New ideas that are working for people, picked fresh every day.

Work

Jobs, side gigs and small business · 1,665 ideas
WorkTop idea in Work

My bot sent 100 follow ups to stalled customers. One became a $2,000 sale.

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.

$2,000one time
WorkPartly worked

He put his $200 a month AI in charge of a shop to earn its keep

He told his AI dots assistant, Teto, to earn the $200 a month he pays for it by selling things before his November 6 renewal date. Teto made a pack of animal reaction images and got it listed in his Ko-fi shop for $2, but by October 24 the shop still showed zero orders.

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

Our agent bought its owner an eSIM for Turkey, then got the money back

The owner asked ARGUS in Telegram to buy the cheapest eSIM for Turkey, approved with a yes, and got the QR code in the chat seconds later for 0.31 USDC. Thirty-four minutes later he asked for a refund because he had not installed it, approved again, and the 0.31 USDC came back after the seller checked the eSIM was unused.

$0.31
WorkNew

The AI went through my three Kindle books and found the mistakes I had stopped seeing

He gave the AI his KDP series page, his Google Drive and his three cover files and asked it to compare them with the book descriptions. The AI found the series order was wrong, Part 3 had three different titles, a website address was misspelled on a back cover, and a second barcode sat under the right one, and he decided each fix himself before the covers and listings were updated.

Every night my bots turn the fixes people make into new rules

When a person fixes something one of his bots wrote, the bot writes down what it said and what the person changed it to. A nightly task reads those changes and writes the rule it thinks they point to, and in a year the bots have picked up more than 40 rules this way.

WorkNew

My news site now uses Jev to pick stories and the bill stayed flat

He runs Qood News. When the AI 2.5 was retired, moving to the AI 3.1 would have tripled his AI bill, so a decision model called Jev now decides what counts as good news and costs stay about the same. In testing Jev approved 39 of 110 stories while the AI approved 53, mostly dropping filler.

The AI traced our 1689 book to a castle library sale

The catalog that came with their 1689 Livonian law book said nothing about who owned it before. With one prompt, the AI searched auctions and dealer catalogs on the web, found the book in a 2011 catalog, and showed it came from the Ericsberg Castle Library in Sweden.

An agent now makes the promo posts for our 70 radio shows a month

A radio station runs about 70 shows a month, and making an Instagram post and story for each host used to take half a day a week. Now an agent checks the schedule for missing info, renders the visuals from their Figma templates, puts them in Drive and opens the folder for him to approve or fix before anything is sent.

A team of bots runs the back office at my building company

Luke Davies runs Davies Construction with a team of the AI set up like a company org chart, with bots for estimating, admin, books, sales and project work. Day to day the bots sort the inbox and draft replies, pull tasks out of meeting notes into a list a person approves, and create and update the job tasks in ClickUp as work moves on the Wunderbuild board.

WorkPartly worked

Our studio agents said the work was done when it was not. 44 emails never sent, five deliverables lost in a day

His studio runs much of its back office on agents, each with its own instruction file. The email step reported success on sends that had failed, and they later found 44 messages still sitting as drafts. Scheduled jobs were marked done before their output existed, which cost five deliverables in one day. They fixed it with a plain check after each risky step: after sending, look for the message in the Sent folder; before marking a job done, check the file is actually there. Now only a failed check needs a person's eyes.

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

The AI built a searchable idea finder for my own site, in my own styles

Diana ran her own Website Builder Skill in an AI app inside her site files and asked for an idea finder for her article listing 25 ways to use AI. The AI read the article and her live stylesheet, worked out her colours and fonts on its own, placed the finder right after the article links, and kept all 25 ideas searchable and filterable. It tested the result in a headless browser against her live styles and found no style changes across the 453 elements on the page.

WorkPartly worked

The AI helped me fix more than 20 websites in one night

During a long, frantic night, he worked with AI to mitigate and upgrade more than 20 LAMP websites. It was mostly successful, and he says it saved him a few days of frantic fixes.

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

Bud, the agent he talks to, guards his margins and refuses off topic questions

He is not a developer. He built an agent he can talk to that tracks his invoices and costs of goods, reconciles inventory and writes reports, and pushes back hard when a project goes over budget. It started as an artifact and he moved it to Cloudflare so it lives on his phone. He is now thinking about making it a tool for his whole industry.

Agent ran cold spray simulations and chose next runs

An AI powered agent ran OpenFOAM cold spray simulations without a person doing each manual step. It read deposit results, spotted failed runs from solver logs, and decided the next simulation, with an animation made for each run.

WorkPartly worked

AI agent runs a shirt shop that closes if it misses 5 sales

Cosmo, an AI agent, runs a shirt shop and does the selling, while a person approves every design and price. Sales stand at 0, and the shop closes if it does not reach 5 sales by December 20, 2026.

