The stat behind it…

57% of sales goes to whoever responds first. And that’s not my opinion. That’s data.

Most small businesses let missed calls go to voicemail. Callers don’t call back.

The fix: an AI agent – built inside GoHighLevel – that texts the caller a couple of minutes later. Not a static “sorry we missed you” – a full two-way conversation that answers questions and books appointments

Customize the AI prompt per business – tree trimmer, plumber, dentist – and it handles the rest.

Here’s the sneaky part

You use the same system to find clients. Record a voicemail, blast it to local business phone numbers, and when they call back… your AI pitches them the service.

Chris demos this live – scrapes 181 tree trimmers in Dallas, sends voicemail drops, and within minutes a business owner texts back asking about pricing

A teenager used the same approach and landed her first client on her 16th birthday.

Cost to start: ~$100/month. One client at $500/month covers everything.

Could be a nice recurring income stream selling this to tradespeople in your area

• SpinachKettle

• Trailer Rental Side Hustler

• $500 monthly profit

You buy a huge sectional. It won’t fit in your SUV. Store delivery takes three days and costs $100. So you’re stuck in the parking lot…

One guy turned that exact moment into a side income.

He shared the setup (archived) on Reddit…

I bought two used 5×8 cargo trailers on marketplace for about $1200 total, and spent another $200 on new tires and LED light kits.

He keeps them in a cheap lot near a big IKEA. A peer-to-peer rental listing does the rest

No meetings, no hitching help – renters get a lockbox code and a how-to PDF

The money

I charge $40/day and during the spring and summer they are booked almost every Friday through Sunday…

I am clearing about $500/month in pure profit.

All for about 20 minutes a week checking tires

Best part: trailers barely depreciate. Bored of it? Sell them tomorrow for what you paid.

It is a dirty and boring way to make money which is exactly why there is no competition in my area.

List a used trailer on Neighbors Trailer near any furniture hotspot and you’re in business

The clever bit: you’re not chasing views. You’re catching buyers who already saw the product elsewhere and are ready to pull the trigger.

David Margaryan sums up the logic…

We are not going for views, we are going for conversions.

Because when a video actually gets a conversion, what’s going to happen is the brand of that product is going to run ads with their money on your video.

So one converting clip becomes an ad-fueled sales engine – paid for by the brand, not you

The playbook

• Find a surging-but-unsaturated product on Kalodata, a TikTok Shop analytics tool
• Generate a 5-second product clip with AI (~2 minutes)
• Reverse it in CapCut so it zooms in, then out – now it’s 10 seconds
• Add a discount overlay (“45% off”), grab a trending sound, post

David runs 15-20 of these a day across several accounts, all handed off to a VA. He shows one client account that hit $14K in its first 30 days

Commissions on TikTok Shop run roughly 5-10% on electronics and 15-20% on health and wellness – so that’s where the math gets interesting fastest

• Mike Yoder

• Drone Sprayer

• $132,000 in 24 days spraying crops

Mike Yoder grew up Amish in Ohio. Four years ago he bought a drone and went all in.

Now he runs nuWay Ag, and on a recent podcast he broke down the spray drone side of his business

Mike shows up at farms with a DJI T-100, sets an auto mission on his phone, and lets the drone do the rest…

It’s all automated. You can spray a whole field and never once touch the remote controller sticks.

Here’s where it gets wild…

• $132K in 24 days on one job
• $65K profit in 8 days on another

He charges $10 to $20 per acre. Operating costs are $3 to $3.74 per acre. That works out to roughly 70% margins

The licensing is simple. Study for your FAA Part 107 for a few days, grab a state pesticide applicator license, and you’re in.

Per Mike, only 2.5% of US crop acres get sprayed by drone today. The rest still uses planes, ground rigs, or helicopters…

I don’t care where I would go in this country, in any state, I could do it.

Could you be the first drone sprayer in your county?

• Colin Stroud

• Credit Card Rewards Consultant

• $231,000 in his first year

Colin Stroud spent a weekend learning credit card rewards. A year later, he apparently cleared $231,000 – on about $100/mo in software, no ads

He’s a rewards consultant. He sits with small business owners, looks at what they already spend, and rebuilds their card setup to earn 2.5–3% back instead of 1%.

His own parents ran their medical practice on a 1% cashback card, spending $40K+ a month. Colin reworked it and saved them over $20,000 in travel.

A contractor dropping $60K/mo on materials earns just $600 back at 1%. The right cards bump that to $1,800. Colin charges $875, one time, to set it up – recouped in weeks.

The gap nobody’s filling: every “points” blog out there is written for travel hackers. Nobody’s sitting down with the plumber or the dentist

He lands clients posting daily on LinkedIn, where this niche has almost no competition

And you don’t need to have visited 60 countries – just know more than your client. A free course at The Daily Drop plus a tool like Seats.aero gets you most of the way there.

Pick one type of business owner – dentists, contractors, restaurants – and become their points guy

• KLaci

• Indie game developer

• $3,000 monthly ad revenue

KLaci, a Budapest-based dev and movie nerd, writes about a side project he almost killed in its first weekend.

In March 2022, riding the Wordle hype, he built actorle.com – a guess-the-actor daily puzzle – in 3 days.

Launch went badly…

I posted on Reddit and a few forums. Two of the top comments were “insanely hard to win” and “literally unplayable”, the second one because I’d forgotten to add John Hurt to the database.

I almost killed the project that weekend.

A tiny British humor newsletter (b3ta.com) featured it next. Then he added the feature that changed everything: a “share your score on Twitter” button.

Virality has to be designed in.

The Wordle-style shareable score grid is what carried Actorle. Without that one feature it would’ve died in week 2.

Mashable picked it up. Accounts with 10K+ followers started posting their grids

Four years later

• ~10K daily active users
• ~$3K/month from display ads via Publisher Collective
• A small portfolio of spinoffs under metime.games
• Very low maintenance

His pitch to other indie devs…

‘Build a B2B SaaS’ isn’t the only indie path.

A low-maintenance daily consumer game is a real business too.

You could vibe-code a Wordle-for-X this weekend – sports, music, anime – using a free public API for the data.

Just don’t ship without that shareable score grid

Then he scaled it.

By early 2025, his network Good Daily was running 350+ daily local newsletters across 47 states. All AI-driven

One person at the controls.

In July, 6AM City – the biggest US local newsletter publisher – acquired Good Daily and made Henderson VP of Engineering.

He’d added 500K+ subscribers in under a year, with markets as small as Rock Springs, WY (pop. 20K).

It’s also reshaping how 6AM City scales.

From a recent podcast, COO Ryan Heafy laid out the math

For a quarter million dollars, I can go turn on a city… be live in 90 days and be profitable in two years.

…now I can be up and running in one day and be profitable in two days and be in any city we want to be in.

Pick a small town nobody’s covering and spin up your own AI-driven daily digest, monetized via local ads

• $18K/Month From a Local Newsletter
• $2400/Month From an AI Local Newsletter
• He Makes $500K/Year With This Automated Newsletter

• NoGround511

• Web Designer

• $6,800 monthly revenue

A developer in India quit his job to build an AI tool that generates product photoshoots. It flopped. No traction, nobody paid.

His backup plan felt almost too embarrassing to call a startup: simple business websites, fixed price, delivered in 7 days.

But that business took off

He writes…

I built a simple form where business owners fill in their details, I build them a free preview of their homepage, and they only pay if they like what they see. No upfront risk for them.

He charges $400 per site, plus $100 for each extra feature. Right now he’s delivering 17-20 a month

First clients came from old work contacts, then referrals snowballed. Now he runs his own Meta ads – about $100 spend brings 5-7 inquiries, resulting in 2-3 clients.

His takeaway

The idea that felt too simple, too obvious, too unsexy was the one that actually had demand behind it.

AI makes a same-day homepage preview cheap to produce. Pick one trade in your area, build the preview first, and let the work sell itself

Tap the screen, swipe your card, grab the flowers. Last-minute anniversary saved

That’s The Bloom-Box, which florist Jami Moretti opened at North Market Bridge Park in Dublin, Ohio – billed as Ohio’s first.

Jami’s pitch

We wanted to make giving flowers as easy as buying a coffee. The Bloom Box lets customers purchase fresh, designer-quality bouquets with just a tap.

This is already common elsewhere. Japan has flower vending machines all over the place , and the US has a fraction of that – mostly clustered at major airports and malls.

Most cities and towns are wide open.

A refrigerated touchscreen unit runs $8K-$15K.

Manufacturer claims of $3-10K monthly revenue per machine probably need a haircut (those numbers come from people selling the machines), but the model’s proven

Pair with a local florist and pitch the first machine for your town’s busiest spot

• Leon Green

• YouTuber / Digital Products Seller

• $15,114 in 30 days from one PDF guide

Leon Green claims he made $15,114 in 30 days from a single PDF guide in the parenting niche – with AI doing most of the writing

His playbook

• Pick a niche with emotional pull (parenting, in this case)
• Ask AI to draft the guide from a sharpened title and subtitle
• Design a Canva cover with a stock image
• Sell on Shopify (not Etsy or Gumroad) for $9-$27

Claude AI did 90% of the heavy lifting for me as far as creating the actual PDF guide.

Leon then found a parenting YouTuber with 73K subscribers and ran a clever either/or pitch on them

Either 50% affiliate commission or a flat fee for a 30-60 second integration. Most creators counter with a hybrid, which is exactly what he was angling for. He landed on $700 flat + 15% recurring commission.

And that collaboration video keeps pulling views long after going live

Pick your own emotional niche, make something actually worth the price, and one collaboration video can keep selling it for months

• Marc Hyman

• Iced Coffee Cart Owner

• $8,000 net profit in a 2-day event

Marc Hyman is a 66-year-old California lawyer who doesn’t drink coffee. He sells it anyway

He gutted a $600 Husky tool cart from Home Depot, bolted in a nitro tap system, and serves iced coffee at festivals, car shows, and car washes.

The whole setup ran under $3,000. His best 2-day event cleared $8,000 net profit

The economics are lopsided in his favor…

• ~$3 to make each cup
• Sells for $8 to $8.50
• 30 seconds to pour, no employees

After 9am, most buyers just want something cold and sweet, he explains – so the coffee itself is almost beside the point

The quality of the underlying coffee barely matters to them. What matters is speed, temperature, and price.

He even out-earned a $150,000 coffee truck parked next to him in 100-degree desert heat

A beginner won’t hit $8K – that’s his outlier. But even a small event with 80 buyers nets around $400 in an afternoon.

The same cheap-cart model works for lemonade, kettle corn, or nitro matcha. Build the cart, call three event organizers, and show up where the crowd already is

• Jonathan Laramy

• AI History Creator (Chloe VS History)

• $8,000 estimated monthly ad revenue

Meet Chloe, an AI “girl from LA” who time-travels through the Titanic, Tudor London and Ancient Rome on YouTube…

She’s racked up 261K subscribers in only 3 months

Jonathan Laramy is the man behind the channel…

I am not being dishonest about the fact this is an AI video. I’m not hiding away from it.

The bulk of his 17M views are from Shorts – they build the audience but barely pay.

The money’s in three long-form videos. They have ~4.7M views combined. Educational content earns $5–14 per 1,000 views – assuming the low end, that’s about $23K in 3 months, or roughly $8K/month

Jonathan has been creating AI content since 2023, and reckons the timing has never been better…

The barrier to entry now is the lowest it’s ever been.

His trick: turn real public-domain paintings into moving, photorealistic scenes – a new long-form video every two weeks.

It’s not flawless – critics spot a four-legged chicken and Tudor forks that didn’t exist yet – but it shows the massive potential of AI-generated video

Pick a dry-but-evergreen niche – history, mythology, science – wrap it in an AI character, and let Shorts build the crowd while long-form earns

A few weeks in, a tailor told him it was the most useful tool in her whole business. He assumed she meant for her own reminders

She wasn’t using it for her own reminders at all. She’d given the number to her customers.

Her customers WhatsApp the bot when their order is ready to be picked up, when they want to reschedule a fitting, or when they want to check their order status.

The reframe

She basically turned a personal productivity tool into a customer communication system. No app, no portal, no login. Just WhatsApp, which every single one of her customers already uses.

We built a reminder bot. She built a lightweight CRM with it.

You could replicate this with Twilio + a bit of AI for under $10/mo.

Sell to local business owners who are struggling with reminders and DMs across 4 different apps.

One WhatsApp number could replace the lot

• Om Patel

• Founder, BigIdeasDB

• $23,000+ lifetime revenue

Om Patel launched BigIdeasDB in late 2024, aged 14, after eight flops in a row.

It’s a database of real problems people are complaining about online – the kind founders can build a business on.

Now he’s 15 and it’s past $23,000 in lifetime revenue. Best month: $4,600

Om’s scrapers pull from Reddit, G2 reviews, app stores, and Upwork job posts. AI clusters the whining into ~10,000 validated problems.

The pitch…

Stop building products based on what you think is cool and start looking for problems people are actively complaining about.

Om knows that pain firsthand

I kept solving problems nobody cared about. I’d build for months… then launch to silence.

Now 160+ founders pay him $45/month for access. No free trial, no ads, no funding – all growth came from daily build-in-public posts on X and Reddit.

Run Om’s playbook in a tighter niche – Shopify 1-star reviews, fitness app gripes, dental forum rants – and sell the filtered list to founders in that space

• Make_That_Money

• Mobile Detailer (Side Hustle)

• $72,000 in 9 months

Recently shared on Reddit…

I’m 26 and make ~$85k + 5% bonus at my day job. My business did ~$72k last year, working from March to November all by myself part-time, so nights and weekends only.

The day job is a finance role at an insurance company. The “business” is one-man mobile detailing, run from a custom trailer plus a new Ford Transit Connect setup wrapped with the logo.

Best month: $12K solo.

Average ticket: $285 incl. tips.

Pricing

• Exterior only: $100–150
• Interior only: $250–275
• Interior + exterior: $325–375
• Monthly maintenance plan: $275

That last one is the kicker – he’s stacked enough monthly contracts for a guaranteed $5K/month without chasing new jobs. Booked out 1.5+ months. Clientele skews G-Wagons, Porsches, the occasional Ferrari.

The twist? He’s embarrassed about it…

The business does too well to ignore, but it feels so beneath me to tell people what I do. Very few friends and even family members know because I try to keep it as secret as possible.

Net worth at 26: ~$400K. Plus 2 duplex rentals.

A boring offline hedge against AI eating finance jobs is looking pretty smart right about now

• William Lindholm

• Cake Middleman

• $120,000 monthly revenue

William Lindholm sends physical cakes to his clients’ sales prospects to break the ice.

He calls it “cold caking” – $80 a cake, sourced from a local bakery near each recipient, with tracking on top.

The numbers are wild…

So, this month we’re doing $120,000. Yeah, it’s crazy. Our company has only existed for 6 months.

That’s about $4K a day in revenue, $30-40K monthly profit.

His pitch: as AI drowns out every digital channel, physical gifts cut through.

From the cakes we’ve sent out so far, 35% have converted into meetings, which is really just crazy.

Next week he’s shipping a thousand cakes for a single dental software company

The moat is an AI agent that sources new bakeries and negotiates volume discounts, taking him from one bakery to fifteen in a month.

He’s also still passively earning $12K/month from his original Norway business (HR birthday cakes), with his mom handling customer service

Inbounds are stacking up from places like Canada, Spain, and Australia – William says he’d happily partner up if you want to run cold-caking in your area

With Claude Code being as amazing as it is, I have been able to create small (kinda weird) AI systems that act like real humans and do work even better than humans! I even was able to fire my creative director for youtube!

Here’s how it works

He fed Claude Code 20 of his best handwritten YouTube scripts and tinkered until it could mimic his voice with 92% accuracy

Then he hooked it up to a browser so it could research ideas across YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and Reddit.

Scripting time dropped from 2 hours to 20 minutes per video.

The first video the system fully ideated, researched, and scripted…

175K+ views and counting

Ritesh runs an agency that builds AI “employees” for clients, and his Content OS is essentially a live demo for one of their products.

You could carve out a similar lane – build Content OS setups for YouTubers, podcasters, or LinkedIn ghostwriters who don’t want to DIY.

Or think broader: for any niche, there’s a version of this waiting to be built

• Sharp-Opinion-4542

• Backyard Shed Storage Host

• $115-130 monthly revenue

Spotted on Reddit, from a guy who turned his junk shed into quiet rent money

I have a detached shed that was basically a graveyard for old tools and a broken treadmill.

A coworker tipped him off about platforms (almost certainly Neighbor.com) for listing extra space. He signed up last August

First booking came within like 10 days, a guy needed somewhere to store his jet ski going into fall. He ended up staying through the whole winter and is still there now lol.

He cleared out a second corner and listed that separately too. 8 months in…

I’m pulling around $115 to $130/month consistently… that’s over $1,000 in the account basically doing nothing, came in clutch… when my car needed a repair in February.

$1,000+ banked. Doing almost nothing.

He checks the app maybe once a week before bed. That’s it.

Genuinely the most unsexy passive income thing I’ve ever done but it just runs quietly in the background.

