2026 **

There are reports that the $50k minimum spend has now been dropped. However advertising is only open to US advertisers. More details.

Support is wild in an age of AI

Andy Brice — Fri, 08 May 2026 16:14:03 +0000

Recently a customer emailed me:

Please consider re adding the option to convert from one time zone to another as was available in [Easy Data Transform] version 1.x. See the attached screen dump.

Easy Data Transform has never had a time zone conversion feature, so that is a bit strange. Although . But the screenshot really set off alarms bells as, despite saying “Easy Data Transform v1.11.2” in the title bar, that is not our software!

I thought that someone was trying to pass of their product as ours and did a search. But I couldn’t find any reference to another piece of software called “Easy Data Transform”. I emailed the customer to ask where they had got the software from. The reply came back:

The screenshot was from a ChatGPT output – maybe hallucinating.

Wow. Not only had ChatGPT hallucinated the feature, but also a fever dream screenshot of the user interface, with the non-existent feature. It looks like a real screenshot at first glance, but the icons are a giveaway if you look closer.

For reference, this is what the actual user interface looks like:

ChatGPT has got some of the input types, transforms and menus correct. But otherwise it looks quite different.

I had another brush with AI hallucinations when I asked MS Copilot how to perform ‘one hot encoding’ in Easy Data Transform. It came back with a very plausible and confident sounding answer, including this summary of the transforms required:

Just one problem – only 1 of these 4 transforms actually exists (Split Col). It hallucinated the other 3!

Customers are increasingly typing questions into AIs, rather than reading documentation or asking on a forum. That is good news if it means that the customer gets a quick and accurate answer without troubling busy developers. But it is very bad news if they are getting incorrect answers, especially when these answers look plausible and are confidently presented. It is galling enough that AIs are stealing all our web traffic, without them giving our customers bad support advice as well! Wild times are ahead.

Ps/ Time zone conversion and one hot encoding are now available in the latest version of Easy Data Transform.

Stop Publishing Garbage Data, It’s Embarrassing

Andy Brice — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 15:52:57 +0000

Twice this week, I have come across embarrassingly bad data.

The first instance is the UK government’s fuel finder data. This is a downloadable CSV file of fuel station locations and prices from around the UK. A potentially very useful database, especially during the current conflict in the Middle East. A customer suggested it as a possible practice dataset for my data wrangling and visualization software, Easy Data Transform . So I had a quick look and spotted some glaring errors within a few minutes.

A quick plot of the latitude and longitude shows some clear outliers:

On further investigation, some of these UK fuel stations are apparently located in the Indian and South Atlantic oceans. In at least one case, it looks like they got the latitude and longitude the wrong way around.

A quick look at the fuel price columns also shows some major issues:

The ratio between the most expensive and cheapest fuel (per litre) is 1538:1. Clearly wrong.

Shown as a histogram with a logarithmic Y axis:

I am guessing that the reason for this bad data is that the fuel stations are submitting their own data and, humans being humans, they make mistakes. But then the government is publishing the data without even the most basic checks. That just isn’t good enough.

I reported the problem on 22-Mar-2026. They acknowledge my email on 24-Mar-2026 (“Thank you for sharing this, we have passed this on to the technical team to have a look at.”). The CSV file published on 29-Mar-2026 still has the garbage data.

The second instance is a report on electric cars from UK motoring organization, the RAC. The first graph in the article is this:

Did the number of Battery Electric Vehicles on the UK’s roads suddeny drop from ~1.4 million in 2024 to ~0.0017 million in 2025? What happened to those ~1.4 million vehicles? I’m guessing that someone got their thousands and millions mixed up. But then they published the report with this glaring error. Did anyone mathematically literate even check this graph?

Lousy data undermines trust in institutions and can lead to bad decisions. I fear we are heading for a future where LLMs generate data, which people don’t bother to properly check. This data is then used train LLMs. The error is then much harder to spot once it is served back without the original source by LLMs. A slop-apocalypse.

Authors should have their work proof read, programmers should test their code and data people should do basic data validation. Let’s take some pride in our work.

Transform Messy Data into Insights with Easy Data Transform Advanced Edition

Andy Brice — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 11:45:44 +0000

My data wrangling product, Easy Data Transform, got a major upgrade yesterday, with the addition of data visualization capabilities. Here are some examples of what it can produce in a few clicks:

You can see this new visualization feature in action in the video below:

(Likes and subscribes help me with the YouTube algorithm and are much appreciated)

Human brains are highly developed for visual processing. But data is often messy and in the wrong form for visualization. So data wrangling and visualization, tightly integrated together, is a powerful combination. It was a lot of work, but it makes Easy Data Transform a much more complete, end-to-end, solution. No more pasting data into Excel to get a chart!

At the same time, I have segmented Easy Data Transform into 2 products: Easy Data Transform Core Edition (data wrangling, one-time fee $99) and Easy Data Transform Advanced Edition (data wrangling+visualization, one-time fee $198). The Advanced Edition is a paid upgrade from the original product. Optional, of course. I sweetened the deal with a time-limited discount for existing customers who want to upgrade to Advanced Edition. The response from Easy Data Transform customers has been very positive.

Have you got some messy data, you want to turn into insights? Why not give Easy Data Transform Advanced Edition a try? It:

Runs natively on Windows and Mac.
Is drag and drop (no syntax to remember).
Does not store your precious data on someone else’s server.
Is deterministic and will not hallucinate!
Can process millions of rows in seconds.
Can create re-usable templates for repeatable processes.

You can download a free trial here. And you can get 15% off Easy Data Transform Advanced Edition until 17-Jul-2026 using this discount link.