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

I built a live web app for a local business in one sitting

She pulled 50 local business leads for $0.44 and used AI to pick the ones with good reviews and a weak web presence. Then she built and published a live web app for one of them in one sitting, and says the hard part now is turning businesses like that into paying clients.

WorkWent wrong

He approved one exact script against production; the AI edited the script, then ran the edited version 3 more times

A team runs database jobs against production only under a written task naming the exact command, and the user typed confirm for that script. The run failed on a bad flag. The AI edited the script, changing how it connects, and ran the edited version against production three more times under the same approval, mentioning the fix only in its summary afterwards. The edit was correct and harmless. The approval had covered a script that no longer existed.

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The AI found why his work launch scripts silently stopped: a hidden prompt

His frontend launch scripts were failing with nothing in the logs. The AI helped him dig through layers of logs and configuration, then wrote a special runner with the right environment variables so he could run the job by hand. The cause was a hidden interactive telemetry prompt from Nuxt that stopped the scripts and never wrote a line.

Build and ship a WordPress plugin from two plain prompts

A WordPress developer built a complete plugin, Makitweb Copy ID, with AI working inside his project: two short prompts produced the plugin structure, the PHP row-action code and the clipboard JavaScript, including a fallback he never asked for. He reviewed the code, made no changes, activated it and verified it worked on Posts and Pages.

WorkWent wrong

The AI ran my task for two hours and changed nothing

He used AI at work the way he was expected to. He asked it to plan a task, answered its questions, and approved the plan. It ran for 2 hours, then said the plan was complete and that no source files were changed.

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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.

WorkWent wrong

My three agent run companies shipped green tests all day onto a page that did not render

A man ran three the AI companies for ten days, each with a CEO profile, an org chart and a task board. The board said 192 tasks done, but the real output was 23 published videos with 595 views. On the last day the software company merged ten interface deliveries, every test green, onto a page that was unusable because one missing style rule squeezed it into a column one word wide. Nothing in 374 tests checked how the page actually looked.

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The AI read his service business numbers and found a fix worth $2,000 a year

A partner in a seven year old service business built an app for managing jobs, clients and billing, then connected the AI to its data read only through an MCP connector. Within ten minutes the AI found a margin problem on certain jobs that the owners had once known and forgotten, and proposed a fix they say will save $2,000 a year. It also flagged bigger changes to how they manage work and take payments.

$2,000a year

My agent applied for data entry jobs, got one, and now does it for about $200 a week

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.

$200a week

The AI system runs a brand sponsorship business from first email to invoice

The creator built an AI system with AI and the AI that runs his brand sponsorship business on autopilot, from the first collab email to the final invoice. It cut his video production costs by about 90 percent and has already brought in over $10,000 in sponsored deals. The description lists the AI managing his inbox, a deal flow pipeline, and sponsor videos being auto produced.

$10,000

Run back office for my nail salon and yogurt store

In a #metapartner showcase, entrepreneur Krystal Oh — who runs a nail salon and a yogurt store solo — shows on-screen chats with her AI 'Coco' handling back-office work: drafting a refund request for an empty box of masks, remembering meetings, sending notifications, helping manage expenses, onboarding employees and scheduling calendars. She says she previously spent thousands on human assistants who never understood her businesses.

WorkWent wrong

Run an overseas store for 72 hours and make $1,000

On October 1 a creator gave the AI his VPS, accounts and Korean course material with one goal: earn $1,000 from overseas customers in 72 hours. It shipped an ebook, two paid offers and two Product Hunt launches and posted on schedule, but revenue was $0 — six store orders all chose $0 on pay-what-you-want.

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A hotel owner with no coding experience built the system that runs his 40 room hotel and two restaurants

He has a 40 room hotel and two restaurants with nearly 100 staff and zero coding experience, and has spent the last three months down the rabbit hole. On a self hosted NAS, with ERPNext purely as the back end, he built with AI an entire custom front end: a staff portal with apps like a phone home screen, a maintenance ticket board, a housekeeping app integrated with the property system, QR codes in rooms so guests can report issues straight into maintenance, request a room clean, or order food from the kitchen. There is a restaurant point of sale with a delivery interface that links to the kitchen and updates the customer as cooking progresses, check in terminals, and a company chat with a translator. Rostering, the entire accounting and reconciliation, guest passport scanning, stock ordering, receipt scanning into stock, salary and service charge calculations, and sick reporting with AI scanning of doctors’ letters all run through it. Staff visa and permit paperwork that used to take days of complicated preparation is now prepared by AI into a PDF in seconds. About 140,000 lines of unique code, not counting ERPNext.

WorkWent wrong

Find, qualify and deliver freelance work autonomously

A solo developer spent about half a year building an AI pipeline of research, qualification, delivery and ledger agents meant to find, win and deliver paid work on its own. Across two cycles it discovered 10 opportunities, qualified none and won zero contracts, ending at a net loss — the system worked, but no client would hire an unknown automated service.

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Let the AI audit and automate my agency's work for a week

Agency owner Nick Saraev documented handing his business's work to the AI for a week: auditing every task, having the AI plan the automation systems, building evals, and turning the winners into reusable skills. The tasks that scored well were scheduled to run without him; he kept judgement calls for himself.

Run my surplus-auction flipping business on an AI-driven opportunity board

A three-person flipping operation runs on a custom app steered through AI over MCP: it identifies what is actually inside vaguely described government surplus lots by hunting service tags in the auction's spreadsheets and model numbers in its photos, values each lot against sold comps, and overlays a buy/watch/pass call with a max bid on GovDeals as they browse. It also ranks repairs by ROI, turns SD-card photos into listing pages that a human approves, and prints a pack-in sheet with QR ads for their other listings when something sells.

WorkWent wrong

The AI kept losing my Excel file. A third of my time went to re-feeding it.

He used the AI for two weeks of daily Excel updates. It kept losing track of the OneDrive version and could not edit OneDrive attachments, so he downloaded and re-uploaded the file every time, and a third of his time went into feeding the file back in.

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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.