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

Run my whole solo business on a daily ritual — I just approve and send

Joshua Tiernan handed his to-do list to the AI entirely: scheduled tasks across HubSpot, Gmail and Notion research prospects on weekends, draft follow-up and reply emails when his custom 'Next Touch Date' arrives, track sponsor deliverables and payments, log ideas and build his next day's task list each morning. Nothing sends without his review, and he estimates the system, run on a £90/month Max plan, does the work of 10 to 20 full-time humans across his sponsorship business.

Cut a three-hour trading workflow to about 20 minutes

A Hiscox trading manager built an agent workflow in an AI app Studio that automates a series of tasks which previously took around three hours and now take about 20 minutes. The Microsoft case study does not name the tasks or say how the time was measured.

WorkWent wrong

I asked the AI to fix my phone number problem. Visible blocked it at every turn.

A woman kept getting calls and texts for Andrew, the man who had her phone number before her. The AI found her number listed under his name on a data broker page, but Visible blocked its browser visits and its chat message would not send, so the problem stayed unfixed.

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

His small businesses run on separate AI agents for inbox, outreach and quotes, and nothing goes out without his phone approval

He runs his own small businesses with AI agents. Each job has its own agent with its own instructions file: one triages the inbox, one handles outreach, one prepares quotes. The agents only draft; he approves every email and quote from his phone before it goes out. A brief arrives at a fixed time every morning with the overnight replies, what is waiting on him, and the follow-ups for the day, and it replaced his own daily check-in. When he corrects something, the correction goes into a shared notes file that every agent reads, so he only has to say it once.

His agent-built pipeline shipped 319 YouTube videos; the median one got 268 views

Since July 2026 a Japanese creator has run a political clip channel with a pipeline the AI built: it watches source channels, fetches new videos, transcribes them locally, picks highlights from voice peaks and wording, fixes subtitle typos and names, makes thumbnails and titles, exports long videos and Shorts, uploads them unlisted, then collects view and retention data to feed the next round. In 3.5 months it shipped 319 videos for about 1.05 million total views and 1,080 subscribers, though the median long video reached only 268 views; he publishes the failures too, including the agent claiming 'fixed' when it was not.

My AI watches my Amazon listings and only speaks up when something changes

WisePPC runs a scheduled the AI check over its own Amazon catalog. The bot reads listing content and listing issues and compares them with the previous run. If nothing changed, it says nothing at all. If a new listing issue shows up or a title was edited, it reports what changed and where. It only reads, and it asks before it changes anything.

WorkWent wrong

The AI merged straight to main and my production app broke for every user

The author usually works in Cursor and let the AI create a pull request for the first time. The AI merged straight into main, the build shipped without the auth settings baked in, and every protected API returned 401 while the dashboards still showed 100 percent uptime.

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

Build client-facing divorce tools with AI instead of spreadsheets

Family-law trainer Stephen Smith built four working tools with AI, one conversation each: a settlement schedule that shows a client how much of an $8,000,000 award is actually spendable and when, a two-sided case chronology with exhibit links, a parenting-time calculator that counts overnights and percentages, and a case-path timeline clients get at the first meeting. The examples use training data, and he warns that the AI wrote the math, so every number must be checked before a client relies on it.

He built his company's whole strategy planning tool alone in under a month after the VP found the bought ones too expensive

His VP of engineering reviewed two or three strategy tools on the market and they were prohibitively expensive, so he asked if it could be built instead. He built it alone in less than a month: long term objectives broken down into annual objectives, improvement priorities, projects, milestones and tasks, with bowler charts tracking the KPIs, full project management tools, and containerized staging, development and production environments. It cost roughly $1,000 to $2,000 in an AI app credits. The VP then put his own name all over it, and made him replace his own name in the about section with the name of the organization.

He rebuilt his 70 year old mother's business website with AI and her revenue quadrupled

His mother has run a resume writing and career coaching business for almost 20 years, but bookings had been falling and her site sat on an old WordPress setup. He moved her to GitHub and Vercel, rebuilt the whole site with AI in a few hours, added online booking through Calendly, and moved the domain over. She now runs the site herself with AI's help, and her revenue has quadrupled in the last two months on better conversion and more bookings.

Every two hours my agent checks my app's issues, fixes them and opens the pull requests

A developer gave the AI a token for his code repo and set a two hour cycle. The AI checks the issues page, makes a branch for each issue, writes the fix or change, and opens a pull request. Merges rebuild the app and serve it on his home network, and the AI texts him on Telegram when it has a question or when work is done. He uses the app daily and files features as issues, which are handled within a couple of hours.

Run my one-man startup with a team of bots

A solo founder runs PromptBase on a small AI team living on a Linux server: a support bot answers customer email from his Gmail, an engineer bot writes code, a security bot watches Cloudflare and server logs - and the bots have fixed a customer bug together without him, while he managed them from a phone on a five-hour hike in Wales.

Built a 'Piggy Bank' agent that scans Messenger, Instagram, email, and card

Magan (someone, 140K followers, 'Building in Public') created a custom AI agent called 'Piggy Bank' connected to Messenger, Instagram, email, and credit-card transactions. It scans sources to find all subscriptions (which she can cancel), reads Instagram DM chat history to track brand-deal payments, and generates a ledger showing how much she's owed, plus spending insights and payment reminders.

Non-coder runs her side business on 10 recurring the AI jobs, about 95 runs a week

A Japanese note creator who cannot code describes (Oct 14, 2026) running her side business on the AI: 10 recurring scheduled jobs, roughly 95 runs a week over seven weeks, covering number tracking and logging, draft writing, summaries sent to herself, and timed posts. Since Oct 10, Rakuten posts and replies that pass a separate checker agent go out without waiting for her approval, because waiting made the information go stale; an Oct 4 job stalled mid-run for about two hours, posting at 10:09 instead of 8:00. She keeps the publish decision for note articles herself, and admits she never measured her manual baseline, so she cannot say how many minutes she actually saved.

Monitored 14 local community Facebook groups and alerted the tradesman whenever anyone

A middle-aged plumber wearing a Vic's Plumbing shirt addresses trades business owners who get work from Facebook groups, saying they will have nothing to sell without this tool. He programmed the AI to watch his 14 local-area community groups for service requests; each alert carries the post link so he can go directly to engage, answer questions, and offer his phone number.

Build a custom order-routing app that sends my worst orders to Amazon MCF

A 7-figure Amazon seller growing a Shopify store (300 orders/month, fulfilled in-house from the east coast) hit his limit on slow, expensive west-coast and Florida shipments. Shopify's native routing couldn't see order-level detail and Functions needed Plus, which he doesn't have - so over one weekend he built a custom app with AI: it checks each incoming order's zip code, and if it falls above a USPS tier threshold and every line item is in FBA stock, it silently reassigns the order to Amazon MCF. He added a vacation-mode switch (everything routes to MCF while he travels) and stuck-package alerts; shipping time fell from up to 7 days to a max of 5, hosted for $5/month instead of a $99/month order-editing app.

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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.