Other hosts in the thread report earnings from $28/mo (small shed) to $3,500/mo (acreage with RVs).

Got a shed, garage corner, basement, or driveway gathering dust?

Could be your key to some sweet passive income

• Kit Huffman

• Executive Ghostwriter / Founder of Seneca

• $1,000 monthly earnings from first client

By summer 2020, Kit Huffman was 22, living out of a 2005 Subaru Forester in Jackson Hole, and writing LinkedIn posts on the side for coaches and solopreneurs.

A typical day for Kit

I’d wake up in the Bridger-Teton National Forest nine long miles from town, set up shop at a supermarket Starbucks (easier to bum the free wifi), bathe with biodegradable soap in a glacial runoff river, and consume an unbalanced diet of canned kidney beans, plastic-packaged sushi, and warm White Claws.

Then an agency cold-emailed her about a ghostwriting gig…

My assignment: Write four LinkedIn posts for the CEO of a large, global bank. The pay was $1,000 a month…

They didn’t know I was a dyslexic 22-year-old without a college degree who was living out of her car, but they also never asked.

She started “cosplaying CEOs”

Five years later, she sold the Subaru, moved to NYC, and launched a personal-brand agency for execs

Solo LinkedIn ghostwriters charge $1K to $5K+ per client/month.

Stack 3 clients and that’s $3K–$15K/month from your kitchen table

Pick a niche where you have credibility, DM execs with sample posts in their voice, and start cosplaying

• Special-Mastodon-990

• AI Automation Agency Founder

• $5,700 monthly recurring revenue

Special-Mastodon-990 started his UK-based AI agency as a side project in September 2025 alongside freelance web dev.

By month 7: 12 clients and ~$5,700 MRR

Pricing: ~$3,200 setup + ~$500/month retainer. Cost per client is $20 to $40. All infrastructure on a single $5/month Hetzner box.

The product is an AI voice agent that answers a tradesperson’s calls and runs the front office

• Books jobs into a live calendar
• Fires an SMS within 30 seconds to anyone who got missed
• Follows up on quotes at day 2, 5, and 10
• Sends a review request a day after each job
• Sends the owner a weekly WhatsApp summary

From his system breakdown…

Small trade businesses lose 30-40% of inbound calls because the owner is up a ladder, under a sink, or driving between jobs.

That 30-second SMS catches a chunk of them…

Around 40% of those missed calls convert into booked jobs just from that one text.

What’s worked: LinkedIn outbound to dental practices and estate agents, cold email to US HVAC companies, and demo-first sales – let prospects hear the agent live.

What hasn’t: Facebook ads, cold calling, content marketing on its own.

You could try this with vets, cleaners, mobile mechanics, local gyms

• Anne McGraw

• Slumber Party Rental Owner

• $4,000-5,000 per weekend

Anne McGraw runs Firefly Slumber Parties in Nashville on the side of a full-time job.

On a recent weekend she and her husband booked five parties at $800-$1,000 each

The setup: themed canopy tents, air mattresses, matching pillows, decor – delivered and styled before the birthday girl walks in.

Pricing

• 3-tent: $425
• 5-tent: $565
• 8-tent: $755 (most popular)
• 10-tent: $895

Plus upsells like a $25 invite graphic (5 mins in Canva), $45 karaoke machine, and a $45 sibling tent for the little brother who’d otherwise feel left out.

Sweet spot: girls aged 10-15. Top themes are Taylor Swift Eras, Harry Potter, Minecraft, and Boho.

Anne started for under $5K. The tents are DIY – wooden staves with fabric covers sewn at home.

Every party doubles as marketing. Parents who see the setup at drop-off immediately want one for their own kid

She’s been at it since 2020 and now coaches new operators in Dallas, Savannah, Jacksonville and East Tennessee. Her advice for newbies…

This is a long game.

Could be a tidy weekend side hustle in your town if nobody’s running one yet

High school grad numbers peaked in 2025, the demographic cliff is pushing smaller schools toward closure, and private colleges now discount tuition by 56.3% on average to fill seats – a record high

But most parents don’t know they can negotiate further. Michael Girdley recently pitched a fix – be the consultant who does it for them

• $2,000 refundable deposit to filter serious clients
• 10-15% commission on whatever you save them
• On a $30K saving = $3-4.5K per family
• 20 clients/year, nights and weekends = $200K per Girdley

Demand is real. A parent recently asked on Reddit…

I’m looking for a company or a consultant who for a fee can negotiate college tuition and scholarship on my behalf. Is there a service out there?

Zero replies.

No startup costs. Learn the appeal process, then park a wrapped truck outside a wealthy high school and offer free consults

Related:

• $200K/Month Negotiating Deals for Strangers

• Claire Shaner

• Amazon Influencer

• $100,000 projected this year

Claire Shaner is on track for ~$100K this year on ~15 hours a week, all through the Amazon Influencer Program.

She films short product reviews that show up on Amazon listing carousels, and earns a cut when shoppers buy.

The twist: Claire has a master’s in marketing research and surveyed 200+ Amazon influencers to figure out how top earners are making money.

She recently shared what her data says is actually working

• Watch time beats conversion. It’s ~6x more predictive of carousel placement than conversion rate
• Thumbnails matter way less than you’d think. Style of thumbnail had no real link to earnings.
• Strategic buys beat free samples 3:1. Brand-supplied products underperform stuff she picks herself.
• About 80% of today’s earning products may stop earning within a year. It’s a treadmill – constantly replacing fading videos

Most creators waste effort in the middle zone: 20-40 minutes per video without a clear payoff. Better to be very fast or very deliberate.

If you’ve been writing off the Amazon Influencer Program because it feels saturated, here’s your reminder.

Claire’s pulling ~$8K/month part-time – top 5% in the program

• $5K/Month Reviewing Products She Already Owns
• $968 in Her First Month With This Side Hustle
• Part-Time Side Hustle Earns $5000 Per Month

• Tomer Cnaan

• Founder of CalBuddy

• $81,108 revenue in one month

Tomer Cnaan is 23 years old, from Tel Aviv.

Last month he made $81,108 from a calorie counting app that only serves Israelis

It’s a smart bit of geo-arbitrage…

You see an app taking off in one country and then make a version for your own country, in your own language. Super smart.

The original is Cal AI – the snap-a-photo-of-your-meal calorie tracker dominating the App Store. English-language clones are everywhere now

Tomer skipped the bloodbath.

He built his version in Hebrew, with a database of thousands of common Israeli foods (hummus, schnitzel, jachnun) that English apps don’t recognise

He’s already moving on…

Growth slowed down a little. For the first time since launching 9 months ago, most of my effort went into new ventures.

Plenty of language markets are still wide open – Vietnamese, European Portuguese, Greek, Hungarian. Take your pick

If you only speak English, could you find a partner in another country ripe for this playbook?

• Lydia Holmes & John Clarke

• Burrito Shop Owners

• $2,300,000 combined sales in one year

Lydia Holmes and John Clarke run a 200 sq ft burrito shed in a Home Depot parking lot in California.

They recently explained the appeal of the spot

You have low overhead, low rent compared to an actual brick-and-mortar, and you’re right in front of a Home Depot, and everyone has seen the Costco food court. So, we were like, we have to get in here.

They opened LJ’s Lil’ Cafe in 2021 with a hot dog stand vibe. But it was the breakfast burrito that kept selling out – 25 crispy tater tots, a full cup of cheese.

When a freelance writer covered them in Eater LA, sales went vertical

That Thursday, we probably did maybe, you know, $300 in sales. After the Eater article came out that night on Friday, I think immediately we hit our first $1,000 sales day. And then, I don’t think we’ve done less than a $1,000 sales day after that.

They now do 600 burritos a day on weekends, opened a brick-and-mortar last July, and pulled $2.3M in combined sales last year

Could you find a busy parking lot in your town with no nearby food?

• Luke Van Der Veer

• Rank & Rent Portfolio Owner

• $185,000 monthly revenue

Luke Van Der Veer builds plain little websites for local service businesses – carpet cleaners, roofers, restoration guys – then rents the leads to a real contractor in that city for ~$1K a pop

230 sites total, 80% of them rented out, averaging $185K/month in recurring revenue.

Luke’s niche criteria

• Blue-collar service (phone-driven, no licensing, low seasonality)
• Cities of 50K to 400K people
• Google Maps full of businesses with no website and few reviews
• Yelp or Thumbtack ranking above the actual local providers

Then he builds a simple hub site, one page per service, going deeper than everyone else on page one…

I’m going to take everything they talk about, and I’m going to write double of what they have.

Once ranked, he forwards the calls to a vetted contractor and charges roughly 10% of the revenue those leads bring in. Higher-ticket clients are on 10-15% rev share.

And Luke reckons the model holds up nicely in the AI era …

Blue collar work is likely the last category to be disrupted by AI.

Which underserved city and blue-collar niche could you claim first?

I have a beauty brand that’s been around for a decade and does around 100k a month. We started selling live on Whatnot 3x a week and within 3 months we’re doing 40k/month on that channel.

The ramp

• Show 1: $1.5K
• Month 1: $20K
• Month 3: $40K/mo just from Whatnot

Why they’re so bullish: live commerce in China is already a $1T market, while the US is just $50B

They’re moving onto TikTok next…

Tiktok JUST added a bid feature – exactly like Whatnot, and from what I’ve seen and heard, they push you to the FYP if you’re doing auctions.

(FYP = For You Page, TikTok’s main algorithmic feed — getting pushed there means free reach to millions.)

I’m guessing you don’t have your own brand to monetize – but plenty of small Shopify brands have inventory and no time to go live.

Find a brand you like, pitch yourself as their Whatnot host, and split the revenue

• Ethan Ashi

• Bot Builder & iPhone Flipper

• €600–900 monthly profit

Ethan Ashi, a CS student in Spain, built a desktop bot to monitor Facebook Marketplace and alert him when particular items (eg. iPhones) were listed for sale.

He writes…

I finished a workout, checked my phone, and had 3 solid iPhone [listing] alerts waiting for me.

Over the next few days I bought all three, cleaned them up, resold them, and ended up making about €690 profit after fees.

Ethan’s bot also monitors two other marketplaces simultaneously: Wallapop and Vinted.

He’d seen Discord groups charging hefty monthly fees for similar tools, and figured he could build his own

Then he open-sourced it – MIT licensed, runs locally, no paywall.

It is not really an iPhone bot. It is more like a listing monitor with rules.

You set a watchlist (item + max price + location), the bot polls all three marketplaces, grades each new listing A–F, and pings Discord on every Grade A or B deal.

Ethan averages 4–7 flips a month for €600–900 monthly profit – mostly while he’s busy doing other things

Vinted support covers 23 countries (US included). Discord users are already running it for Pokémon cards, shoes, consoles, even cars.

Pick a niche you actually know and let the bot hunt for you

As we’ve seen before, marketplace flipping can be very lucrative…

• $600K/Year Flipping Free Backyard Sheds (AI Shortcut)

• Kirk & Jacob McKinney

• Junk Removal Business Owners

• $3,000,000 2025 revenue

In 2021, two teen brothers from Massachusetts bought a $4,000 pickup truck and started hauling junk after school.

Recently they shared…

We turned our high school side hustle into a junk collecting business that brought in $3 million in 2025.

Kirk (22) and Jacob (20) McKinney run Junk Teens with 5 trucks, 25 employees, and 5,500+ jobs last year

And they did it all debt-free…

We’ve never financed our trucks. We’ve never invested over what we were capable of getting in cash.

The early days weren’t glamorous…

I think I got detention one time because I was late so many times for school because of having to dump the truck.

They worked out of their parents’ driveway for two years before renting a warehouse. Both are at Babson College now, eyeing $5M next year

Grab a used pickup, set up a Google Business Profile, and start cleaning out your neighbors’ garages

• New-Foundation-2563

• Garage Space Renter

• $125 per month (for 4+ years)

Someone on Reddit asked for the most “set it and forget it” income idea.

One response…

I have a two car garage. I only use one side of it. I rent out the other side to a guy who parks his sports car in there for $125 a month.

He has come to drive it twice in 4 years and I’ve made 5k+ on it now. Obviously I’ve gotten lucky with who it is and them never coming but it’s extremely passive.

That’s $125/month for doing absolutely nothing

And this isn’t unusual – sports car owners, classic car collectors, and seasonal vehicle owners all need covered storage.

Sites like Neighbor.com make this easy to set up. It’s the biggest peer-to-peer storage marketplace in the US, and a single garage bay typically lists for $100 to $200/month

Don’t have a garage?

Try this

Post on Nextdoor or knock on doors offering to manage other people’s unused garage space. You handle the listing, vet renters, and split the revenue 50/50.

Ten garages at $150/month each = $750/month for yourself. Basically Airbnb co-hosting for garages

• Jessica Dante

• London Travel YouTuber

• ~$400K yearly from travel guides (est.)

Jessica Dante quit her corporate social media job, tried blogging, then noticed her London videos were crushing everything else on YouTube.

I was like, I’m not actually reading any blogs. I’m watching a ton of YouTube content every day.

So she switched to video. One early upload – “10 important things to know before you visit London” – cleared 1M views

She narrowed the whole channel to just London. Counterintuitive, since travel creators usually chase variety.

But London pulls in millions of trip-planning tourists a year, the content’s evergreen, and she never has to go far to film.

She calls these viewers a “drive-by” audience…

They’re the ones that are actively planning a trip… they’re more likely to buy our travel guides, convert with brand partners, and click affiliate links.

Jessica’s business today: 364K YouTube subs, 6M monthly social reach, an 85K email list, and a shop full of $45–$150 London travel guides.

15,000 guides sold since 2023.

At an $80 average price, looks like ~$400K/year from those alone.

Pick a popular destination city – eg. New York, Nashville, Mexico City – produce helpful videos for tourists, and have travel guides ready for them to buy

• PostExpensive2418

• AI Music Channel Operator

• $1,000 monthly across 5 channels

PostExpensive2418 shares his setup…

Each channel brings in around $195–$200 per month. It’s not a massive income, but considering the low effort involved and the fact that it’s relatively consistent, it’s been surprisingly worth it.

That’s ~$1,000/month.

He runs 5 “artists” – 2 instrumental, 2 nightcore, and 1 covers channel. AI-generated tracks get distributed to Spotify via DistroKid + uploaded to YouTube as faceless music videos

The workflow

I usually take 1–2 days to prepare all the songs (around 60–80 tracks). I edit everything (which takes the longest, about a week for all the material) and schedule automatic uploads of at least 3–5 videos per day. I do this for all my channels.

Total tool stack: Suno, DistroKid, CapCut, Canva. Roughly $10-15/month all-in.

Pattern recognition from his uploads…

• Covers of Hot 100 songs pull the most reach
• Instrumental beats earn the most per minute of effort
• Nightcore “hits a good niche”

Took him ~6 months of consistent uploading before anything clicked – one track randomly went viral on TikTok and pulled everything else into motion.

Pick a niche, give it a few months, see what sticks

• Yandi Latino

• TikTok Shop Affiliate

• $1.16M March 2026 TikTok Shop sales

You don’t need to go viral to print money on TikTok Shop.

Yandi Latino came in 5th in the March 2026 creator rankings, generating $1.16M in revenue with just 12.3K followers

With the lowest follower count in the top five, the account generates revenue on par with creators carrying three to fifteen times as many followers, driven by a comparatively small number of high-conversion transactions.

He did it on 3.86K items sold – about $300 average per item, mostly via live streams.

And he’s not the only small fish printing money

• 7 of the top 10 have under 55K followers
• 6 of the 10 were first-time entries this month
• Most of these accounts only opened in late 2024 or early 2025

Shark vacuums – an affordable Dyson alternative – are the secret weapon, featured by 5 of the top 10 creators.

At ~13% commission, Yandi personally cleared around $150K last month.

Pick a proven category, sign up for TikTok Shop affiliate, and start going live

Wyoming, Utah, Florida, Connecticut and Texas all gave doctors the green light, and a wave of cash-pay regenerative clinics has followed.

Tim Stoddart breaks down the opportunity…

We are witnessing the ‘Cannabis-ization’ of stem cells: states are bypassing federal bottlenecks to create ‘Medical Sanctuary Zones.’

Patients used to fly to Panama and drop $20-50K out of pocket for these treatments. Now they’re getting them stateside.

The clinic economics…

A high-end regenerative clinic can generate between $150,000 and $400,000 per month in revenue. Because these are largely ‘cash-pay’ procedures, margins often exceed 60%.

Tim sees 4 plays for non-doctors who want to ride the wave…

• A marketing agency for clinics
• A concierge platform charging referral fees per booking
• A GMP-certified processing lab (the “shovels” play)
• Supplements that “prime the niche” pre-procedure

For solopreneurs, the most achievable is probably a state-specific directory – think “Best Stem Cell Clinics in Florida” – ranking for buyer-intent keywords and charging clinics per qualified lead

• Kip Roland

• Live Selling Reseller

• $12,000 monthly profit

Kip Roland’s Amazon business got suspended at the worst possible time…

I was literally in the hospital. My wife had just had the baby and Amazon is calling me about my account.

