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Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas

The AI runs my sales outbound with Apollo and Lemlist

He connected the AI to Apollo for contacts and Lemlist for sending, and runs his outbound for finding clients through it. The video shows the setup and the result live in Lemlist, then packages the workflow into a repeatable skill.

WorkPartly worked

I hand the AI my shop statements. It pulls the numbers and drafts the email to send back.

An independent shop owner says supplier fees creep up a little at a time and stop getting checked. He handed his statements to the AI, which pulled the numbers and drafted a renegotiation email that he read and sent himself. He ran the same pattern on a water cooler contract, where the bot found the notice window in the terms and drafted a calm email.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

For six weeks an AI operated Cadence Virtuoso for him and designed three analog circuit blocks

Brazilian engineer Rodolfo Lage describes six weeks in which an AI did nearly all of his work inside Cadence Virtuoso, professional chip-design software that looks immune to AI (CentOS 7 server behind SSH, X11 GUI, a Lisp dialect called SKILL; the AI cannot even install on the server). Through an open-source bridge loaded into his own Virtuoso session, the agent created cells, drew schematics, built testbenches, ran Spectre simulations, read results and generated reports, across 52 versioned scripts and 47 commits, while he defined problems, reviewed and made design decisions. Three blocks were completed: transistor characterization with clean DRC and matching LVS, current mirrors sized by an optimizer to under 0.005% current error, and a common-source amplifier reaching 26.8 V/V gain and 109 MHz gain-bandwidth. A verification skill he built after a silent failure (a 10-point sweep returning the identical 499.21 mV ten times because the swept variable was not connected) caught six more silent errors on the amplifier alone, none of which produced any error message.

Launch a landing-page SaaS that made $16K in three days

A self-described desperate vibe coder commented in an Reddit showcase thread that the SaaS he built with AI, which auto-generates landing pages and tracks who will pay, made $16k in 3 days with 876 paying users. It spread via Reddit and Twitter and got noticed in a hackathon Discord.

$16,000

Make claude.ai three times faster in a two-week agent sprint

Reporting Anthropic's September 23 engineering post, this analysis describes the AI running a two-week performance sprint from a Slack channel: 150-plus threads, benchmarks built for each bottleneck, and more than 3,000 merged changes with no customer-facing incident. Time to a typeable page at the 75th percentile fell from 3.1 seconds to 0.55, with a human approving every pull request.

Match 904 insurance documents overnight at my dental clinic

A South Korean dental clinic director with no IT training runs locally hosted agents that reconcile insurer payment records against clinic records line by line. One run matched 904 documents and 3,389 pages in 69 minutes, auto-confirming 77% of 6,928 lines and leaving staff only the flagged remainder to review.

WorkWent wrong

An AI bot called Zara interviewed me for a journalism job

She applied for a journalism job and was interviewed by an AI bot called Zara. The bot interrupted her, ran on a timer, asked odd follow up questions and made her share her screen.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.

Run HR support for plant workers inside WhatsApp

Coca-Cola Andina built its HR agent Andi in an AI app Studio and bridged it to WhatsApp, where its Argentine plant workforce actually lives, authenticating workers against SAP-synced HR data. About 1,200 of 3,600 active employees use it monthly across nearly 5,000 conversations with a 4.1/5 satisfaction score, and unresolved issues are bundled into tickets for HR.

His mouse and keyboard finder site made $130 in its first month

A product designer who could not have built this alone made a site that helps people pick gaming mice and keyboards, based on years of answering the same questions from friends. He built it in an AI app and keeps improving it from reader feedback. In its first month it earned $130 from affiliate links, with almost all traffic coming from Reddit posts.

$130a month

The AI helped solve a GIS geometry problem that sat unsolved for 10 years

A GIS user went back to a PostGIS polygon problem he had asked about almost 10 years earlier. Working with AI, he analyzed his old scripts and watched the intermediate geometry steps live in the browser, which pinpointed four exact reasons the original approach failed, and the clean reversed pipeline is now posted as the answer.

Add up my employees' photographed time cards for payroll

A Parix.ai guide to the AI for Small Business reports that Iowa grocery owner Tom Mulholland photographed employee time cards and had the AI add them up, saving at least 15 minutes on every payroll run. (Secondhand summary of the Meta launch case; the same owner appears in launch coverage organizing his employee schedule and ads with his agent, which he named Wall-E.)

The AI turns each podcast episode into a short video on its own

For several weeks his system has taken each new podcast MP3, transcribed it, picked a strong clip and built a vertical short with about eight animated scenes using Remotion and the AI. It now runs on autopilot, he checks the video after it posts, and each piece gets around 200 to 300 views.

WorkWent wrong

An agent restored a two week old file and silently wiped four security fixes

He asked an agent to undo a wording change in a privacy policy. The agent found an old backup archive in the project, copied the server file out of it, and reported success. The archive was two weeks old, so the copy silently wiped four security fixes the same agent had written and deployed 40 minutes earlier. He found out two days later when an endpoint stopped working, and rebuilt the lost code from the agents own session logs.

This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.