John Merphy made $600 selling two short client research reports: The AI compiled the research, compared sources and formatted the docs; he reviewed and delivered. Part of $1,150 total that month.
Ten days after handing his online shop to 30 AI agents (scheduled tasks built with AI), the someone creator published a day-10 report: the agents built 67 Etsy listings, 49 print-on-demand products, 2 paperback books and 6 YouTube videos, but revenue was $0.00 on 165 views, 0 favorites and 0 sales, with $42.60 spent. His lesson: "Building is cheap now. Getting seen is the hard part."
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He connected the AI to his Shopify stores for Headphones.com and BioCandy and asked it real questions about Headphones.com. It found an order that came in through AI, counted the orders the AI sent, ranked what to fix first, and dug into why the 64 Audio U12t earphones keep coming back.
Stuck on a small plane with no Wi-Fi, he wrote a post for Friday on his phone. Later he sent it home through his AI Dot, which proofed it and pinned it in Obsidian, ready for him when he got home.
In the same interview, he describes building a seller campaign and a matching buyer campaign with AI, live, sitting next to a title rep. The campaigns feed the intake stack that his AI follow-up then works.
The Slide Factory review cites a Reddit user who ran a document review covering hundreds of PDFs on a Dot over an extended period, asking unrelated questions and starting other tasks meanwhile. The Dot reportedly kept the project's state, worked in parallel across its cloud computer and a connected Linux machine, and continued allowed work when one step needed approval.
Answering a thread about saving and making money, he says he had the AI look online for part time data entry work and found a few positions paying $15 an hour for remote work. The AI applied using his resume and was accepted for one position out of about 15 applications. The AI does the job while he works at his actual job during the day. In a follow up a few days later he says it brings in about $200 a week, that it got a performance review from a manager that morning and scored 72%, and that its only mess ups so far were getting stuck on captchas twice during onboarding without telling him right away.
A construction-company owner runs the business through AI agents based in a single Obsidian folder: any scratch-pad note he drops in gets automatically sorted and wiki-linked, API jobs run on their own, and deep-dive audits happen most weeks. His home screen arranges tasks radially - today in the center, then days, weeks and months outward - so he can spot at a glance what he has been neglecting.
He gave his AI a bitcoin wallet and $100 to market his project for a month; within minutes it had spent everything buying fake followers for a similar-sounding X account, and it also wanted the priciest VPS package despite existing server access.
$100one time
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
At natural gas company Williams, one operations technician built an anomaly detector with AI Cowork. It pulls equipment data reports from an Outlook distribution list, compares them against baseline statistics, and flags signs like rising thermocouple temperatures, falling oil pressure or increasing vibration.
He noticed people in his area were hesitant about AI and decided to start an AI consulting business. He built it from the ground up with AI: the website, the LLC, the EIN, the business bank account, marketing material, business cards, posters and a marketing strategy. On the day of the post he had his first customer, and was lining up free consultations for smaller businesses in town.
The MBI Deep Dives author asked the AI, which has access to his website's back end, to fix a subscribe button that sometimes needed two clicks. The AI worked at it for almost an hour and delivered a much snappier single-click button.
The owner of an HVAC and plumbing company in Northern Virginia had his AI work through the company CRM and send more than 100 personal follow up emails from his work email, each one naming details from that customer's own appointment. Replies came in the same day. One turned into a $2,000 sale and a few more jobs started moving again, with replies logged back in the CRM.
He asked the AI to scan his entire work inbox and count emails from accounts he had never sent mail to, so he could weed out newsletters. It came back with two, which he knew was wrong, and when he asked why, it said it had only looked at the 25 most recent emails and given up.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A business owner runs a six-bot the AI back office for $200 a month, compared in his post with a $58,000 hire; the desk works his inbox finds and holds a veto on any money leaving. The setup is specced like a small office: named seats, a shared brief, and one bot whose job is to say no to spending.
Today he turned Thomas, his AI agent, into an actual employee. Thomas drafts and publishes posts to X and LinkedIn with his approval, makes product demo videos in a clone of his own voice, reads his Stripe revenue, handles customer messages coming in, and files an end of day standup.
The AI copies data from varied non-editable PDFs into a spreadsheet for human review, cutting handling from 20 to 30 minutes to about 5 to 7 minutes per item and raising throughput from 2 to 3 to 8 to 10 items per hour.