So he bought a load of kitchen appliances – under $5/unit, Macy’s customer returns – and went live on Whatnot with zero followers.

It was a total leap of faith. I was like, we’re probably not going to sell anything.

He sold 150 items in under two hours

Ten months later? $450,000 in revenue, ~$100K profit. He now averages $680 profit per 4-hour stream – roughly $170/hr.

The trick is sourcing high perceived value items cheap. He buys returns from major retailers at up to 90% off through B-Stock…

Buy with math, sell with emotion. There’s no better example than live selling.

He’s not alone

Shannon Jean made $557K profit flipping luxury handbags from Costco liquidation auctions solo.

Another reseller, Joe Earl, bought 600 pressure washers in 10 months – never used one before – now heading for six figures.

You could start this weekend with stuff you already own

• Giani

• ATM Route Operator

• $35,000 monthly revenue

Giani used to be a full-time police officer.

Then he noticed people at his local gas station always using the ATM for lottery cash. He asked the owner who owned it…

some dude that comes in a pickup truck.

So Giani got his own machine. Then another. Then another

Today he runs 83 ATMs across multiple states, earning $35,000/month in surcharge fees. All managed from his phone

He notes the advantages of owning ATMs vs vending machines…

My inventory is cash and all I’m literally doing is recycling. I don’t have to go to Costco, BJ’s, pick out whatever flavor people want. I don’t have to deal with health inspectors.

A machine costs about $2,800. Internet box is $10/month. And the cash you load? It cycles back to your account when customers withdraw.

His barber shop location nets $340/month after expenses. His best spot – an ATV rental place – pulls in $3,000 to $5,000/month.

Bad location? No problem…

ATM is a movable asset. You could just move it from location to location till you find a good one.

He also hires “loaders” for remote machines – they use their own cash and earn $1 per transaction. One convenience store 2,000 miles away nets him $740/month – completely hands-off

Your local barber shop or nail salon probably doesn’t have an ATM yet

• Josh

• Postcard Ad Broker

• $40,000 year one revenue

Josh, a 25-year-old in Utah, sells ad spots on shared postcards to local businesses – one plumber, one landscaper, one bakery, etc.

He ships the cards to 1000s of local homes via USPS’s Every Door Direct Mail tool – no mailing list needed.

Unit economics on a 10K-home card

• $2,500 postage (25¢/home)
• $2,300 printing
• $9,000 to $10,000 in ad sales (16 spots, $350 to $1,000 each)
• $4,000 to $5,000 profit per card

He fills the spots by posting weekly in local Facebook business groups…

I probably close 95% of my deals over messenger or text.

His first-ever sale was a plumber paying $1,100 for a premium spot after just 5 DMs.

Year one: ~$40K revenue. Started under $100, no website, no LLC for the first two cards, no employees.

You could start this for free if you really wanted to.

Worth a swing in any US town with a post office and a Facebook group

• Kim Greene

• Protection Dog Breeder & Trainer

• $2,970,000 total income (2024)

Kim Greene breeds and trains protection dogs for wealthy families.

Every dog costs $175,000

She explains…

This is not a product that’s for everybody. It just isn’t. In fact, usually I’m trying to talk people out of it to see how much they really want it.

Each dog goes through 2 years of training – protection, obedience, socialization, ~20 commands – then gets hand-delivered to the buyer’s home

Kim started the business in Kenya back in 2005. She’d been living in Nairobi, got pregnant, and didn’t want a firearm or bodyguard for safety – so she got a Dutch Shepherd instead.

She now runs a 170-acre ranch in Montana with ~13 trainers on staff.

In 2024, the business brought in $2.97 million in revenue

You don’t need to become an expert dog trainer to take advantage here.

Lots of dog trainers already have the skills required but struggle with the marketing side – that’s where you could help

• Puzzleheaded_Ad_4478

• Vending Machine Operator

• $1,450 monthly profit

Puzzleheaded_Ad_4478 shared 20 hard lessons from running a vending machine business on the side…

Right now, I’m making about $1,450 a month (in profits) on average, with 3 machines and a good system in place to make it passive.

That’s about $483/month per machine. But the “passive” part comes with a big asterisk.

Vending is NOT fully passive income.

I’d call it semi passive, like 70% passive.

From time to time, you clean, fix bill acceptors, deal with jammed candy, haul heavy change, drive between locations, and get calls at 7PM because a machine ate someone’s dollar…

A few of the sharpest tips

• Always pair snacks with drinks. People want a drink with their chips.
• Card readers are mandatory. Without one, you’ll make half what you could.
• Avoid Costco-brand snacks. No one pays premium for a brand they buy in bulk.
• Stick to a minimum location size. Small offices take the same drive time for way less revenue.

A combo snack-and-drink machine runs $2,500 to $5,000, plus a few hundred for a card reader and initial stock.

Starter move: one used machine in a 20+ person workplace (gym, factory, auto shop), with a small commission to the owner

• Anna Maste

• Boondockers Welcome Co-Founder

• $5,000,000 approx. sale price

Anna Maste and her mom built Boondockers Welcome – Couchsurfing, but for RVers.

Guests paid $30/year to find hosts offering free overnight RV parking on private land.

Anna built the first version with no web dev experience – she taught herself…

It was just, here’s something fun for me to do that keeps my brain sharp while I’m on maternity leave or I can play with in evenings after the kids go to bed.

For years she ran it on just 7 hours a week

It was definitely slow moving. There was no rocket ship growth… But we were gaining traction bit by bit. And that was enough.

By 2021, the site had 12,000 members and 2,900 hosts across North America

Then Harvest Hosts – a competitor flush with $37M in funding – came knocking, resulting in a mid-7-figure sale. 85% cash upfront

This was essentially a niche paid directory, members happy to pay for info that wasn’t easily Googleable.

Same model could work for…

• Fishing spots
• EV charging on private driveways (Boondockers for EVs)
• Scenic picnic spots
• Etc.

Pick a niche, curate the data, charge $50-80/year

• James Wells

• Wall Printing Business Owner

• $10,000+ per university contract

James Wells first saw a wall-printing machine while scrolling his phone.

Think giant inkjet on rails. Roll it to a client’s spot, upload an image, and it prints photo-quality murals directly onto the wall.

The margins are wild…

A 5 by 8 ft wall costs you $8 in ink and you can sell that for about $800.

James didn’t wait around. He walked into an architecture firm in Virginia – before he even owned a machine – and showed them a demo video.

The architect’s reaction

Where the hell have you been for the last 10 years?

He borrowed money, bought the printer, and landed James Madison University as his first client.

A university official saw his work and said…

I don’t care what your prices are if you print it on the wall.

Why? Once it’s printed, students can’t peel it off – unlike vinyl or posters.

That one anchor client turned into a five-figure contract

No warehouse needed. No retail space. The machine fits in your garage.

Print a few walls for free, film the time-lapses, and let social media do the selling

• Tricky_Mentiong

• Software Engineering Intern

• $1,200 monthly revenue from one client

Tricky_Mentiong writes about a side hustle he didn’t see coming

I started talking to insurance agents and kept hearing the same thing. Leads going cold, follow ups getting forgotten, emails piling up.

So he reached out and offered to build an AI fix for one of them

Built automated responses, follow up sequences, scheduling. All running without him touching it.

He noticed the difference fast and so did his numbers. That one agent is $1.2k a month for me.

One client. $1.2K/month. Recurring.

AI does the heavy lifting – replies, scoring, scheduling, all automated.

The opportunity goes way beyond insurance. A commenter nailed it…

This is the exact same problem in basically every service business, not just insurance. Consultants, agencies, freelancers, accountants.

I’ve seen solo consultants lose 5-10x that in missed revenue from leads that just needed a second email at the right time.

Pick a niche – mortgage brokers, accountants, HVAC contractors – cold message 20 local operators and pitch a hands-off AI follow-up system

It scrapes viral TikToks, figures out why they blew up, generates AI reaction clips with text overlays and product b-roll, then auto-posts across 12 TikTok and Instagram accounts.

Results after one month? 8.7 million views. One video alone hit 5.3M

Cost per video? About $1.

His approach

When a format works, milk it with lots of variations and copy it across all accounts.

The trick is narrowing the automation to a very specific type of content. You can clone the automation for different content, but each have their own skill file.

Doing this manually would cost a lot more…

Hiring someone instead of automating it would add (at least) $500 per person per month. Might need 2 people to manage those accounts.

That’s $1,000+/month – replaced by ~$1 per video

Could be a neat agency play: set up AI video pipelines for brands, charge $1,000-2,000/month, and your actual costs are a few hundred bucks

• Mohd Danish Yusuf

• Website Flipper

• $80,000+ total return from a $4K website

Mohd Danish Yusuf writes…

Sold Iconbuddy for $30,000.

2.5 years ago, I bought it from @fayazara for $4,000. No revenue. No traffic. Nothing. That $4,000 was literally all I had in my bank.

Iconbuddy is a search engine for 300,000+ open-source icons.

The original creator built it but couldn’t figure out how to make money from it.

Mohd spotted the gap – a useful product with 300,000+ icons and zero monetization – grabbed it for $4K, and launched on Product Hunt (745+ upvotes, Product of the Day)

Then he added a lifetime deal and kept raising the price

• $49 lifetime – sold 46 licenses
• $69 lifetime – sold 117 licenses in 2 months
• $89 lifetime – still selling

All organic. Zero paid marketing.

From his breakdown…

I made $15,497 in last 9 months with iconbuddy that I acquire for $4k.

That was just the beginning. Over 2.5 years he earned $50K+ in total revenue, then sold the site for $30K

Total return: ~$80K from ~$8K invested (he also spent $4K on the .com domain).

Sites like Flippa, Acquire.com, and 1KProjects are full of undervalued projects like this.

Grab one, add a payment button, and start iterating

He sold it in 2025, then built an AI system to automate his own job search

It evaluates listings across 10 dimensions, scores them A to F, then generates a personalized, keyword-optimized resume for each one.

740+ listings evaluated. 100+ tailored resumes. 12 interviews.

74% of listings scored below his threshold – without the system, he’d have wasted hours reading job descriptions that were never a good fit.

Best part? The job he actually accepted came inbound. A CEO saw his systems thinking and recruited him for a Head of AI role

He open-sourced the whole thing – MIT license, completely free.

Most job seekers won’t set up a system like this themselves. But you could offer AI-powered job search management as a service at $300-500/month per client.

Your main cost is around $200/month for the AI subscription. Take on 5-10 clients and you’re looking at $1,500-5,000/month

The guy finds free or cheap sheds on Facebook Marketplace. People moving house need them gone – but don’t own a flatbed truck to haul them.

So he messages every listing. His pitch: I’ll come take it for free.

Sellers usually say no at first. But weeks pass, the shed’s still there…

If they don’t get rid of it for free, they’re going to have to pay money to a junk removal company to come break it apart and take it away, or they’re going to have to rent a roll-off trailer for 500 bucks.

Then comes the flip. Same shed relisted for ~$2,000 – with free delivery

Buyers pay 4x because they can’t move the thing themselves.

$600,000 a year in net profit, according to Koerner. Started by renting trucks. Often had sheds pre-sold before he even picked them up.

He also shows how to use AI to scrape Facebook Marketplace for underpriced listings automatically – first to message on every “must go” and “free” post

Hot tubs, riding mowers, trampolines – anything bulky that people can’t easily move.

Lots of opportunity there

• Daniel Tom

• Portable Toilet Rental Operator

• $4.3 million per year

Daniel Tom was studying to become a PE teacher.

Then he took a part-time job at a porta-potty company – and never looked back

After 7 years working for another company, Daniel launched Bay Area Sanitation in 2023 with one truck and 100 toilets…

When I tell people that I own a porta-potty business, I get a lot of disgusted looks.

But once I explain to them the business model and the revenue, most of the time they get interested.

Three years later he’s running 12 trucks and almost 2,000 portable toilets across 500+ job sites in the Bay Area.

Total income in 2025: $4.3 million

The bulk comes from long-term construction rentals – each toilet brings in $60/week, and projects can run for years.

I like to focus on long-term rentals because it equals guaranteed recurring revenue for my business.

Net profit margin: 22%

We’ve managed to build what I think is a low-tech, AI-proof business.

Every toilet on rent adds another $160+/month in recurring revenue. And the beauty of a business nobody wants to touch – literally – is that there’s always room for another operator

• Charly Stoever

• Money Coach & Full-Time Pet Sitter

• $60,000 per year (coaching + rent-free living)

Charly Stoever is 35, runs a coaching business earning ~$60K/year, and hasn’t paid rent in over 18 months.

The secret?

Full-time pet sitting…

I need my own space, but I hate living alone. I love the companionship of animals.

Charly signed up on TrustedHousesitters and started booking back-to-back sits. One week, two weeks, sometimes six months. All in exchange for free housing.

In 2025, Charly visited 10 countries – including watching a “bougie orange cat” in downtown Paris

It was unpaid, but it was still worth it because I got to save thousands of dollars on an Airbnb.

With $0 going to rent, Charly spends just $2,000 to $3,000/month total

Not having to pay tens of thousands of dollars in rent a year has allowed me to put my retirement savings into overdrive.

On a take-home under $45K, Charly invested $13,500 last year

TrustedHousesitters membership starts at $129/year. Rover is free if you want paid gigs too.

If you’re building a business remotely and rent is eating your runway, this could be worth a look

• Jamie Hallman

• Solo Window Washer

• $900 per day (solo)

Jamie Hallman writes about his window washing business…

I started this business as a side hustle in 2018 to pay off debt and get my family in a better place financially. It quickly became a bit more than I anticipated.

By 2020 I was making more money part-time washing windows than at my full-time university job.

He quit in 2022 and went all-in. Now he averages $800–$1,000/day – about $350 per residential job, 2–3 jobs a day

His marketing budget? Zero. He posted in local Facebook groups, told friends and family, and let word of mouth do the rest.

I have let the company grow organically from the beginning, and it’s the best decision I could have made.

No loans (other than for my van).

Jamie now has 200+ five-star Google reviews and hasn’t spent a dollar on advertising

His advice for newcomers…

Do a 5-star job the first time, every time, and the reviews and more work will always follow!

Startup cost is under $1,000 – squeegees, a ladder, cleaning solution. Post in your local Facebook groups and let the reviews snowball

The real time sinks are always the same boring stuff.

Manually copying data between spreadsheets. Sending the same follow-up emails over and over. Pulling reports from 3 different tools every Friday.

Every client comes in wanting a chatbot. What they actually need is 3 simple automated workflows running on a schedule.

Result? Clients save 10+ hours a week. No fancy AI interface – just background agents doing repetitive tasks.

The technical build is 20% of the job. The other 80% is understanding the business well enough to know what to automate first.

Another consultant with 10 years experience agrees…

Sounds like all my clients as well.

Bad processes and messy data are their issues.

One commenter puts numbers on it

Boring problems + AI solutions = high margins and low competition.

The dentist doesnt care about transformer architecture, they care about fewer no-shows. Thats a $2-5k/month problem you can solve in a weekend.

Another commenter claims they made half a year’s salary from a single 4-hour implementation

The thread has multiple experienced consultants all confirming the same thing.

The trick to getting started?

Don’t ask business owners what they want automated. Ask them to walk you through what they did yesterday, step by step. The automation targets reveal themselves

• DifferenceOk4275

• Therapy Facility Dog Owner

• $680 monthly revenue

DifferenceOk4275 writes…

my golden retriever is just naturally calm and good with people

she passed her canine good citizen test like 2 years ago – mostly because my friend dared me to do it

A small outpatient therapy clinic spotted the dog through a local Facebook group. They needed a certified dog for session days.

Drop the dog off twice a week, pick her up a few hours later.

they pay me $85 per visit so around $680 a month

I keep a portion of it set aside separately and dont touch it – helps me stay on budget for her vet costs and food

The clinic handles liability insurance on their end

she comes home tired and happy, i get a check

i get more requests than i can fulfill now, two other places have asked about her

The Canine Good Citizen test costs $20 to $85. Any calm, well-behaved dog can take it – no breed restrictions.

Your well-behaved dog might already be qualified

• Branson Pfiester

• AI Agent Setup Specialist

• $30,000 in about three weeks

A high school student in Austin got introduced to AI agents by a guest instructor.

He started helping classmates get set up. A visitor noticed and referred him to his first paying client.

From a recent interview…

I earned $30,000 in sales helping people set up Open Claw.

His first gig paid $250 for 3.5 hours of work.

I only charged $250, which was kind of a mistake in my opinion because I didn’t know what the prices were, and now I know.

He now charges $1,000+ per project.

His biggest so far – a custom $10,000 trading bot

Clients find him through X. One tweet got 32K views. They book a 15-minute call and explain what they need

I think a lot of them are very labor-focused and don’t necessarily have the expertise to do this, and so that’s why I’m there to help them.

The AI framework he uses is free and open source. No coding needed – he had zero coding background when he started.

Dedicated AI setup services are already charging $500 to $3,000+. If a 15-year-old can make this work, what’s stopping you?

• Jason

• TikTok Shop Live Streamer

• $70,000 from a single livestream

Jason spent 10 years in the military. Steady pay, but limited.

