Building PromptForge in public: what we shipped, what broke, what we learned

Where this started

We (Richie and Amy) run a small studio in Ireland. Late 2025 the same question kept coming up from clients: "Can you just… make ChatGPT actually good for us?"

They weren't asking for another chatbot. They were asking for someone to bridge the gap between "I have a rough idea" and "I have a prompt that reliably produces work-quality output". We built PromptForge to close that gap.

What we shipped

• Forge — turn a rough idea into a structured 5-part prompt in one click. This is the core.
• Rescue — paste a broken prompt, get it re-engineered and diagnosed with a score.
• Prompt-from-file — drop a PDF, docx, image or spreadsheet and get a prompt with the file as context.
• Prompt Packs — ready-made 5-part prompts for specific jobs (small business, marketing, students, legal letters, medical prep, images).
• Chrome extension — call PromptForge from any tab.
• Live comparison — see the raw model output vs the forged-prompt output side-by-side.

What we tore up

• v1 role picker — a dropdown of 200 "expert" roles. Users froze. Killed it; replaced with an AI-generated specific archetype (see: Why "act as a world-class expert" is dead).
• A credit system with 12 tiers — nobody understood it. Simplified to Free / Pro / Agency.
• Onboarding wizard — 8 steps, 40% drop-off. Cut to 2 steps, drop-off collapsed.

What we learned

1. Score, don't praise. Users trust a 68/100 diagnosis more than "great prompt!". We now score every output on clarity, specificity, context, format and constraints.
2. Show the work. The "here is what the model would have said without the forge" side-by-side sold more upgrades than any feature copy ever did.
3. Model-agnostic wins. Users bounce between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot. Every prompt PromptForge produces is model-agnostic on purpose — no "Claude tricks" that break in ChatGPT.

What's next

• PromptForge Weekly (the newsletter you're reading) — one battle-tested prompt every Sunday, torn down publicly.
• Team workspaces — shared prompt libraries with role-based access. In closed beta now.
• Firefox + Edge extensions — the MV3 zip works on Edge as-is; Firefox needs one tweak.

Where you come in

Everything we ship comes from users telling us what's broken. If you use PromptForge and something feels off — or if there's a job you wish it did — tell us or reply to any newsletter. We read every one.

— Richie & Amy