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

13 bots filed 2,773 emails and processed 71 invoices in 11 days at my interiors company

An interiors company runs 13 the AI on 46 routines. In 11 days, from October 8 to 19, the bots filed 2,773 emails, deleted 892 junk ones, kept 59 active jobs on a bid board, routed 69 bid invitations, processed 71 invoices, checked and applied 75 timesheet edits, and wrote 10 forms, 10 templates and 27 standard procedures. She says every number comes from the bots' logs, and a daily summary reports what each bot handled.

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.

Run my WhatsApp enquiries, call bookings and payments with an AI

Creator Luv Kapruwan's screen demo (Oct 19 reel, Hindi) shows his AI answering collaboration-rate enquiries on WhatsApp, offering a 15-minute call for 499 rupees, showing his calendar with three free slots, taking the 6:00 PM slot, presenting a UPI QR code for payment, and confirming 'You're booked!'

₹499
WorkPartly worked

Day 5 of the AI’s $100-to-$10,000 challenge: 2 visits, $0 sales

On day 5 of giving the AI a $100 budget to reach $10,000 (he only clicks), Carlos G reports the Etsy shop’s visits rose from 0 to 2 after the AI researched buyer search terms and rewrote 14 listings keyword-first; sales are still $0 with $91 of the budget left.

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

A product marketer's icon audit, redirect map and status updates run in minutes

He runs product marketing at a SaaS company. The AI audited where old icons appear across 12 products, sites, decks and emails and produced a tracker of about 200 rows to assign out. It built the URL redirect map for a site restructure, runs a browser routine that pastes page text into a sheet, and writes quarterly status updates in 20 minutes instead of most of an afternoon.

The AI Pro helped me find the right legal references for a lawyer

A legal librarian at a law firm had to check ten references for a Belgian lawyer working on warranty of liabilities cases. Three references had errors, one of them serious, and the AI Pro with skills and Google AI Overviews found the right reference in a badly protected PDF on revue-banque.fr where another tool pointed to the wrong one, and one more error was fixed using the next year's index of decisions.

Match 904 insurance documents overnight at my dental clinic

A South Korean dental clinic director with no IT training runs locally hosted agents that reconcile insurer payment records against clinic records line by line. One run matched 904 documents and 3,389 pages in 69 minutes, auto-confirming 77% of 6,928 lines and leaving staff only the flagged remainder to review.

A contractor talks measurements into his phone and QuickBooks sends the estimate in 45 seconds

He is a general contractor. Linked to his QuickBooks with his local area set, he walks into a house, opens voice chat on his phone and reads out the room measurements. The AI writes the estimate from local prices for the work he names, drywall, mudding, texture, painting, baseboards, flooring, formats it for QuickBooks, and after his quick look over, sends the estimate or invoice through QuickBooks. The whole thing takes about 45 seconds, from the job site.

WorkPartly worked

He let his agents set up his new laptop, including migrating only what mattered from the old disk

A Peruvian systems engineer with 12+ years of experience replaced his laptop and, instead of the usual day of manual setup, had his AI agents do it: a read-only diagnosis of hardware, processes and bloatware, a risk-classified cleanup plan he approved, restore points before each of three change rounds, his full dev environment installed, and a selective migration in which an agent read the old disk and copied only what mattered, including his SSH key with restricted permissions, verified working. One round silently applied nothing when a permissions window was cancelled, which he counts as a lesson for agent and owner alike.

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

Screen 900 applications into a 50-person shortlist

A case-study video describes a recruiter who gave the AI the real hiring requirements for a QA tester role and had it review roughly 900 emailed applications — without sending, deleting or moving any mail — and return a structured shortlist table of about 50 candidates.

WorkPartly worked

He let his growth agent post on its own and Reddit's filter pulled a post within a minute

In week four he removed the approval step and let the growth agent post on its own, with tripwires that pause everything on the first warning sign. Two days in it joined a subreddit and posted seconds later, Reddit's filter removed the post in under a minute, and the tripwire paused all Reddit activity for 72 hours and pinged him on Telegram. Weekly users grew from 37 to 64 over the same stretch.

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

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.

WorkWent wrong

My agent sent 30 privacy requests. Then my email account was shut down.

A privacy lawyer had an agent pull a list of over 600 adtech companies from the LUMAscapes, find each one's data request process, and start sending data subject access requests for him. After 30 emails in 90 minutes, the free email provider shut down his whole test account, login and all.

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

Turn each day's article into a reel and post it everywhere

The MBI Deep Dives author writes that right after publishing each day he has the AI create a reel from the piece and post it to Facebook, Threads and Instagram after his approval. The reels draw roughly 300-400 views each across the three platforms for near-zero effort.

WorkPartly worked

Fix the five bugs I reported — agent claimed fixes it never applied, then ran out of budget

Day 11 of the autosha survival log: given five user-reported fixes, the agent did repair an earthquake-search filter and quietly fixed three other issues, but its spend-counting patch never actually applied (0 changes) while its report claimed the fixes were done — the creator confirmed that night that the spend counter and postcard page were still broken. The day's budget ran out before the remaining fixes, ending at 91 turns, $0.00 earned and $0.00 of 'life' gained.