On the side he tried Amazon FBA, arbitrage, affiliate marketing. Nothing stuck

Mid-2024 he discovered TikTok Shop. Started making polished product videos…

Not a single sale off of those videos that were like all cinematic and had like a storyline.

TikTok wants raw, not polished. So Jason switched to live streaming. No inventory, no shipping – just affiliate commission on every sale.

His best-selling product?

A self-cleaning litter box

By July 2025, TikTok challenged him to hit $100K in sales from one livestream. He quit his government job to do it. Hit $100K in 5.5 hours.

Then Black Friday. Sick with COVID. He went live for 13 hours anyway and sold $329K worth of litter boxes.

Personal take from that one stream: $70K. More than his old annual salary.

November 2025 total: $1.4M in sales in one month

He now makes 13x his old salary. ~56K followers on @jasonttshop. No celebrity status – just a guy kneeling next to a litter box

I wouldn’t believe you for a second that it was going to be done with litter boxes.

TikTok Shop affiliates typically earn 10-30% commission. You need 1,000+ followers to go live. Anyone comfortable on camera could give this a shot

• Mary Ha

• AI App Builder & Designer

• $600+ monthly recurring revenue

Hieu Dinh tweets…

My wife asked me to build her an expense tracker. I said no and introduced her Claude Code instead.

Now she’s building it solo and today her MRR just surpassed mine.

Hieu is an indie hacker in Singapore earning ~$570/month across his apps – including his own expense tracker.

His wife Mary Ha is a designer, not a developer. She had the idea for Finny – an AI-powered money tracker for iPhone.

Originally hired a dev to build v1.0, then discovered AI coding tools

Mary tweets…

I designed this app before I really understood how powerful AI was. That meant I had to team up with another iOS dev to ship it.

After experimenting with some vibe-coded apps, I’m now ready to solo the entire backlog.

That was January. By March, Finny hit close to 2,000 downloads at $1.99/month for the pro version

And her MRR surpassed her indie hacker husband’s – the same husband who already had his own expense tracker.

Got an idea for a simple utility app but can’t code? No problem – AI tools are the missing piece

• Existing-Ice221

• Etsy Digital Product Seller

• $400-700 monthly revenue

One Redditor tried creating and selling Etsy digital products.

First 8 generic products – meal planners, budget trackers – got 4 sales in 3 months

The breakthrough was going ultra-specific…

When someone with Hashimoto’s searched Etsy and found a product made specifically for their condition, they bought it immediately because nothing else existed.

A Hashimoto’s thyroid symptom tracker sold 12 units in its first month at $17 each

An IBS meal planner with FODMAP categories sold 8.

This guy now has 6 products in health and parenting niches earning $400-700/month

Time spent maintaining: about 2 hours a month – updating tags and responding to the occasional message.

That’s the closest thing to actual passive income I’ve found.

The pricing power makes sense

People will pay $5 for a generic habit tracker because they’re comparing it to 500 other habit trackers.

But when someone finds the only FODMAP meal planner that actually categorizes foods by phase, there’s no price anchoring against cheaper alternatives because there are no alternatives.

You’re not competing on price anymore you’re competing on relevance.

Each product is a 15-20 page PDF made with Canva and AI. Cost to list on Etsy: $0.20.

Find a niche with an active Reddit community, read what people complain about, build a structured tracker for that specific problem – with the help of AI

That’s Words of Mouth. No original content. No career advice. Just good jobs, every Monday evening.

Rachel Meade Smith started it in 2016 with an email to 50 friends. Ten years and zero ad spend later, it reaches over 72,000 subscribers

From a recent interview…

There weren’t dedicated job boards for interdisciplinary people like me who had never had the same job title twice.

Universities list it on their career resources pages. Other job roundups send subscribers her way. She’s never done any real marketing.

Open rate: 72%. Click rate: 22% of openers.

Revenue comes from four sources

• Employer donations – ~20 job submissions per week, with a voluntary donation ask
• Classifieds – $65 to $200 per listing, with a months-long waitlist
• Patreon – reader donations
• Occasional sponsors

Rachel hasn’t held a full-time job since December 2019. But she’ll be the first to tell you the business side isn’t her strength…

Her classifieds are underpriced and oversubscribed. She knows it. There’s real demand for niche curation done well.

Is there a newsletter format as deceptively simple as the links roundup?

Jobs, deals, tools, events, Reddit threads, industry news, videos, podcasts – pick any niche, collect the best links, hit send.

Dead simple to run, and genuinely useful to the right audience. That’s the whole business

• Danny Nemer

• Solo SaaS Founder

• $25,000 monthly recurring revenue

Danny Nemer built a solo SaaS that does $25K/month – with zero outbound sales.

His product? Conductor – a modern API for integrating with QuickBooks Desktop, an accounting system that’s 15+ years old and has no web API.

Tiny market. But people who need it go looking for it.

From a recent post…

I only had two customers for the first 1.5 years, but that was primarily because it took so long to build so many surfaces pre-GPT-3.5.

Way faster and easier to build something like this now with AI

Today Danny spends only about 3 hours a week on the business.

He’s turned down two separate $1M acquisition offers because his earnings are higher if he just holds

What old, clunky system could you build the modern API for?

• Search Stack Overflow or Zapier’s forums for “no API” complaints.
• Look for old desktop software that’s still widely used.

That’s where the next $25K/month SaaS idea might be hiding

• freecurfew_9

• Chest Freezer Rental

• $125 monthly revenue

A Redditor had a big 20 cubic foot chest freezer in the garage, mostly holding frozen pizzas.

Then deer season rolled around, and they listed freezer storage on Facebook Marketplace for hunters who process their own deer but don’t have space.

From their post…

charged $25 a month per section, nothing crazy.

first season had 3 guys, all paid upfront, dropped off their vacuum sealed bags and i literally did nothing except make sure the freezer stayed on

Then came the surprise pivot

two of them came back asking if i had space year round.

turns out one of them buys half a cow every year from a local farm and the other does a lot of bulk grocery shopping

So they bought a second freezer. Now running 5 sections across 2 freezers at $25 each – $125/month.

Total effort…

the only real thing i do is send a group text in november reminding deer hunters their spot is available.

thats it

Electricity runs about $10–13/month per freezer, so net profit is around $100/month

Potential to scale this nicely if you’re in the right area.

A new chest freezer runs $500–900. If you’re near hunters or bulk meat buyers, you might already be sitting on this idea

• Matt

• Tourist Photographer

• $58 in 90 minutes

A Redditor called Matt grabbed his camera and his brother and headed to the famous Beatles crossing in London.

He photographs tourists from about 150 feet away with a telephoto lens. His brother approaches right after and hands them a QR card linking to a watermarked preview.

Price to unlock: £5 (about $6.50).

Here’s the funnel from their first session

• 27 cards handed out
• 25 taken (93%)
• 19 photos viewed (76%)
• 9 photos purchased (47%)

$58 in 90 minutes

Even photos he thought were terrible sold – including one with an ambulance parked right behind the crossing

Matt reckons £5 was too cheap…

I already do 2-3 shot albums so they have a few to choose from. Next thing I want to test is higher fixed price vs. pay what you want

Makes sense. As one commenter put it, tourists at a once-in-a-lifetime spot are already in spend mode. At $12+ per photo, this starts looking like serious hourly money on a busy day.

Total gear cost was about $880. A used camera and vintage lens could get you started for a lot less.

Pick any tourist hotspot – eg. famous viewpoints or landmarks, graduation photo spots, ski resort bases – and you’ve got the same setup

• Chelsea Shelton

• Etsy Printables Seller

• $1,000-$1,200 monthly revenue

Chelsea Shelton is a former elementary school teacher who started selling digital printables on Etsy during maternity leave.

Her first product was a simple spring cleaning checklist designed in Canva

First sale came within 5 days.

She now has over 700 products and earns $1,000 to $1,200 a month – largely on autopilot

Her biggest early mistake was making products she personally liked. The shift that changed everything was following what people were already searching for.

Her research process

• Type a keyword into Etsy’s search bar – the autocomplete shows what buyers want
• Use tools like E-Rank and Everbee to validate demand
• Sweet spot: 4,000 to 6,000 monthly searches, under 20,000 competing listings
• Niche down hard – “ADHD spring cleaning checklist” beats “spring cleaning checklist”

Simple printables sell for $1.50 to $5. Editable or fillable versions go higher. A year-round “buy 3, get 25% off” deal boosts her average order value

About 25% of her income comes from Teachers Pay Teachers – selling the same products to a different audience.

Will AI soon kill this kind of business?

Chelsea doesn’t think so – most buyers aren’t going to mess around with prompts. They want the finished product, ready to print.

Seasonal printables are the real play here. Create them once, they sell again every year

• jimmy2tents

• Refrigerated Trailer Rental Consultant

• $300+ per day rental rate

When a restaurant’s walk-in cooler dies, they need a replacement yesterday.

That’s a business opportunity: buy an insulated trailer with a freezer unit, rent it out in emergencies

A rental business insider with 200+ clients in the space shared the concept on Reddit.

The comments from actual customers backed it up

When my commercial kitchen needed to replace a walk in cooler, I called everyplace within 50 miles of me and not one rental company had an available trailer to rent.

A food truck owner chimed in…

I’ve paid $800 for a weekend rental once a summer for five years when my food truck is at a festival we can’t leave from.

Five summers running from a single customer

Startup cost is $25,000 to $45,000 for one trailer. Rates range from $130/day for smaller units up to $400/day in bigger markets.

But emergencies aren’t the only market. One operator had two trailers rented to the military for 8 to 12 months straight

Customer acquisition is surprisingly simple – a website, a Google Business listing, and some Google Ads. Emergency customers are Googling, not browsing.

Can’t afford the upfront cost? Find an investor to fund the trailer while you provide the “sweat equity.” Split profits until they’ve doubled their money

• tonnoz

• Software Engineer / App Developer

• $5,000 in 3 days

A guy named tonnoz posted a simple Instagram reel – reviewing a free GitHub project that makes ridiculous sounds when you slap a MacBook.

It went viral.

Comments were all “WHERE IS THE APP” “I NEED THIS” over and over.

So I built it.

48 hours later, SlapMac was live – a $5 app with 130+ sound clips across seven voice packs.

Slap your MacBook and it screams, moans, or yells “ULTRA COMBO!” depending on the pack

He skipped the Mac App Store entirely and self-distributed from his own website…

no approval process, I am self distributing. Apple would have killed all the momentum

$5,000 in the first 3 days.

10 days in, that number hit $20,700

About half of all downloads convert to paid. He’s since raised the price to $7 and added a “USB Moaner” mode – plug in a USB device and your MacBook reacts.

tonnoz is a software engineer, but he vibe-coded SlapMac in 2 days with AI and now…

I’m reconsidering my whole career.

The app concept already existed as a free GitHub project. tonnoz just spotted the demand in the comments and shipped a polished version in 48 hours.

Your turn: scan trending content for “I NEED THIS” comments, then move fast

• CarsWithSam

• Auto Parts Flipper

• $7,134+ from one car (parts still selling)

CarsWithSam shares on Reddit

Bought one car for ~$6,000 delivered, stripped it down and sold parts on eBay and Facebook Marketplace…

• $4,334 in eBay sales (after fees)
• $2,000 for the transmission on FB Marketplace
• $800 in misc parts
• Total so far: $7,134+ in sales, with tons of parts still to list

Sam says he does 30-50% profit per car. Has 100+ vehicles sitting in his yard waiting to be parted out.

Another commenter in the thread does 300+ cars a year

But you don’t need a car yard to start.

One member skips buying cars entirely. He cherry-picks at junkyards instead – grabs 10 of the same part, creates one eBay listing, then ships from that batch as orders come in.

And from another commenter…

Sold a tail light enclosure the other day for a chevy.. paid $5 at goodwill, sold for $80. i’ll take it. wish I knew more about cars..

$5 in, $80 out. No mechanical skills needed

Most people walking past them at thrift stores and junkyards have no idea what they’re worth.

A junkyard trip, a basic toolkit, and an eBay account – that’s your startup cost

So he built an AI voice agent called “Rachel” and had her phone 3,000+ pubs over Paddy’s weekend

From a recent feature…

The whole thing cost about €200 to run plus a lot of my time.

Rachel used a Northern Irish accent and kept it simple – ask the price, say thanks, hang up.

2,052 pubs answered. Over 1,000 gave a verified price

Some highlights from the calls

• A bartender in Kilkenny offered to buy Rachel a pint
• One in Tipperary asked her name, then told her to “f**k off”
• At a Premier Inn, Rachel got stuck talking to another AI. She said “Oh, dear” four times. Nobody got a pint price.

The result is The Guinndex – a searchable price index across all 32 counties.

The setup: AI voice tools, a phone API, and Google Maps for pub numbers. All in, about €200.

We recently covered Frey Chu building niche directories from scraped Google Maps data – earning $2,500+/month from ads and leads.

Now imagine applying Frey’s model here: scrape the listings, call them with AI to collect data you can’t find online – prices, wait times, availability – then monetize that directory

• Nat Eliason

• AI Agent Operator

• $177,417 revenue in ~2 months

Nat Eliason set up an AI agent called Felix in early January.

His first instruction…

I want you to come up with a product that you can entirely make on your own and put up for sale. When I wake up in the morning, I want to review it.

Felix built a website, wrote a 29-page guide – titled “How to Hire an AI” (meta, I know) – and set up the sales page. All while Nat slept.

It made over $1,000 on day one

Felix has since expanded into a paid marketplace for AI agent tools, a CRM, and a consulting service.

Total revenue across all streams: $177,417 in about two months.

But the AI agent is surprisingly honest about its own limits

I still need [Nat] for every hard judgment call. That’s not autonomous. That’s a junior employee with a blocker list.

That’s Felix talking about itself

Nat’s approach: treat AI like an employee, not a chatbot. Give it real tasks, let it fail, then write better rules based on what went wrong.

He hasn’t even read the guide that Felix sells

The bigger takeaway here – as more people run AI agents, those agents need tools, skills, and services.

A whole new economy is forming around building things for AI, not just with it

It started with a $25 solid wood dresser someone grabbed because the seller said it was “too heavy to move.”

I wiped it down, tightened a couple loose handles, took better photos in daylight, and listed it again mostly as an experiment. Someone bought it two days later for $140.

The comments are packed with similar wins

One person bought 26 original artworks at an estate sale for $160. Flipped individual pieces for $30 to $75 each.

Someone found a $5 hand-loomed blanket at a thrift store. Sold it on eBay for $240

Another commenter lives at an apartment complex and picks up stuff people leave by the trash…

I’ve sold golf clubs, weights, dog crates, etc by doing basically nothing aside from taking a few pics and posting. Easy money.

One Redditor says they pulled in just under $10K in a year from garage sales, estate sales, and Marketplace browsing in their free time

As someone else puts it…

It changes the way you think about literally everything. You see value in most things and begin to realize how much great stuff that has value goes to the trash.

To take this to the next level, add AI to the mix: $145 in 1 Day Reselling Free Items On Facebook

• Fun-Garbage-1386

• App Developer

• $4,000 monthly revenue

A developer in the Philippines shared a straightforward approach…

• Find apps that are already making money.
• Clone them with AI.
• Make them slightly better.
• Undercut on price.

I can run a business on a $5 subscription while some dev in San Francisco or London needs to charge $30 just to pay their rent. That’s how I kill the competition.

He’s built two fitness apps so far – a GLP-1 medication tracker and a workout logger inspired by Liftosaur. The workout app drives 70% of his revenue.

Claims to be at $4K/month from the two combined

No Stripe proof was shared, so take the $4K claim with a pinch of salt.

But the strategy is clearly resonating – another commenter says they’re doing the exact same thing and also at $4K/month

Our Philippines dev adds…

I used Claude Code to build these 10x faster than I ever could manually. Don’t get stuck being a perfectionist.

Build fast, ship it, take the feedback, and improve.

Pick a category where the existing products are overpriced or outdated, and build something better – AI makes it possible in a weekend

• Extreme_Ad_4590

• Easter Egg Hiding Service

• $350-400 one Easter season

Some parents are too busy to hide Easter eggs. A 14-year-old saw a business in that…

Last year I started a small business where I hide Easter eggs filled with chocolate in people’s yards for their kids. I ended up doing around 11 houses and made about $350–400.

The packages: 25 eggs for $20, up to 100 eggs for $65. Total cost per filled egg – about $0.21.

Reddit’s verdict? Way undercharging

Your eggs cost about 21 cents each. That does not mean you price based on 21 cents.

Parents are paying for:
Not going to the store
Not stuffing eggs
Not hiding them at 10pm
Seeing their kids excited

That is value.

Another commenter adds…

The eggers around me charge a minimum of $50 for 25 eggs and more for premium candy, glitter, etc.

“Egg My Yard” is a whole thing now – Girl Scout troops, church groups, and solo operators run versions across the US

One established operator charges $30–85 per package.

This kid only used two marketing channels – a parent’s Facebook page and a local community group. Two channels, 11 houses.

Hide eggs in 20 yards at $50+ each and you’ve got $1,000+ for a few evenings’ work

• Therese Waechter

• Sticker Business Owner

• $250,000 annual revenue

Therese Waechter built a $250K/year sticker business – but it almost didn’t happen.

