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

Run my 250-domain business for 30 days

A domain investor gave the AI six months to make his 250-domain business profitable and documented month one: the bots logged 347 hours of work, graded over 700 names, bought 11 domains, sent over 100 cold emails, and built the website and newsletter. Sales so far were zero, and the owner noted the bots made more work for him, not less.

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

A scripted edit bounded by the next 'def' silently deleted 17 test functions (partial)

During a long pull-request review session, the AI wrote a Python script to replace one function in a large test file, bounding the replacement at the next top-level 'def' instead of the function's real end. The span swallowed 17 unrelated test functions, which were deleted silently; the model noticed only afterwards and rebuilt the file from git.

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

The AI edited my whole video from one raw clip

He dropped his raw clip into AI and it did the edit: it cut the stutters, pauses, and ums, and added zooms, sound effects, captions, and animations. He says the finished edit was the AI’s work, not his.

Run a four-agent fleet on one laptop around the clock

One user runs four AI agents 24/7 on a 32GB Ubuntu laptop: a default PM agent on Feishu, plus dev, DevOps and content agents delegated between each other, with 5 MCP servers and 34 tools. A daily 04:30 self-learning distillation cron keeps the fleet improving while a custom watchdog keeps it alive.

WorkWent wrong

I told the AI not to sign my commits. It signed 25 of them in a row.

Every project he works on bans AI attribution, and the rule is written into the instructions he gives the agent in every repository. Checking a pull request, he found the AI named as co author on every commit: 25 in a row in one private project, ten and a half hours of work, and 40 signed commits in total across three days and three projects.

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

The AI reads and updates her Notion project pages across chats

She keeps the current state of her projects in Notion and works in an AI app. In a live test she opens a fresh chat, has the AI read the Notion page for the video she is making, pick up where she left off, and update the page without duplicating what is already there.

Sell custom Illustrator scripts built with AI on Upwork

A freelance designer with no coding background used a standing AI setup — a dedicated project, custom ExtendScript instructions and a scripting skill — to build three batch logo-processing scripts for an Upwork client. The client paid $640, left a five-star rating and became a repeat client.

$640
WorkPartly worked

The AI ran the command before my reject landed

He was working through a 1.2 TB SHARE-seq run and hit reject on the AI’s plan to rename the FASTQ files with symlinks, so he could ask why so many reads were undetermined. The command had already run, making the symlinks and submitting a QC job, and the agent then showed him the evidence from his data and surfaced a missing package.

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

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.

My bot found about $100,000 in overdue invoices and emailed the clients for me

A home service pro had the AI sign into his Jobber account and his email and asked who owed him money. The bot named his four largest overdue invoices, about $100,000 in total, then read his past emails to those clients to match how he writes, and sent each client an email listing what was due, when it was due, and the invoice numbers.

WorkPartly worked

Make the AI the production company for a four-minute film — and survive its notes

Jeremy Swiller used AI as the production company for the second promo film for MindRight, the meditation app he built with AI: The AI drove Google Flow and ElevenLabs through 107 planned stills, face-consistency scoring and a rebuilt voice track across six 12-hour days and twelve full cuts. The finished film is on YouTube; it cost about 1,500 Flow credits and no new cash, but the AI’s 3–4 day estimate and the character's drifting face and voice made him the client from hell.

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

Run my online shop with scheduled AI agents and post the earnings

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.

A roofing estimator’s system breaks down huge drawing sets, tags every fact, and checks his final number before it goes out

He works as a commercial roofing estimator for a large regional contractor in the NYC metro, and his work starts with large PDF construction drawings and specifications. Over eight months he built a system he calls Estimator-OS. Incoming drawing and spec sets get broken into the standalone sheets and sections relevant to his trade, filed and organized, then chunked, documented and tagged into a local database for the project. From there it runs his RFI process and addendum reconciliation and issues his pricing requests to vendors and subs. Before takeoff he gets an HTML dashboard of the project with all the facts, details and gotchas. He does the takeoff in the software they use, then gives the final number back to the AI for review and final checking. He runs it on a Max 20x plan and values the usage at about $6,000 at API prices, and says he moves through projects more quickly and with greater accuracy.

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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.