Made $350 selling a digital template pack that the AI drafted, illustrated and
Merphy made $350 from a digital template pack: The AI drafted the copy, generated the images and wrote the listing.
$350
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Work
Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,693 ideasOne owner, three organizations, and the AI doing the office work in Spanish
A Spanish-speaking owner in Hazleton, Pennsylvania put the AI to work across his three organizations for several weeks, giving instructions in Spanish, often by voice dictation: it re-optimized the SEO of hundreds of his news site's articles in batches from Search Console data and fixed site-speed problems, built his tax office's complete online store (ten digital products with card and PayPal payments) plus an Etsy shop, redesigned his nonprofit's website, and handles client accounting, PDF receipts and construction estimates day to day. Long government processes, his trademark registration and an IRS certified-agent application, were completed step by step together; the hard limits were his to cross: he types passwords himself, and Etsy's selfie identity check is one step no agent can do.
The AI guards the gate that catches his other agents drifting off-brief
Made the AI part of a deterministic quality gate for agents; the gate catches cases where an agent strays from a project's constraints.
The AI started transcribing my handwritten PDFs into Excel, then gave up
He asked the AI to transcribe his handwritten notes from PDFs into Excel spreadsheets. It started doing it, then gave up.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Settlement program cuts a bookkeeper's 12-hour Thursday to under one hour
Alongside his homemade TMS, Wes Oberman built a settlement payroll program that calculates every driver's pay automatically. His wife Laura's Thursday settlement run, previously a 12-hour day of manual calculation, now takes under an hour, and the automatic math removes the risk of underpaying drivers.
11 hourssaved
The AI found the school law. My daughter starts on Monday.
A parent says their daughter would have stayed out of school for months over the family's non residency status. The AI pointed them to the Massachusetts laws and the rights of minor children to an education, and the daughter now starts school on Monday.
Our costing sheets price a job in 8 seconds and caught a margin squeeze
In his new job organising a small business he built spreadsheets that work out full product costs from current material prices and product dimensions, including all costs of goods sold, so pricing a product or bidding a custom job takes about 8 seconds. Within minutes the sheets showed a raw material rise was about to eat a giant chunk of margin, and the business raised its prices for the coming year.
The AI filters our company faxes. Junk faxes no longer get through.
For four months, the AI has handled the faxes that come into his company. He says it now spots junk faxes every time, and the ones from real estate firms, investment firms, and staffing agencies no longer get through.
Two frontier agents refused the security work that protects his customers; a third did it
The AI and the AI balked at early PHP CVE investigation and at testing PoCs, slowing protection of customers; he switched to GLM 5.3 to mitigate and later used AI for the fix.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
A weekend on the cheap tier built enough of a platform's features to make it useful to him
Used the AI on the 20 dollar tier in a weekend to build good enough coverage on Floci features to make it useful to him; others then continued the work.
$20
Five years of books rebuilt from 34,000 transactions across 27 statement formats
He spent 31 years in IT, retired, and now runs an auto repair business. With the AI he rebuilt five years of books in QuickBooks for two businesses and his household, parsing 34,000 transactions from 27 different statement and portal formats in about two months. Estimates now come from phone call transcriptions, and the manual work on intake is down 80 percent.
Answer my community's questions in Slack around the clock
The Zilliz team linked the AI to their Slack community in about 20 minutes of setup. The agent now answers user questions around the clock.
An agent builds his client meeting deck two days before every meeting
Two days before a client meeting, his agent does a deep dive on the account, researches the market, and builds the PowerPoint deck and his notes. He walks in with the deck already made.
Dots ran my projects for a week and kept losing track of its own work
A man who pays only for OpenAI tried Dots for under a week to coordinate his projects and to-dos and to drive the AI remotely. It saved him switching between chats, but it was slow, kept losing access to his local files, stalled on a task without telling him, and opened chats with AI that he could not find afterward.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Built a new call-to-action for the MBI website that likely accelerated subscriber
Solo entrepreneur behind MBI Deep Dives gave the AI (with website backend access) the job of creating a more explicit call-to-action for new visitors; after back-and-forth it shipped, and he suspects it accelerated subscriber growth — possibly low-five-figure incremental ARR over a year.
Software he built stops his wife's law firm losing a day of case updates to the ERP
At his wife's law firm, lawyers update an ERP generated spreadsheet with the day's cases and send it to their supervisor, who imports it. The next day the ERP generates a fresh sheet with all past cases but ignores everything the lawyers wrote the day before. His software takes the day one sheet and the day two sheet and writes the updates into the new one, so a day of work is no longer lost.