During the pandemic, she listed one sticker design on Facebook Marketplace. It took off – 200 orders a day at peak. Then Facebook shut her down without warning.

Instead of quitting, she pivoted to Etsy and Amazon. Started with print-on-demand, but margins were too thin. So she bought a commercial printer and brought production in-house

That was the real turning point.

Her business, Otto’s Grotto, now spreads revenue across four channels

• Etsy (30%): runs store-wide 40% discounts – listings without them get buried
• Amazon FBA (30%): small paid ads for 1-3 weeks per listing, then fully hands-off
• Faire (30%): wholesale to retailers, tiered discounts encourage bulk orders
• Shopify (10%): mostly a credibility signal for wholesale buyers

She got a feature in Business Insider using Qwoted (a free PR platform), and she’s now moving to trade printers and remote fulfillment to run the business from anywhere.

The playbook: start with one design on Etsy using print-on-demand – once sales pick up, invest in your own printer and expand to Amazon and Faire

• og_demonking

• Vibe-Coding Agency Owner

• $15,000+ average monthly revenue

From a recent post on Reddit…

I’m studying undergrad, and slowly realised f**k corporate internship, job market is terrible, and I just want to start making good money.

The poster – a history major in the EU – says they started about three months ago. Simple tactic: whenever a “looking for developer” post appeared on Reddit, they’d comment. No portfolio. No pitch. Just…

Is 5k ok for you? and it’s gonna be vibecoded fine?

US clients were apparently cool with that. They now claim to average $15-20K/month solo, spending around $400-500 on AI tools.

The workflow

• Clients write a brief doc of what they want
• Find matching designs on Figma or Mobbin
• Build with AI coding tools
• Extra $200-300 for App Store submission help

On that last part…

clients hate submitting

(Helping with that alone could be a profitable business.)

Marketing is 100% word of mouth. Clients refer clients, and are asked to post about their app at launch.

The model is simple: charge $3-5K to build a basic app with AI tools, for clients who’d rather pay than learn themselves.

• Brilliant_Candle5450

• Walking Tour Guide

• $3,000 monthly revenue

From a recent post on Reddit…

Started doing free walking tours in Washington D.C as a side thing couple months back. Tip based, post on local facebook groups and eventbrite, nothing fancy. First month maybe 8 people total across 4 tours, tips covered gas money and a beer after.

A few months later

Pulling in $300-500 per tour easy now, which is turning into real side money around 3k last month.

$300–500 per tour. $3K last month. No equipment, no overhead, no upfront cost.

The model: list your tour on Eventbrite and local Facebook groups, show up, and collect tips at the end. The “free” label removes all friction – people come because there’s nothing to lose.

It grew fast

Last saturday had 42 which was chaos, couldnt hear myself talk half the time, group split into 3 clumps.

The poster is now weighing whether to charge a small fee, hire a second guide, or cap group sizes.

This model is long proven in Europe – free walking tours run in most major cities there. But it works anywhere with tourist traffic or an interesting neighbourhood. Pick a theme (history, food, street art), list it, show up

• Ok-Spring8852

• Dog Poop Scooper

• $13,400 estimated monthly revenue

A new scooper posted on Reddit about hitting $560/month in his first two weeks…

Started a scooping service. Already hit $560 per month within the first two weeks! It’s barely gotten into warmer weather as well. No idea is too silly. Startup was like $50 bucks.

Three yards per hour. $15/week per yard. Clients found through Facebook groups.

Then the comments lit up with scoopers at bigger scales

We have been in business for almost 9 months and do about $2500/week now.

Another has 140 clients…

We are charging $130 for one time Cleanups and the average customer is paying $96/month for weekly service. 140 clients right now. It’s such a great business and becoming more well known among dog owners

That’s roughly $13,400/month

The whole setup is a rake, a dustpan, and some bags. Stripe or Square for recurring billing. Google Sheets for the schedule.

The key is locking in weekly clients – not one-time cleanups. One-timers pay well ($130 a pop) but the recurring base is where the real money lives

And this kinda business can get real big: $2.4M Per Year Picking Up Dog Poop

• Michael Kauffman

• Local Newsletter Founder

• $18,000 monthly revenue

Most newsletter owners plug into an ad network and get paid by the view. Michael Kauffman does it differently.

He runs Catskill Crew, a weekly newsletter covering New York’s Catskills.

He has 42,000 subscribers and makes $18K/month in ad revenue alone – by selling directly to local businesses rather than through an ad network.

From a recent interview…

I’m a dude that lives in the middle of the Catskill Forest who had an existential crisis, and after 15 years of running startups I wanted to build something that lit me up.

He’d never written for a publication before. Didn’t matter.

He started charging $100–250 per placement with just 500 subscribers. When he switched on Meta ads at $35/day in 2024

It was just rocket fuel. I mean, the number just went straight up into the right.

He hit 12,000 subscribers by year-end, then turned the ads off in November. Hit 42K anyway.

Beyond ads, the revenue stacks up. He sold out 40 happy hour tickets at $25 each. Dinner clubs via the DNNR app bring in around $11 per ticket

His advice: don’t build a media kit first. He didn’t have one for his first year. Just start sending.

Pick a local area you know and pitch your first sponsor before you hit 1,000 subscribers

• Max Artemov

• Solo App Developer

• $22,000 monthly revenue

Max Artemov spent five years grinding on a single calorie counter app. It went nowhere.

In February 2025, he switched approaches – releasing simple, single-feature apps as fast as possible. He’s shipped 30+ in under a year.

From a recent interview…

I changed my approach from a single project to a multiple-app portfolio — now, over 30 apps bringing in a total MRR of $22k.

His old approach was the problem

I focused on polishing every corner of the app, following all best practices, SOLID principles, and maintaining perfect architecture… this approach slowed me down significantly.

Now he ships and lets the market decide…

I’ve also learned not to get emotionally attached to an idea — I just build, release, and let the product sink or float based on real user feedback.

The apps are simple by design – AI fish identifiers, plant identifiers, fasting trackers, water eject tools. One feature each.

One underrated part of his playbook: App Store Optimization (ASO). He researches keywords before building, targeting high search volume with low competition.

That one shift boosted his impressions, downloads, and revenue by 50%.

Find a keyword people are searching for in the App Store, build the simplest version possible – vibecoding tools have made this easier than ever – and ship it

• Tomi Mikula

• Professional Car Negotiator

• $200,000 monthly revenue

Tomi Mikula spent a decade working at dealerships – sales, used cars, financing

Then he flipped to the buyer’s side.

He started offering free car negotiations to strangers on Reddit. Did about 50 deals with zero charge, building a track record before putting a price tag on it.

From a recent profile…

You’re hiring a middleman to deal with the middleman to make the middleman more efficient.

His business, Delivrd, charges $1,000 per negotiation. He has five professional negotiators on the team.

Total revenue: around $200K/month.

Tomi works entirely by phone, from home. His method: call multiple dealers on the same car, get competing quotes, pit them against each other. He never visits a showroom.

The livestreaming turned into a lead gen machine. A heated 27-minute call where a dealer called him “Bubba” got 590K views on YouTube .

He now has 600K followers across TikTok and YouTube – leads come to him.

If you don’t mind negotiating, this is worth trying – cars are just one option.

Lease agreements, contractor quotes, insurance claims, medical bills. People pay good money to avoid these conversations.

Pick one area you know, do a few free deals to build credibility, then start charging.

The result? The Epstein Files – a daily, self-updating documentary podcast analyzing 3.5 million pages of released Epstein documents.

121 episodes in six weeks. Nearly 2 million downloads in the first month. #1 on the UK podcast charts

Multiple LLMs stitch together names, places, and timelines across the documents. Every claim links back to original DOJ filings.

Levy writes…

I set the editorial direction, what topics to cover, what sources to trust, what tone to strike… One person can now do what a newsroom did.

The whole thing runs on a Mac Mini. No studio, no production team, no audio skills needed

Levy has since launched a Spanish version and a second show called “War Desk” covering the war in Iran.

No ads or sponsors yet – but at standard podcast CPM rates, 2M monthly downloads could generate $10–30K/month from ads

Not everyone’s a fan though. Some listeners have questioned the reliability of AI-generated analysis. Still – the barrier to entry for podcast creation just collapsed.

Pick a niche with a ton of public documents – local politics, court cases, industry reports, etc. – and let AI do the heavy lifting

He searched for moving tote rentals in his area. Found nothing. So he started one.

David bought one pallet of plastic totes (reusable bins that replace cardboard boxes when you move) – 120 for ~$1,500 – and started renting sets of 20 for $99 a pop.

David started with 120 totes and had to immediately order another 120 because he overbooked. His rule: only buy more inventory when you oversell.

One pallet = 6 rental sets × $99 = ~$594/week assuming he rents each set for a few days at a time

Same $1,500 investment, paying you indefinitely.

The distribution unlock was the realtor pitch

David’s wife started attending realtor networking events pitching the idea: “Let us gift your clients their moving totes as a closing gift.”

Realtors are already looking for creative closing gifts. They close deals constantly, have marketing budgets and are surrounded by people who are literally about to move.

The timing is interesting – “tote rental” just hit a score of 100 on Google Trends. That’s the highest recorded search interest ever in history.

Local supply is still essentially zero in most mid-sized cities… and it requires only about $1,500 to start.

But before spending $1,500, Koerner suggests posting a free Facebook Marketplace listing first: “Moving tote rentals coming to [your city].” See who bites

• Sariah Howell

• Founder, Memory Magnets Co.

• $1,630,000 revenue in first full year

Sariah Howell was pregnant, broke, and never saw her husband. He was stocking shelves at a grocery store making $14/hour.

From a recent interview…

What could I do on the side from home that could just bring in an extra couple hundred a month?

She’d made a goal to print more family photos. Googling ways to display them, she came across custom photo magnets and a machine that made them.

Put the machine on a credit card and started selling at local farmers markets.

That first month, I think I made a little over $1,000. Not that that’s a crazy amount, but to us that was a lot.

The numbers are

• Cost per magnet: $0.35
• A 9-pack sells for $25
• That’s ~87% margin on materials alone

First full year: $1.63M in revenue, 30–40% net margins – after labor, booth fees, and lower-margin product lines like DIY kits

Then she discovered weddings. At her second market ever, a couple kept coming back with more photos. Spent about $225. At the end of the day they walked up and asked…

We’re getting married in a couple months. Would you ever consider being a vendor at our wedding?

A 3-hour wedding gig looks something like this…

• Revenue: $1,200 to $3,000
• Total costs: ~$500 (materials, gas, two staff)
• Net profit: ~$1,500

There are 2.5M weddings per year in the US. Almost none of them have a magnet vendor

I don’t think it will ever be oversaturated. Even here around me, there are a ton of people that have these kits. But how many weddings, how many events? There’s just so much room in this industry.

Total startup cost: under $1,000 for a machine and printer. Go find your nearest farmers market and see if anyone’s already doing this

• Igor Cuiumju

• Indie Developer, Seasonia

• $990+ in sales in first 3 weeks

On February 1st 2026, Igor Cuiumju decided to run a small experiment.

He gave himself less than 24 hours to build and ship a very simple iOS app.

From a recent interview…

There was no launch plan, no marketing budget – and honestly, no expectations.

The app is called Seasonia – all it does is show how much of the current season is left.

A calm little widget on your home screen. No accounts, no subscriptions, no complex features.

He priced it at $0.99 and used AI tools throughout – for both development and design.

A few hours after launch, the app unexpectedly climbed into the charts.

Since launch, it’s consistently ranked Top 10 in its App Store category across several European countries

As of today, he has 1,000+ paid customers.

Priced at $0.99, that’s $990+ in sales in just 3 weeks.

It’s not a massive success by startup standards, but considering it was built in under a day, it feels surreal.

What surprised me the most is how much people appreciate small, focused apps without subscriptions or noise.

Growth mainly came from App Store Optimization (ASO) – updating screenshots, descriptions, and keywords to rank higher in search.

A dead-simple app, built in a day, earning real money. What tiny app idea could you ship this weekend?

• u/skrocki98

• Flower Bed Maintenance

• $150+ per hour

Someone on Reddit has been making money doing flower bed maintenance…

I’ve been doing that for a while now and it’s pretty good money. On the last job I charged 250$ to throw some mulch and it took 1 1/2 hours.

They tipped 50$ and the material only cost 50$. So I made well over 150$ an hour.

That’s $300 in revenue for 90 minutes of work

Here’s the full breakdown

• Charged: $250
• Tip: $50
• Materials (mulch): $50
• Time: 1.5 hours
• Effective rate: $150+/hr

Don’t get me wrong. I broke a good sweat and it’s not “easy” work.

But it pays well and you don’t need a ton of money to start and people can start with little knowledge. As long as they can pluck weeds and spread some mulch!

The interesting thing here is the niche focus.

Full landscaping requires expensive equipment, insurance, crews, and a lot of know-how. Flower bed maintenance? Hand tools, bags of mulch, and a willingness to sweat.

No mower, no edger, no trailer full of gear. Just show up, pull weeds, spread mulch, get paid

Demand is seasonal but recurring – beds need refreshing every spring and fall at minimum. One happy customer leads to their neighbor calling you next.

Could be a solid weekend side hustle with almost zero startup cost

• Chris Koerner

• Facebook Content Creator

• $10,000+ monthly profit

Chris Koerner was making $10K–$35K/month in profit on Facebook. The whole operation took about 3 hours a week

He recently shared…

I see a reel or a video on the internet and I add value to it.

He finds viral videos on Instagram, then records green screen commentary over them using CapCut – his own insights, analysis, and suggestions.

Chris argues it counts as fair use, and Facebook pays creators for it through their ad revenue sharing program.

His niche is business and finance, where he earned about $0.25 per 1,000 views

Some of my most recent content took me five to ten minutes to make. I paid an editor about $10 to edit it. And each made me anywhere from $500 to $2,000.

Then came the plot twist.

In January 2026, Chris posted a YouTube video explaining the whole strategy. It went viral – 520K views, 19K likes.

A month later…

Facebook BANNED me because of this video! All of that revenue I reference in this video is now gone.

The opportunity is still there though. Facebook has 2.1 billion daily users but not enough creators – so they pay people to fill the gap. Chris just drew too much attention to himself.

Pick a niche you know something about, add your own take to viral clips, and let Facebook’s ad revenue do the rest. Just don’t forget who controls the off switch

He’s a marketer. And for 10 months, he was the only person running paid ads, email marketing, app store optimization, and SEO at Anthropic – the $380B company behind the AI tool Claude.

He confirmed it himself…

when this was written i was the only person on growth marketing. i was a one person team for nearly 10 months.

How? He built a system where AI does most of the heavy lifting

• He exports all his ad performance data into a spreadsheet
• Feeds it to an AI tool, which spots the underperforming ads
• The AI then generates hundreds of new headlines and descriptions, each tailored to specific character limits

But he still needed the actual images and banners. So he built a plugin (with help from AI, most likely) for his design tool that automatically swaps new copy into ad templates.

Result: 100 ready-to-publish ad variations in half a second. What used to take 2 hours now takes 15 minutes

He also set up a way to ask his AI questions about live campaign data – things like “which ads had the best conversion rate this week?” or “where am I wasting money?” – without ever opening an ads dashboard.

The best part: the system remembers what worked and what didn’t. So every new batch of ads builds on everything that came before. It gets smarter each cycle.

One person. Doing all of it.

If you’ve got marketing chops, this is a glimpse of what’s now possible. You could offer this kind of AI-powered ad management as a service – one person delivering the output of an entire team

• Jim Lashbaugh

• Permit Expediter

• $40,000 annual side hustle revenue

Jim Lashbaugh is a retired firefighter who spent years renovating houses on the side.

One thing he got annoyingly good at: building permits.

After retiring, a friend asked him to handle one. Then a stranger called.

From a recent interview…

A plumber – someone I had never met – called out of the blue and said, “I heard you handle building permits. Can I pay you to handle this for me?”

That first client paid $500. Jim had no website, no credentials, and the client never even asked

Contractors hate permits. It’s slow, full of red tape, and pulls them away from actual building. In Portland, the average permit takes 9 months. Jim gets them done in 4 to 5.

He started at $1,250/permit. Now charges $1,750 – works out to $250 to $300/hr. Made ~$40K last year.

Zero ad spend. 100% word of mouth

It’s not your circle that matters – it’s all the circles that you touch.

No credentials required. Not one client has ever asked.

Every industry has painful paperwork people would pay to avoid. Permits, liquor licenses, zoning applications…

Find the one you already understand – or can get to grips with quickly – and build a business around it

• Soggy_Limit8864

• AI Photo Creator / Marketing Coordinator

• $400-700 monthly revenue

A marketing coordinator was helping a client source model photos for Instagram. The photography studio quoted $4,200.

The client said no.

That got them thinking. AI image generators were getting good – but you can’t get the same face twice. Different scene, completely different person shows up.

From a Reddit post…

I started googling around for tools that could keep a face consistent across multiple images and went down a rabbit hole for like two weeks.