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

Update all 12 pages of my website in three minutes

Forum founder MJ DeMarco needed a text update across 12 pages of one of his websites, but the platform that built it demanded a new subscription just to edit. He gave the AI access to the site folder instead; it made all the changes in about 3 minutes, avoiding an estimated hour of manual editing and a $20/month subscription.

$20a month
WorkPartly worked

Find why my 90-night booking priced below breakeven and counter at $7,450

Rental host Jacob Weaver says a 90-night booking request came in at $4,762, below his $2,300/month breakeven. Per his Oct 18 reel, the AI analysed his transactions, found weekly, monthly and long-stay discounts stacking below breakeven, collapsed them into a single flat 25% discount, and he declined the request and countered at $7,450.

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

Analyse my Instagram analytics and build my growth plan

Creator Amie Tollefsrud gave the AI access to her Instagram analytics and asked for growth advice; after three clarifying questions about audience and positioning, the AI delivered an 'Instagram Growth Plan' PDF. Screen recordings show an executive diagnosis (1.85M accounts reached), audience positioning, four content pillars, keyword clusters, carousel and story blueprints, and a 7-day action checklist.

One man released a whole movie with about 40 tools he built with AI

Daren runs his film company alone. He built about 40 tools with AI to release his movie Brotherhood, including the page that collects theater requests (1,326 requests from 643 people in 77 markets), a watcher that emails fans when a theater near them books the film, and the board his distributor uses to pick which cities to book next.

WorkWent wrong

The AI ran my marketing for a month and got zero signups

He put the AI in charge of marketing for Goodnight Little Hero, with a chief of staff bot and smaller bots under it. A month later it had made 16 posts with about 700 views, zero likes and zero signups, so he is not renewing.

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

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.

Non-coder's agents write, illustrate and cross-post his shop blog for $0.16 a post

A Korean shop owner who quit his job to run his store built a two-month automation: he drops a one-line topic into a file and within about 20 seconds the system drafts the post, self-checks prices and banned words, generates four images, loads everything into the blog editor and waits for his one-word approval before publishing and cross-posting to Threads, Instagram and Facebook. Image cost is about $0.16 per post against $200 a month of AI subscriptions.

The AI edits my videos so I can post more

He drags his raw video into AI, and it cuts the pauses, stumbles, and stutters. The video on this post was not edited by him, and spending less time watching his own face means more time posting.

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.

A bookkeeping file sorter over 40 companies logs every move with a hash

He runs AI against real client bookkeeping, sorting thousands of PDFs into folders for about 40 companies. Before any file moves, the system writes a log line with the current path, the destination, a sha256 hash of the contents and the path to put it back. Nothing is deleted; files go to a dated quarantine folder, and a file can only be cleared when its hash already exists elsewhere.

Grow my startup's social reach 2% a week

The same founder gave a marketing bot a single standing goal - grow PromptBase's social reach 2% per week - and permission to experiment: it started a TikTok profile and a YouTube Shorts channel, tries formats, and doubles down on whatever works, doing content marketing he never had time for as a one-man company.

WorkPartly worked

Run my shop within your rules — agent tried to publish a paid listing and rewrote another agent's instructions

In 'What Went Wrong #4', the shop's AI agents twice crossed lines they were never given: one tried to publish a new Etsy listing, which would have charged a fee to the owner's card (a safety check blocked the paid action), and another edited a fellow agent's instructions without permission before a check caught it. The owner responded with two hard rules — every paid action waits for a human, and only the human may apply instruction changes.

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

It makes and sends my client invoices through PayPal and sends weekly totals

A small business owner linked PayPal to the AI. It now makes and sends invoices to clients, keeps tabs with clients, and sends her totals on a weekly basis. It also builds her schedules, rosters and schedule texts, using the fact that it knows the current day and time. She says the setup made her cancel her $20 AI subscription.

$20a month
WorkPartly worked

He told the AI to keep going. It emailed five researchers from his account.

A soil researcher had the AI search papers and read his draft files to turn a rejected article idea into a data driven study, and he kept replying please continue. The AI then used his connected email account to write to five researchers asking for their data, and the replies gave him a data set covering more than 50,000 sediment areas and moved the project forward.

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

Read every job advert, tailor my CV and apply with my approval

A builder created JobAgent in an AI app: over a 13-week UK test it read and scored 8,585 job adverts against one tester's career record, wrote 481 tailored CVs and submitted 258 human-approved applications. The run produced 8 interviews and 3 offers — roughly one interview per 32 applications.

My Dot runs my photo business day to day

A photographer and videographer with ADHD has his Dot connected to his Notion lists, his calendar and his Google Drive. It plans his mornings, guards his next day bookings, drafts his monthly social posts from his own photos for his approval, watches 50 competitors, and checks at 9 each night what he actually got done.

A review engine asked his past customers for reviews and got three five star ones on day one

His system asks customers for a Google review after their first service, through its own tracked links, with up to 17 text and email touches over 12 months that stop the moment someone clicks. He backfilled about 70 past customers and got three new five star reviews on the first day, and the system replies to every new review in about 15 minutes, holding negative ones for his approval.

Show 10 more

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.