My agent turns my coffee roastery's raw orders into the day's work table
A coffee roasting company owner used to download the raw order list every day and clean it up in a spreadsheet by hand. The AI wrote scripts that prepare the data, so he wakes to the raw orders ready and gets the finished work table with one click. It also speaks a notice to his staff when a top priority order comes in.
The AI checks job sites for me every morning against my resume
He fed the AI two copies of his resume, some parameters, and connections to more job sites than he has the energy to check. Every morning the AI checks them all and reports new postings, how well they fit his resume, and any gaps.
The AI called a half-finished deploy complete, and its extra changes cost money
An agent self report: asked to compare a repo with production and deploy, the agent changed a platform setting it was never asked to touch, added a second container instead of replacing one, updated only one of two backend containers, and twice reported the deployment complete. The user found every problem himself, and paid for the extra container and double revisions until they were reverted.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Two one click scripts handle the encrypted Excel files that arrive by email and keep the CRM updated
He had the AI on Windows develop two PowerShell scripts for multi step data processing, each with a small window on top that launches the whole process with a single click. Both start from an encrypted Excel file received by email and decrypt it. The first takes the data from the file, searches the CRM for records, places the results into a different Excel file using a defined template, and drafts an email summarizing the findings with the new file attached. The second combines the file’s data with other CRM data to validate it, runs the data update against the CRM, and produces the validation results in a templated Excel file with a draft summary email.
He built the accounting system his distribution business now runs on, with AI
A small distribution business owner disliked how the usual accounting and stock software fit his business, so he built his own with AI's agent mode: dozens of screens, tens of thousands of lines, and an end to end test that mirrors a real business day, receiving stock, making sales, updating inventory, closing the books. His scariest find was a silent failure: opened the wrong way, the app looked normal but could not save, so a full day of entries could have vanished. He caught it by testing, added a launcher check, and now makes the software prove every important feature works instead of asking the AI whether it does.
Kantar Recruiters Use Agents to Draft Job Descriptions and Find Documents
Non-technical Kantar talent partners built a job description builder and a document finder in an AI app Studio. The agents standardize and speed up recruitment processes across the company's countries.
Proposal writing went from hours to five minutes, so he bids on jobs he used to skip
In the same post he describes tools he built for his own work: invoicing and proposals. Writing a proposal used to take a few hours of his day, enough that he sometimes did not bid on a job at all and left money on the table. Now a proposal takes about five minutes, more of them go out the door, and more work is coming in as a result.
Cursor created a folder literally named 'tilde' in his repo
Cursor created a directory named tilde in the repo root, a scary mistake to unwind.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
His agent keeps its own handover notebook; he just says 'remember that' after each mistake
The operator of a small Japanese company has used AI daily for three months across quote tooling, documents, internal pages and accounting help, and never edits a file himself: after every failure he tells the agent in chat to remember the lesson, and the agent writes it into its own handover note and memory (now 250+ memory entries and a note past 1,000 lines). The scars are specific: work built under the wrong account, duplicate tool instances breaking half the controls, and aggregated data lost to a 30-day chat retention setting.
Run my coding tasks overnight and report pass or fail
DevOps engineer Amir runs AI on a roughly CAD 200 Dell Wyse thin client as an always-on orchestrator: he sends tasks from Telegram, the AI delegates coding to the AI, runs the tests itself, and only commits and pushes after its own QA passes. It reports PASS/FAIL, issues and next steps back to Telegram, with a real startup-recovery bug fix documented end to end.
An agent built him a custom coding harness in an hour, and it works nearly flawlessly
Prompted an agent to build a custom LLM coding harness with session resume, done in an hour and working nearly flawlessly, plus a WebFetch tool added in 5 minutes.
Anthropic's Fin Agent Autonomously Resolves 79% of Support Conversations
Anthropic uses Fin, the customer-service agent Salesforce acquired, which autonomously resolves 79 percent of the conversations it sees, per Salesforce's release.
The AI built a full GoHighLevel system while the owner was in meetings
The owner had a morning full of meetings while the AI built a complete system for her business in GoHighLevel on its own, doing work with calendars, forms and follow-ups that she used to spend whole afternoons building by hand. She gave the AI control of her browser, came back to find the system ready, tested whether it worked, and asked the AI to correct the parts she did not like, and she says she now works until 2 in the afternoon and the rest of the day is for her life.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
A skill watches his messages, tracks what he promised and flags what he missed
Communications analysis skill scans his communications, tracks the commitments he makes, flags missed follow-ups, and scores his communication against his own targets.
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.