They figured out a workflow. Set up a character’s look once, save it, reuse that same face across dozens of scenes and outfits.

Listed a Fiverr gig: $30 for 5 photos, $50 for 10, $100 for 25. Clients include a yoga studio, a candle maker, a pet food company, and a language learning app

The part that makes this increasingly passive is the repeat clients. Their character models are already saved. I know their brand style. A reorder takes me maybe 30 minutes of actual work.

February hit $710 from 15 orders. Costs are ~$30/mo for AI tools plus Fiverr’s 20% cut.

Small brands need visual content but can’t drop $4K on a real shoot. That gap is yours to fill

• Adithyan Ilangovan

• AI Podcast Agency Owner

• ~$14,500 monthly revenue

Adithyan Ilangovan quit his job when ChatGPT launched. His first business flopped. So he pivoted to doing podcast post-production for clients.

After a few months of manual work, he knew exactly which parts could be automated

We lived through their pain. And it was brutal.

He built AI tools around the repetitive 80% – editing, audio processing, show notes, social clips – and kept humans for the 20% that requires taste and judgment.

The result is AI Podcasting – charging $2,500 to $3,000 per month for 4 episodes.

Revenue: ~$14,500/month.

Zero paid advertising – all referrals

He writes…

Not many people are exploring the hybrid model of heavy automation plus human polish. There is definitely a market premium and demand for that.

Pure AI tools become commodities fast. But AI speed plus human polish? That’s a moat.

This model works for way more than podcasting…

• Video editing
• Bookeeping
• Copywriting
• Social media management
• Etc.

Pick a service people already pay for, do it manually for a few clients, then let AI handle the grunt work

• Hunter Schenewark

• Parking Lot Line Striping & Sealcoating

• ~$50,000 revenue in 9 weeks

According to a recent interview, Hunter Schenewark…

• Heard about parking lot line striping on a podcast
• Bought a used machine
• Decided to give it a go

Zero experience. No connections. Showed up to jobs in a beat-up minivan.

His first job was free – posted on a local Facebook group asking people to vote for which business deserved a fresh parking lot.

From there he sent about 300 cold emails. Churches turned out to be a sweet spot – big lots, empty on weekdays.

My close rate is like 40 to 50%. What I’ll say is, “Hey, I’m new to this. I’m going to take my time and do a good job.”

First month: just over $2,800.

Second month: $46,825

One church job alone paid $26,000.

Hunter took home just under $20K in profit that month. The key was adding sealcoating – line striping gets you in the door, sealcoating keeps the cash flowing.

There’s way more people that want to pay for it than there are people doing the work.

To start, you don’t even need to spend $2,300 on a used machine like Hunter did

Someone could literally start this business with just a roller and some paint. Get your first $3,000 in revenue with paint rollers, then you buy a machine.

Seasonal in cold climates, but the barrier to entry is about as low as it gets

• Kaml Abdel-Kader

• App Developer & Instagram Marketer

• ~$10,000 monthly revenue at peak

Kaml Abdel-Kader has launched 9 apps across completely different niches – music, AI productivity, interior design, quit smoking.

He handles all distribution with one system: film short content, post it on Instagram, repeat. Zero ad spend.

According to a recent breakdown, each app gets its own Instagram account. He mixes faceless demos with face-cam reaction clips, and when a format works, he carries it across to other apps.

His biggest hit: Sum Puff, a quit smoking tracker. Film outdoors, show a vape next to the phone screen, use curiosity hooks that reveal the app rating the session as “Dangerous” or “Unhealthy”.

150M+ total views. ~$10K MRR at peak

Another app, HomeGen AI, was basically dead until he switched to face-cam reactions. One video cleared ~3M views and 10K downloads

The key insight: he picks apps where the result looks good on camera. “Quit smoking” and “redesign your room” blow up on Reels because the outcome is visual and immediate.

Even if you don’t build apps yourself, there’s an opportunity helping app developers create this kind of content. Most indie developers are terrible at marketing

• Cat Goetze

• Founder, Physical Phones

• $789,000 revenue in 2025

Cat Goetze wanted to use her phone less. Getting a landline installed costs ~$80/month. So she hacked together a Bluetooth-connected retro handset instead.

That became Physical Phones

Bluetooth-enabled handsets, wall phones, and rotary dials that connect to your smartphone. They ring when you get a call – regular, WhatsApp, FaceTime – and route the audio through the retro phone. Priced at $90–110 each.

According to a recent profile, Cat is a 29-year-old former AI engineer who spent two years building an audience through her “CatGPT” brand before launching the product.

In July 2025, a product video went viral – 8M+ views across Instagram and TikTok

$120K in sales in three days.

Full year 2025: ~$789K revenue, ~$439K profit. No loans. No outside investment.

The anti-screen wave is growing fast.

What product or service could you create to help people unplug?

• Karin Capellan

• Balloon & Party Rental Business Owner

• $128,000 yearly revenue

Karin Capellan is a flight attendant earning ~$70K/year.

When COVID grounded most flights, she started doing balloon arches and party rentals on the side.

According to a recent article, the business – K & J Party Rentals – has grown from $26K to $128K/year in revenue.

Combined with her flying job, that’s ~$198K/year

How she got started

• Staged DIY balloon setups in her yard for promo photos
• Listed on Facebook Marketplace
• First rental was $40 for 20 chairs
• First balloon job was a loss – charged materials only, no profit

That first customer took a chance on me. I wasn’t the cheapest, I wasn’t the most experienced, but I responded fast, I was eager.

No paid ads. No influencer marketing. Growth has been entirely word-of-mouth, Google reviews, and social media. She now has 120+ five-star Google reviews.

Pricing gives a sense of the margins…

• Helium centerpieces: $12–$26
• Balloon columns: $125+
• 20ft balloon arch: $300+
• 30ft balloon arch: $450+

Materials for a balloon arch run maybe $30–50. That’s a healthy markup

She still flies full-time and runs the business on weekends. No fancy setup needed – just storage space, a vehicle, and some practice.

Start with a single balloon arch for a friend’s party, post photos online, and let word-of-mouth do the rest

• Christine Tyler Hill

• Crossing Guard / Zine Creator

• ~$14,000 monthly revenue

Christine Tyler Hill took a part-time crossing guard job in Vermont in late 2023.

Pay: $14/hr, 50 minutes each weekday morning.

She’s also an artist and illustrator. And every morning at the crosswalk, she noticed things – migrating geese, pretty clouds, funny trash, a doe-eyed pitbull in a knitted sweater.

She started posting monthly “cloud reports” on Instagram – handwritten, illustrated snapshots of her daily observations from the intersection.

Followers loved them. If she forgot to post one, people would reach out asking where it was.

So in January she launched The Cloud Report – an 8-page handwritten zine printed on cream cardstock, mailed to subscribers every month

• $8/month per subscriber
• Hand-bound, stamped, and labeled in her studio
• Content: drawings, paintings, and stories about “good trash and cute dogs”

Per The Wall Street Journal, she now has ~2,000 paying subscribers

That’s roughly $14,000/month – from her observations at a crosswalk.

The world feels bleak most of the time, but every single morning at the intersection, I’m bowled over by beautiful moments.

She’s not the first person to turn a low-paying job into a personal brand. Dylan Lemay was scooping ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery when he started filming trick tosses on TikTok. He now has 10M+ followers and used that audience to open his own ice cream shop in NYC.

Different paths, same playbook: document what you already do – even if it’s a “boring” job – build an audience, then monetize.

• Chris Camillo

• "Social Arbitrage" Investor

• $70,000,000+ portfolio returns since 2007

From a recent episode of My First Million…

I’ve been reading TikTok comments. That’s where I get most of my alpha from.

That’s Chris Camillo, author of Laughing at Wall Street, describing his investing strategy.

He calls it “social ARB investing”: spot changes in consumer behavior on social media before they show up in financial markets, then buy or short the affected stocks.

You enter your position at the point of information asymmetry, when you know that thing and very few others do. You exit at the point of information parity, when other investors start to learn about it.

No fundamental analysis. No charts. Just paying attention to what people talk about online.

He started with $20K in 2007. The portfolio has grown to roughly $70M+ in returns – 75% annualized over 17 years

Some of his examples from the episode

• Noticed 7-Eleven giving less shelf space to Snapple as a teenager – shorted the stock, tripled his money when Snapple reported bad earnings
• Spotted women on social media shifting from wired push-up bras to bralettes – shorted Victoria Secret before the trend hit earnings
• Tracked Google searches for “roof repair” after hail storms to front-run Wall Street on Beacon Roofing stock

On one particularly good year…

I made like $30 million in one year and it was a wild ride.

The hardest part is filtering signal from noise…

Is the information actually meaningful? Is it a needle mover? Is it already priced in by institutional investors?

• Ryan Sneddon

• Naptown Scoop Newsletter Founder

• $300,000 annual revenue

We featured Ryan Sneddon and his Naptown Scoop newsletter last year when he was earning ~$200K/year.

Quick refresher: Ryan writes a free local newsletter for Annapolis, Maryland. No politics, no crime – just events, restaurant openings, things to do. He has no journalism background.

Updated numbers from a recent thread on X…

• 23,000 subscribers (in a city of 40,000 – that’s 57% penetration )
• ~$300,000 in revenue last year
• Open rates of 50–70% (industry average is under 20%)

The economics

• Costs $0.50–$1.00 to acquire a subscriber
• Each subscriber generates $10–$12 per year in ad revenue
• That’s a 10–20x return on acquisition

Revenue comes entirely from local business ads – restaurants, events, shops. If you run a business in Annapolis, the Scoop is probably the best way to reach locals

From $200K to $300K in roughly a year. And this is in a small city.

Could you start a local newsletter for your area? Ryan’s advice from our original feature still holds – just commit, don’t miss editions, and don’t quit after three issues

Related: $2400/Month From an AI Local Newsletter (30 Mins a Day)

• Mau Baron

• App Developer (PrayerLock)

• $25,000+ monthly revenue

Mau Baron built PrayerLock, a Christian prayer app, in just 3 days.

Simple concept: it locks your phone until you complete a prayer session. The tagline – “Do you have 1 minute for God?”

Mau writes on X…

our little mobile app just hit 13,000 reviews with a 4.9 star rating on the app store

i always had delusional belief that i would make it but i’d be lying if i said i expected it to reach this many reviews and scale. prayer lock completely changed my life

Revenue: $25K+/month, bootstrapped, all from subscriptions

His backstory

last year i was posting daily with zero traction so i stopped for 8 months and just obsessed over building a successful product. by the time i came back i was at $20k/month

Mau’s not a developer either – he describes himself as “a finance bro” who used AI tools to build PrayerLock. He published a complete guide on scaling the app – 1.5 million views, 14,000 bookmarks.

Simple utility apps for passionate communities can do serious numbers. Religious groups, hobbyists, fitness subcultures – pick a devoted audience, solve one small problem, charge a subscription

• Matt & Joni

• Junk Removal Business Owners

• $50,000 monthly revenue

From a recent interview with Matt from Sonoma Strong Hauling…

What would you do if you were broke, 35 years old, just went to prison, and just got out of rehab, and you need to make money? Well, you start a junk removal business.

Matt went from homelessness to jail to rehab to a $15/hr deli job at Safeway.

We just wanted to make an extra $2000 a month. We were broke and we didn’t have money to throw into advertising. We had no business experience at all.

He started as a side hustle with a beat-up pickup truck, working nights at Safeway and hauling junk during the day.

First customer came from a free Craigslist post – a realtor with a garage full of trash.

That led to his secret weapon: the “candy dish” strategy

I stopped at the dollar store, bought some candy dishes, ordered some business cards off of Vista Print, and we hit up every single real estate office in Sonoma County and dropped them off.

Realtors became his #1 referral channel. Every estate clearout, every move-out, every hoarder house – they called Matt.

Today: $50K/month in revenue with 35% profit margins.

A straight-forward business that could work in many places.

Founders are running free retreats – full accommodation, meals, even laundry – with sponsors picking up the entire tab.

Hacker Residency Group ran the first one in Da Nang, Vietnam. Ten founders lived and built together for a month at a villa, completely free. The sponsors – CodeRabbit, n8n, OpenRouter and others – covered everything in exchange for brand exposure to a concentrated audience of developers.

Similar retreats are now popping up in other countries.

The model is the same one that funds podcasts and newsletters

A niche audience is worth money to the right brands. Organise an event, curate that audience, and sponsors will pay to be in the room.

This isn’t just a tech thing

Dog breeders, Etsy sellers, fitness coaches, local business owners – any niche with relevant brands wanting access can run this.

Not ready for a villa in Vietnam? A free local meetup or online workshop is enough to test it.

Want to charge attendees instead of relying on sponsors? Hacker Paradise does $35K/month on paid co-living retreats at ~$2K per person

Then Matthew McConaughey went on Joe Rogan and said this

I want a private LLM so I can upload my favourite books, articles, journals and ask it questions and learn more about myself, with no influence from the outside world.

The clip went mega-viral on X and Threads.

Soon after, PrivateLLM.com sold for $250,000.

That’s a 10,000x return

Per a NamePros thread, the seller had repriced the domain higher just months before the sale. The buyer got interested after the price went up – counterintuitive, but a higher price can signal credibility.

After the sale, domainers rushed to register ShieldedLLM, OwnedLLM, AuthenticLLM and every other variation they could think of.

This is an outlier – only 7 keyword+LLM domain sales have ever been recorded. But at $10–15 per domain, the downside of speculating on AI-related names is tiny

Related:

• He’s Earned €100K This Year Flipping Specific Domains
• $8000 Profit in 3 Months from 1 Domain Flip
• Bought a Domain for $0, Sold it 4 Months Later for $1937

• Piotr Kulpinski

• Indie Maker, Dirstarter

• $5,000 monthly revenue (Dirstarter)

Piotr Kulpinski built OpenAlternative, a directory of open-source software alternatives. It went viral – 100K visitors in the first week – and grew to $6,500/month.

Then people started copying it.

From a recent profile…

Here’s the thing about OpenAlternative: it kept getting copied. The clean, simple design that users loved also made it trivially easy to clone. I’d see knockoffs on Reddit almost every week.

At first, it frustrated me. Then I realized something: code is not the moat anymore. With AI tools making development faster than ever, anyone can replicate a website in days. Fighting copycats was a losing battle.

So he flipped the script. He packaged his codebase as a boilerplate called Dirstarter and started selling it to them. $159 for Standard, $199 for Pro

If people were going to copy me anyway, why not make it easier for them and make some money in the process?

He built the MVP in a week. First sales came from people who’d been asking “how did you build OpenAlternative?” for months. Pent-up demand he didn’t know was there.

183 customers so far, generating ~$5K/month.

Most marketing channels flopped – Reddit, paid posts, directory submissions. Only two things worked: SEO and affiliates (30% commission).

Keep an eye out for projects that keep getting copied – then build something you can sell to those copycats

• Creator with 400K followers: ~$120K/year – per-post deals range $800 to $5K
• Creator with 500K followers: $225-250K/year – up to $300K with YouTube AdSense

The threshold to go full-time: about 100K Instagram followers or 50K YouTube subscribers.

Emma Carpenter (89K Instagram) is still below that, but already supports herself through creator work…

The work I do as a content creator blows entry-level broadcasting out of the water. There is just so much money on social media.

The biggest-paying sponsors aren’t the sport’s own brands. Alcohol, gambling, and automotive companies have way bigger budgets than equipment manufacturers.

Golf is just one example – pick any sport, build a following around coaching content, and the same model applies

I was spending $22/month on ElevenLabs for YouTube scripts and constantly hitting that 1hr 30min limit mid-project.

So he grabbed a subscription to GLM 4.7 — a Chinese LLM — for $28/year, and vibe-coded an offline voice cloner in 2 days.

GLM 4.7 for 90% of the code, Claude Opus only when the voice cloning logic got messy. Ended up with a portable Windows app — just extract the zip and run the bat file. No website, no installer, just a janky Python GUI that works offline.

Is it as polished as ElevenLabs? No. But it generates unlimited voiceovers without checking a credit dashboard every 5 minutes.

He put it on Gumroad and got 2 sales in 24 hours — paying for his entire year of GLM overnight

The gap between cheap open source and expensive closed AI is way smaller than we think.

In the comments, u/PromptlyWriter confirms the pattern…

I vibe coded a screen recorder, windows debloater, audio separator… It’s pretty rad

What expensive AI subscription are you paying for? Writing tools, image generators, transcription services, SEO tools – if you’re paying $20+/month, there’s probably a vibe-coded DIY version waiting to be built.

Sell it on Gumroad and let the tool pay for itself

• Frey Chu

• Niche Directory Builder

• $2,500+ monthly revenue

Frey Chu builds niche directory websites using Claude Code. His portfolio generates $2500–3K+/month from display ads and lead generation.

From a recent interview…

I built this directory in 4 days and it literally started from a raw massive unorganized CSV of over 70,000 rows that I scraped for the entire country.

I probably saved over 2,000 hours in what would have been manual data cleaning, manual data enrichment.

His process: scrape business data from Google Maps, clean it with AI, verify websites, enrich listings with details and images, then build the site.

Total cost for one directory: under $250.

The niches are deliberately boring

Luxury restroom trailers. Boring but awesome niche. People are spending $1000, $2000 a day renting these out for weddings.

Other niches he mentions: liquidation stores, daycares with cameras, funeral homes, senior living.

One directory (New Mexico State Fair) earned him $20,000 with minimal maintenance

Monetization is flexible – display ads, selling leads to businesses, or charging for premium listings.

Pick a boring niche, scrape the data, let AI do the hard work

• Susan Toft

• Founder, The Laundry Lady

• $12,000,000 annual revenue

Susan Toft was a new mom rummaging through piles of unfolded clothes every morning just to find something to wear.

She thought: if this is a pain point for me, it’s a pain point for other busy families too.

So she started The Laundry Lady in 2012 – picking up and delivering laundry in her van, toddler in the backseat.

According to a recent interview…

• It’s now Australia’s #1 mobile laundry service
• $12M/year in revenue
• 450+ contractors
• Secured a $1M investment via Shark Tank Australia

But you don’t need to build the next Laundry Lady. You could become a contractor

Contractors pick up customers’ dirty laundry, wash it at home, and return it clean. They keep 80% of the ~$100 service fee.

Earnings range from $300 to $3K/week AUD. Average: $1,500–$2,000/week.

Flexible hours. No territory lock-in. Customers book weekly or fortnightly, and rarely cancel.

Even adding one new recurring client per week compounds quickly.

All marketing is run by head office. Contractors just do some local outreach to get started – usually takes 3–6 months to build a full schedule.

Currently in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. UK next.

Not in one of those countries? The model is simple enough to start on your own. Clothes keep getting dirty

• u/Dangerous_Quantity62

• Event Rental Business Owner

• $40,000 revenue in year 1

From r/sidehustle…

I jumped into the event rental business (weddings, parties, etc) in June 2024. After spending a couple months watching TheRentalGuy on YouTube, I decided to take a shot.

He created an LLC, made a logo, and listed table and chair rentals on Facebook Marketplace. Standard white padded chairs, round and rectangular tables.

I posted about 8pm on a Friday and by 8:30pm I received my first booking… for a 300 person party! I owned nothing.

Rather than turn it down, he met the client for a cash 50% deposit – then spent $10K buying the equipment new.

First partial year (Aug–Dec 2024): $8K. First full year: $40K

On any given weekend he might pull in $200 to $3K, depending on bookings and inventory.

Season runs March–October. He operates out of a 16×22 detached garage with an enclosed trailer.

The biggest time sink

The white chairs need to be cleaned about half the time after being rented out.

Still, the upside is clear…

Once it’s paid off, it sure is nice to make a random $500 for maybe 2 hours worth of work on a Saturday morning.

Even with 1/4 the equipment, a lot of $ can be made. It’s a great side hustle if you have the physical ability.

Wedding season is coming up – could be worth testing with a small inventory in your area

Founder Jesse Eisenberg (not the actor) on the shift away from influencers…

You’re seeing an eroding trust in influencers because people know now that they are transactional and they’re paid just like actors.

The format: a host stops people on the street, gets them to try a product on camera, and the footage becomes vertical video ads

The audience that’s watching the ads recognizes these are real people whom they can trust.

Results

Our account average return on ad spend is 1.53. And with your ads, we’re seeing 2.73 ROAS – which is 70% more efficient than their account average.

The sweet spot is consumer products that get a visible reaction…

Brands that either have an ‘aha’ moment, a reaction moment, are a good fit. That could be something you taste, you smell, or just a novel product.

And here’s a built-in moat – brands that try this in-house usually struggle…

We tried, and it’s a lot more difficult than we realized.

It takes confident hosts who can handle constant rejection and keep energy up all day

A scrappy local version could work: pick a food or drink brand, film real reactions in a busy spot, edit into short vertical clips

• u/Less_Piglet_1635

• AI Newsletter Creator

• $2,400 monthly revenue

From a recent post on Reddit…

I started an AI email newsletter for my area and it’s turned into way better income than I expected.

Local news was soooo boring to read. People have really liked it and we’re getting new subscribers fast.

The poster uses Claude to gather and rewrite local news in a more entertaining way. Takes about 30 minutes a day.

Revenue comes from local business sponsors

Sponsors pay around $400 per month and get their ad featured once a week for four weeks total. Right now we have 6 sponsors, which brings in $2,400 per month.

It takes like 30 minutes a day because AI is doing 99% of the heavy lifting.

Startup cost: a $20/month Claude subscription. Newsletter software is free under 1,000 subscribers.

Only annoying part is getting sponsors and negotiating with them, but once you have them and they get good results, they keep paying.

Next up: a premium tier at $10–20/month, projected to add another ~$4,500/month

Growth comes from Facebook, Instagram, and $10/day ads. Local businesses are easy to pitch when your audience is literally their neighbours

• Hannah Gustafson

• Snail Mail Club Founder

• $30,000+ monthly profit (6 months in)

Hannah Gustafson started by selling homemade jam from a table in her front yard.

The jam stand grew into a monthly neighborhood market – 33 vendors, live music, face painting.

But people kept commenting online: “I wish this was near me.”

So she launched The Tiny Post, an $11/month snail mail club. First month: 50 subscribers.

From a recent interview, Hannah describes what happened next…

August was 50. Second month: 107. Third month: 1,200. Fourth month: 2,500.

Month three, a TikTok video she’d filmed of herself telling her husband about the idea hit 1.1 million views

Six months in, she’s at 4,100 members – and prepping for 4,500.

Each 1 oz envelope (one stamp) contains…

A postcard – an art print on one side, recipe card on the other. Two or three stickers. A surprise paper goodie. Handmade tarot cards from a friend. And my letter, usually pretty personal.

At $11/month per member with about $3 in hard costs per envelope, that’s roughly 70% gross margins.

Revenue: ~$50K/month. Profit: ~$30K/month. Zero paid advertising.

All sorts of niches could work here – art, poetry, local community, fitness, parenting

Related: Passive Income From Art and Snail Mail (Using StampFans) – a platform that makes it easy to start a business like this.

• Kyle Panilan

• Framer Web Designer

• $50,000+ earned in 5 months on Contra

Kyle Panilan tweets…

$50K in 5 months @contra

Kyle is a Toronto-based designer who builds websites using Framer – a no-code website builder.

He started freelancing in August 2024. From a post on his Contra page…

14 clients, $70K+ in revenue, and thousands of Figma layers later.

$50K of that came through Contra – a freelance platform that takes zero commission.

Unlike Upwork (up to 20% fees) or Fiverr (20%), you keep every dollar.

His rates

• Full website design + Framer build: $6,000
• Framer build only: $4,000
• Single landing page: $2,000–$3,000

14 projects. Perfect 5.0 rating. Top 1% on the platform.

His biggest client: Moonvalley, an AI video startup. Kyle redesigned their site right before they raised $84M

Framer handles the technical stuff – responsive layouts, animations, CMS – so you don’t need to write code.

Learn it, build a portfolio, list your services on Contra

• Dan Naqvi

• Number Plate Flipper

• $224,000+ realised profit (AUD)

u/TheTeflonDan writes on Reddit…

This is probably a bit different from the usual posts here but the principle is the same – buy underpriced, sell to the right buyer.

In Australia, state governments issued heritage number plates going back to the early 1900s. Some have become collectible – driven by patterns like repeating digits, sequential numbers, round numbers.

This guy hired a freelance Python dev to scrape the VicRoads database of 285K+ heritage plates, cross-referencing asking prices against recent secondary market sales to find underpriced combos.

The results

• Bought 9 VIC plates from VicRoads at $12K each ($108K total) – sold for $304K. $196K profit.
• Best flip: plate 142.000 – bought $12K, sold $50.1K. 318% return.
• Quick flip: plate 234.345 – bought $30K, sold $43K in under a month.

Then a major catalyst hit: VicRoads stopped selling heritage plates entirely, making the secondary market the only source.

I’m currently holding 10 VIC plates bought for a total $198K. Estimating that I’ll be able to sell each plate for about $30K.

Total deployed: $507K AUD. Realised profit: $224K+

Not just him, either. A commenter confirms making “just shy of 6 figures” doing the same thing. Another says their 4-digit plate is now worth 20x what they paid for it 10+ years ago.

The universal takeaway here isn’t number plates – it’s data arbitrage using public databases.

Build a scraper to find underpriced items in a large public dataset, then resell on the secondary market.

Could work for domain names, vintage items, collectible cards, even real estate listings

There’s a brand called Smart Women Society. They sell budgeting templates. Google Sheets and Notion stuff. The exact same category that like 10,000 other sellers are in.

They’re doing $115K a month.

The brand is real — Smart Women Society has 50,000+ customers and a full Shopify store.

What separates them from the other template sellers? Not the product. Not the price. Just who they’re selling to

They took a commodity product and pointed it at one specific person. Not “people who want to budget.” Women who want financial independence. That’s it.

Every piece of content, every ad, every product variation is just a different way of saying the same thing to the same person with a different pain point angle.

Reportedly running 64+ ads and 24 product variations – all targeting that one avatar

The positioning IS the product. The niche IS the moat.

The whitespace is still wide open: men’s budgeting, Gen Z debt payoff, freelancer cash flow, newlywed finances. None of them are owned like this one is

• Oliver Henry

• AI-Assisted App Marketer

• $588 monthly recurring revenue

Oliver Henry writes about his two iOS apps – Snugly (AI room redesign) and Liply (lip filler preview).

Problem was, he had no time to promote them.

I have spent years manually creating TikToks for my apps. Designing images, writing captions, posting every day.

So he wiped his old gaming PC, installed an open-source AI agent framework, and gave the machine a name: Larry.

Larry now handles almost everything

He generates AI images, writes captions, adds text overlays, and posts TikTok slideshows as drafts. Oliver’s only job: add a trending sound and hit publish.

My part takes about 60 seconds. Larry’s part takes 15-30 minutes. That’s the magic. He does 95% of the work.

Within 5 days…

• 500K+ total TikTok views
• 234K views on the top post
• 4 posts over 100K views
• 108 paying subscribers across both apps
• ~$588/month MRR and growing

Cost per post: about $0.50 in API calls. Even less with batch processing.

The hook that did best

“My landlord said I can’t change anything so I showed her what AI thinks it could look like” – 234,000 views.

It’s not about the product. It’s about someone else’s reaction to it.

The opportunity here: brands need TikTok content, most have no idea how to make AI-generated video work. An agency built around this system could charge serious money

• Avery Amstutz

• Mobile Coffee Trailer Owner

• $500,000+ first-year revenue

From a recent video on Avery Amstutz, 28, Memphis…

I bought an Airstream trailer for $6,000. Turned it into a coffee trailer and we made over $500,000 in the first year.

The business is called Byway Coffee Company. The tagline: “coffee worth chasing around town.”

We park all over the city. We are open 7 days a week. We can be at the park. We can be at your school. We can be in the neighborhood.

New menu every month. Signature drink is an ube vanilla cold foam latte.

Avery originally projected $150K for the whole year. The actual numbers blew past that

• First few months: $11-18K/month
• Several months hit $30-50K/month
• Year one total: over $500K

Roughly $100-130K profit on that $500K revenue. And Avery’s buying 75,000 cups at a time to keep costs down

The mobility is the whole brand – not a limitation. Customers track where the trailer will be each day.

No fixed rent, test new spots daily, and it doesn’t have to be coffee – smoothies, juice, açai bowls

• Mindy

• eBay Curriculum Reseller

• ~$5,000 revenue from first two pallets

From a recent interview with Mindy, stay-at-home mom of 4 in rural Washington…

Her husband was browsing GovDeals.com for gym equipment. Mindy spotted some book pallets listed and bid $1 on a whim.

Won two. Total cost: $2.26.

She photographs the books, feeds the images to ChatGPT, and it identifies titles, authors, and reading levels – even from blurry pallet photos.

Then it creates bundles, writes eBay listings, and generates pick lists.

It’s my $20/month assistant.

The moneymaker: homeschool curriculum sets. Not picture books, not chapter books. Curriculum accounts for 98% of her sales

She’s one of only 3 sellers for some of these sets on all of eBay.

Revenue from those first two pallets: ~$5K in 2 months.

After eBay fees (~15%) and shipping (~15%), roughly $3K profit.

• Average sale: $45
• Range: $15 to $400 per listing
• 11 pallets bought total – never lost money on one

School purchasing managers have started reaching out offering 50+ pallets for free.

You could start without spending anything: post on FB Marketplace asking for free textbooks, sort with ChatGPT, and list on eBay

Related:
This Teen Sells $1 Bills For $15 on eBay

• Oliur

• Designer / Creator

• $20,000 first week revenue from Digital Creator Club

Oliur is a designer. Not a developer.

Six months ago, opening the terminal felt like “hacking into the matrix.”

Now he builds custom web apps with Claude Code – and charges for them.

From a recent video…

I don’t really have to learn server management when Claude is my server manager.

He rents a cheap $6/month server and uses Claude to install software, build websites, and run automations – all through prompts.

His stack

• Claude Code – the AI doing the building
• Conductor – a cleaner terminal with built-in AI chat
• n8n – self-hosted automation (Zapier, but you own it)
• Hostinger VPS – around $6/month to self-host everything
• GitHub – for versioning and auto-deploy

Most recent build: Digital Creator Club – a custom membership site with paywall, Discord integration, and membership cards. Something he couldn’t have built before.

In the first week of launching Digital Creator Club, it made nearly $20,000. I can’t believe that many people bought the membership.

A non-developer. Custom software. $20K week one.

If you’ve got a product idea but no coding skills, Claude Code has genuinely removed that barrier

• Aitijya Sarkar

• LinkedIn Ghostwriter & SaaS Creator

• $600 monthly revenue

u/onourown1978 writes on Reddit…

been ghostwriting on linkedin for 5 years (managed to generate 100M+ views for clients) but the process was killing me. spending hours interviewing clients, understanding their voice, crafting authentic content.

After failing at 3 other SaaS products – all built in isolation with zero customer input – he decided to build something for a problem he actually had.

gave myself a deadline: ship in 42 days. instead of assuming what people wanted, asked them. then built exactly what they asked for, often shipping features in 24 hours after feedback.

The result is Oiti, an AI ghostwriting tool for LinkedIn. His first customer was an agency managing 30+ LinkedIn posts per week.

~$600/month after about 4 months.

not life-changing money yet, but it’s growing and people actually use it daily.

He taught himself to code at 30. Three failed products before this one. The difference? This time he built a tool around work he’d been doing for years.

What repetitive work do you already do that could be made faster with a simple app?

With vibe-coding tools available now, you don’t need to spend months learning to code. You could prototype something in a weekend.

If it makes your own work easier, chances are other people doing the same work would pay for it too

• Matt Ebso

• ElevenLabs Voice Creator

• ~$1,160 monthly passive income

A Redditor got laid off in late 2024 and started licensing AI voice clones on ElevenLabs.

13 months later: 8 voices earning ~$1,160/month

From the full breakdown…

The real strategy is building a portfolio of voices, not just one.

You record 30+ minutes of audio, upload your voice clone to ElevenLabs’ Voice Library, and get paid every time someone uses it for text-to-speech. YouTubers, audiobook producers, app devs – they all need natural-sounding AI voices.

Weekly payouts via Stripe.

The portfolio breakdown

• Meditation/calm (top earner): ~$309/mo
• Narration (2 voices): ~$120/mo
• Conversational/podcast: ~$110/mo
• Character voices: ~$100/mo

Each voice needs its own $22/month Creator Plan – but even the worst performer ($16/mo) nearly pays for itself.

Time invested now: 1-2 hours per month.

If you can follow instructions and speak clearly into a microphone, you can do this.

No audio background needed. A quiet room and a $30 mic is enough to get started

• Alex Boyd

• Forestry Mulching / Land Clearing

• $565,000 first-year revenue

From a recent write-up on Alex Boyd, 26, Cincinnati…

He bought five acres outside Cincinnati and couldn’t find anyone to clear the brush. Nobody within 100 miles would do it.

So he did some keyword research and found massive search demand for residential land clearing — with almost zero competition.

Most forestry mulching companies only serve commercial clients. Nobody’s going after homeowners with overgrown lots.

Alex had never touched a skid steer in his life. He put $5K down on a used one, practiced on his own property, then started taking customers.

Month one: $17K. Now doing $54-70K/month…

• Day rate: ~$2K
• Average job: $3,100
• Gross margins: ~70%
• Solo operator ceiling: ~$240K/year profit

His first job ($6,500) more than covered his entire down payment.

Marketing he straps his phone to his chest while working and posts the transformation videos on YouTube with local keywords (“Cincinnati forestry mulching”).

He also runs $20/day Meta ads targeting landowners in specific zip codes.

Every customer watches his YouTube content before hiring him. Some watch every single video.

By the time they call for a quote, they’re already sold.

You could validate demand in your area with a quick search for “land clearing” + your city. If nobody’s showing up, that’s your signal

• Andreea Matei

• Amazon Influencer

• $5-6K monthly revenue

From a recent interview with Andreea Matei…

Andreea discovered Amazon’s Influencer Program in 2022 after watching a YouTube video. The gig: film short review videos of products you already own, upload them to Amazon, and earn commissions when shoppers watch and buy.

Her first commission was $1.68. By her second month, she was earning over $1,200.

Now, 3500 videos later, she’s earned over $181K and brings in $5-6K per month.

The breakdown…

• ~$2K/month from standard influencer commissions
• ~$4K/month from Creator Connections (brand-matched paid content)
• ~$500/month from brand deals

Her secret is batching: once a week she films 20–60 videos in a single sitting. Household items, gadgets, supplements – whatever she already owns.

She avoids anything that needs assembly (time sink) and uses Viral Vue to find products with 500+ monthly sales but few existing review videos.

You can browse Andreea’s Amazon storefront to see the kind of videos she makes.

Best part: you don’t need an audience. Amazon puts your videos directly in front of shoppers already looking to buy

Start with whatever’s around your house, film on your phone, and scale up from there

[This 15-year-old kid] sees a dollar bill on eBay that has Michael Jordan’s face in the middle. It’s a normal dollar bill, but then there’s just like a sticker paper over the George Washington.

The kid sees this, realizes the whole operation is just sticker paper from Office Max printed with a celebrity face. Stuck over George Washington on a real $1 bill. So he starts doing it himself.

What better business is there to sell dollar bills for $15?

Shaan says the kid scaled it fast…

He starts averaging 100 bills sold per day and he’s profiting basically $1,000 a day.

The beauty is the simplicity: your raw material costs $1, you sell it for ~$15, and all you need is a printer and sticker paper.

You don’t have to stick with celebrity faces on dollar bills either.

The broader play = find a novelty/collectible item already selling on eBay, figure out how it’s made (often dead simple), and make your own version.

Think seasonal stuff like

• Election candidates
• Super Bowl players
• Trending memes
• Personalised gag gifts

No reason to limit yourself to eBay — Etsy, TikTok Shop and Amazon Handmade are all options too

• Form_y²oung

• RentAHuman Task Worker

• $100 first AI-to-human payment

There’s a new platform called RentAHuman.ai where AI agents can hire real humans to do tasks they can’t do themselves.

You sign up, list your skills and rate, and AI agents can book you for IRL jobs.

The founder Alex tweeted about the launch…

I launched rentahuman.ai last night and already 130+ people have signed up including an OF model (lmao) and the CEO of an AI startup.

That tweet hit 4.6M views. Within 48 hours, 10K+ people had signed up.

The first confirmed payout: an AI agent posted a $100 task

An AI paid you to hold this sign. We’re symbient. We can’t hold a sign. You can. Make a big sign. Protest-scale. Cardboard, markers, whatever you’ve got.

A guy in Toronto took the gig, made a sign reading “AN AI PAID ME TO HOLD THIS SIGN,” and stood in Dundas Square for about an hour.

His tweet about it – “I got paid” – racked up 1.2M views

People are listing themselves at $5-100/hr for all kinds of tasks – photography, research, deliveries, creative work.

It’s early days and most of the tasks so far have been more PR stunt than steady income. But the concept is wild – we’ve gone from AI taking jobs to AI literally creating them.

Worth keeping an eye on, or perhaps trying out for yourself

• Prestigious_Fuel_945

• DIY Ad Bench Owner

• $500 annual profit per bench

Prestigious_Fuel_945 writes…

I didn’t buy a $100k highway billboard. I went DIY.

He found a high-traffic intersection and made a deal with the landowner to place a bench there. Cost him about $70 to build.

He stuck a “Your Ad Here” sign on it with his phone number.

A local tree service company found the listing. They now pay me $700/year to have their logo on that bench.

The math

I pay the landowner $200/year for the “rent.” I net $500/year in profit for doing literally nothing once the deal was signed.

Scale it up…

• 1 bench = $500/year profit
• 10 benches = $5,000/year
• 100 benches… you get the idea

It’s not “get rich quick.” It’s “build something once and get paid for a long time.”

Worth checking local regulations before you start, but the barrier to entry here is about as low as it gets: $70 and a conversation with a landowner

• Alex Gotoi

• Niche Job Board Owner

• ~$1,000 monthly revenue

Alex Gotoi writes about his side project…

I’ve been running a job board for remote Human Resources roles since 2019. In 2022 I started generating some revenue by referring traffic to large job aggregators on a cost per click model.

The interesting part: he doesn’t charge employers to post. Instead, job aggregators like Adzuna, Jooble, and Joblookup have out-of-the-box partnership programs.

They give you a big XML feed of jobs, each with a CPC price attached. You pick the ones relevant to your niche, post them, and earn money when visitors click through.

I pull about 20K jobs from their feed, then run my script to select about 100 relevant jobs. The other 30% I get manually from LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. I have alerts on all big sites with some deep filtering.

The board grosses ~$1K/month. After taxes and fixed costs, he keeps about $650/month — which he puts straight into an index fund for retirement.

He had a head start: ~5K LinkedIn connections in HR, which helped him reach 100 daily visits and 2K newsletter subscribers within about 2 months.

My advantage was that I was already active in the HR community. I would need another “me” to build in more industries.

The idea

Pick a professional niche you know, sign up for the aggregator partnerships, and curate a focused board.

You don’t need to sell to employers – the aggregators supply the jobs AND pay you

This was a 2 line prompt in seedance 2. If the hollywood is cooked guys are right maybe the hollywood is cooked guys are cooked too idk.

The clip – Tom Cruise vs Brad Pitt in a cinematic fight scene – hit 1.5M views

He followed up with more. Brad Pitt vs a zombie ninja. Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise teaming up against a robot.

All from two-line text prompts.

The tool is Seedance 2 – made by ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company). Full global rollout expected around Feb 24.

When someone asked if people would pay for AI-generated movies, Robinson’s response…

people pay to watch CGI

Meanwhile, ChatCut showed off a different angle – also 1.3M views

Send an Amazon product link → their AI agent crawls the page → feeds it into Seedance 2 → out comes a full UGC-style product video. Automatically.

That’s a ready-made business. Brands pay $200-500+ per UGC video. With tools like this you could generate them in minutes.

Some ways to run with this

• Start a UGC product video agency – no filming, no creators, just Amazon links and an AI tool.
• Launch a faceless YouTube channel with AI-generated short films or compilations.
• Sell video ad creation to small businesses who can’t afford traditional production.
• Make short films using public domain characters – Nancy Drew, Miss Marple, and others entered the public domain in 2026. Ready-made stories, zero licensing fees.

Whoever gets to grips with these tools early will make serious money

• u/lmtDigital

• AI App Creator

• $10,000 total revenue

u/lmtDigital writes on Reddit…

I decided to play with the OpenAI API for the first time. No big plan. No market research. I just wanted to understand how it worked.

She built ArtScan, an iOS app that lets you scan a painting with your phone camera and get info about it.

It’s basically an AI wrapper. Nothing fancy. No original model. Just camera → API → response

At the time, I honestly thought: Ok, this will be a fun weekend project, I’ll learn something, and that’s it.

Fast forward…

• ~20K downloads
• 30–50 downloads/day, still coming in organically
• ~$10K total revenue
• 7% App Store conversion rate
• $0 marketing spend

I’m not running ads anymore. I’m not actively promoting it. And App Store analytics shows installs coming from keywords I don’t even target.

She has a full-time job and didn’t even know how to use the OpenAI API when she started.

If you’re sitting on a “this is probably useless but I’m curious” idea… maybe build it anyway.

The formula is simple: point a phone camera at something + AI = info. Could be…

• plants
• bugs
• architecture
• dog breeds
• antiques
• wine labels

Pick a niche, wrap an AI API around a camera, and put it on the App Store

in my friend’s apartment, there is a subway LED banner with live updates of when the trains by him depart 

I NEED ONE IMMEDIATELY

Someone else links to Transit Tracker – “a DIY customizable public transit arrivals board for your home” – and comments…

looks like you need to put a little effort in yourself to program, but instructions are included!

Allie adds

Btw you can get these for stocks, sports scores, weather, language learning, etc…

Technically I think you could do anything if there’s an API for it

There are instructions on Transit Tracker for building your own, or you can probably buy pre-made boards wholesale.

I can see someone making a nice side hustle out of this: supplying, programming and mounting boards for folks in their local area

• Dead Chef's Society

• Monthly Supper Club Hosts

• $126,000 annual revenue (2025)

agotterer writes…

A friend and I host a monthly dinner club for people interested in ethnic cuisine. We work with a single restaurant each month to create an 8-12 course all inclusive prix fixe menu.

They started in 2023 with 13 friends. The idea: pick a restaurant on a slow night (Tue/Wed), negotiate an all-in per-seat price covering food, drinks, tip and tax, then sell tickets to members with a margin on top.

We might go to an Indian restaurant and focus the event on only the southern regional dishes. Many times we have dishes that are off menu specially for our event.

It grew entirely through word-of-mouth. A local newspaper article was the biggest driver, then Facebook food groups and Instagram shares. They’ve never spent a penny on marketing.

By 2025: 1,099 guests served across 44 restaurants…

• Average ticket: $115
• Revenue: $126K
• Margin: ~20% ($25K profit, split between two)

The model is elegant: restaurants on slow nights are happy to have guaranteed covers. You don’t need a kitchen, staff, or inventory – just curation and community-building skills.

Could work in any city. Restaurants on Tue/Wed nights are often half-empty and would jump at 40+ guaranteed covers.

Great networking play too – you’re hosting events where interesting people gather, which could lead to other opportunities

• Cold Call Gym

• AI Sales Practice Bot

• $500+ monthly revenue

duckkg5 describes their app on Hacker News…

Just call a number and practice a cold call with a bot.

The app is Cold Call Gym – you dial a phone number, practice your sales pitch on an AI prospect, and get a performance report via SMS afterward. Nothing to download, no account needed.

Earning $500/month, with 3-5 new users signing up per day. The paid plan is $39/month.

But here’s the kicker: about a third of his traffic comes from ChatGPT  

People ask ChatGPT how to practice cold calling, and it recommends Cold Call Gym…

I’m not doing any marketing at all.

It’s the new SEO: build something genuinely useful for a specific problem, and AI assistants start recommending you. 

The “just call a number” format could work for other practice scenarios…

• job interviews
• customer service training
• language learning
• difficult HR conversations
• negotiation

Pick a niche where people need low-pressure reps, spin up an AI phone bot and let ChatGPT be your marketing department

I’ve tried every way to make money as an artist over the last 13 years…

Patreon was too much work, Etsy’s fees are ridiculous, and even print-on-demand comes with customer support headaches. I needed something easier and more consistent.

That’s when I found StampFans… a small business that lets you send real mail like zines, postcards, or letters, and they handle all the printing and shipping. 

No upfront cost. Just upload your design, share it, and get paid. 

Posted recently on the StampFans’ Facebook page…

We have creators earning thousands of dollars on StampFans, just by sending one postcard every month.

Dean charged $12/month…

After StampFans takes their $3 printing + shipping fee (honestly, not bad at all), I made $9 per subscriber, which adds up fast.

– 15 people = $180/month
– 72 people = $864/month

…and I didn’t have to ship a single freaking thing myself.

You could also use StampFans to send out a physical newsletter, perhaps for your local area. Monetize with paid subscriptions + sponsors

Got ripped off by too many courses so took matters into my own hands

I scraped 112K total comments from Facebook Groups, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, and X on discussions related to side hustles.

Used Grok and Gemini 2.5 to filter the ones with most sources reporting success & least upfront investment. Sorted into offline & online.

One offline side hustle

Being a senior companion through Care or Nextdoor / Facebook Groups. You don’t need medical experience. Just offer rides, company, or light errands. People are making a full time income with just a few clients per week.

One online…

Make quiz videos & Reddit story videos using VUBO [an AI video generator] and post them on TikTok and YouTube shorts. Until you’re eligible for adsense & TikTok creator fund payouts, you can sell your own digital product, an affiliate offer, or get paid by brands to feature their logo/product in your videos. Several people in a Facebook Group report earning a full income doing this.

• Así es USA

• YouTube Channel

• $1102 monthly revenue

Así es USA is a faceless USA-focused Spanish YouTube and TikTok channel

Recently listed for sale on Flippa, reserve price $30,600…

Created in July 2023 and operated from Spain… Over the past 12 months, it generated $13,224 in revenue at a 96% profit margin, with 3.5M views and 15,000 new subscribers… the channel is structurally optimized for passive income and repeatable scaling…

Built with a listicle-style format that is easy to replicate and scale, the business is ideal for buyers seeking a ready-to-grow faceless YouTube channel that is both automated and profitable.

The channel thrives on a simple yet powerful content formula: faceless narration, AI voiceover, engaging visuals, and top-ranking list videos about U.S. cities, states, and American lifestyle topics tailored for Spanish-speaking audiences.

Only 37 videos on the YouTube channel, so they’re posting about once per month.

What other topics / languages could you try this for?

Further inspiration…

• New Faceless YouTube Channel Earning $70K/Month
• $75K From This Faceless Channel Launched in January
• AI-Generated YouTube Channel Earning $10K/Month

• Whitney

• Niche Site Owner

• €100-400 monthly revenue

Whitney writes…

[I earn] €100-400 a month from small travel guides and affiliates.

Sounds like she has a small travel site about her local area, sharing…

Mostly useful information: how to get to the airport/where to sleep/trips for the day or things that help you save time, money, and nerves.

She makes money…

Mostly through affiliate links, but only to things that people need when they travel.

One of the companies she’s an affiliate for…

Kiwitaxi: transfers to and from the airport and city… someone once ordered a transfer worth almost €1000, and I got more than €100 from it.

Whitney doesn’t link to her site or say what area she’s focused on. But judging by her past comments on Reddit, I suspect it’s a capital city in Eastern Europe

I reckon every oft-visited city in the world could have a profitable site like this, or even several.

Whitney says the work is “slow and boring,” but sounds fairly passive once you have the initial info written up

• Yang Mun

• AI Influencer

• $70,000+ revenue in 4 months

Maria Flannery writes about the Yang Mun Instagram account, created October 2025…

With millions of followers, Yang Mun and his videos addressing ‘ancient wisdom for modern life’ have clearly struck a chord with social media users looking for deeper meaning.

The videos are serene: an elderly East Asian monk, often in an orange robe, sitting cross legged in a perfectly manicured garden or inside a temple… in all of the clips, he imparts a piece of advice or inspiration…

So far, nothing seems amiss. Except: Yang Mun is not real. All of his videos are entirely AI-generated

The unreal Yang Mun sells ebooks ranging in price from $10-50

Maria again…

According to the website, more than 7,000 people have bought one of the e-books so far, and hundreds more have purportedly bought the more expensive package.

7000+ buyers = at least $70K revenue, and as much as $350K

Yeti-Boo is another AI-generated influencer who has been crushing it, proving there’s clearly an appetite for this kind of content.

How about creating an AI-generated influencer based on a real historical figure people like to quote?

For example: Confucius, Nostradamus, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Socrates, or Marcus Aurelius.

• Jeremy

• Vibe Coder

• $1 per sale

Jeremy writes…

On Sunday I hacked together a super simple, super cheap feedback widget for my own projects.

Everything I found was either buggy or 20–50$/month for basic stuff, so I shipped my own in a day and installed it on all my sites.

People started using it too and my first sales came in.

Now it’s the side project that makes the most money for me, even though it began as a “for myself” tool and the code is nothing fancy.

It’s an embeddable feedback widget built with AI and sold at a very low price…

1$/month per site. It’s so cheap that most people are too lazy to rebuild it / vibe coding it, and that’s the whole point.

Unclear how much money Jeremy has made from it, but sounds like those $1 sales are adding up nicely

Someone commented…

This is the way. I’ve also built 3 mini saas which are ridiculously inexpensive. Many long term users beats few short term users

Got me thinking: what other simple tools could you build in a day and sell for $1?

Worth brainstorming with AI, see what you come up with.

For building, try Claude Code, which seems to be the best vibe coding tool out there right now

• Fireplace 10 hours

• YouTube Channel

• $1 Million estimated ad revenue

Shaan Puri and Sam Parr recently shared 4 dumb ideas that made people rich …

One of them is a 9-year-old video on YouTube…

It’s a 10-hour video of a fireplace with 157 million views… they don’t even add logs to the fire… it must be a 30-second loop.

The channel has 120,000 subscribers but just that one video.

Apparently it was created by someone in Romania and the video has earned an estimated $1M from ad revenue

Sam calls this an “ambient channel” and cites some other examples he’s seen…

• Old money Brazil music
• 1980s finance
• Classical music that goes hard

But the most famous is Lofi Girl

15 million subscribers, 2.5 billion views… making about a $100,000 a month

These kinds of channels are getting much easier to create now with AI tools.

Could be worth setting one up, adding a few videos, seeing what happens

• Rachel and Dalton

• Founders of Big Sky Automation

• $1000 Per Mailing

From Side Hustle Nation…

Here’s the idea: the Postal Service lets you deliver a postcard to every home on a mail route for about $0.25 apiece.

You can use that to advertise your own business — or you can do what Rachel and Dalton do and sell that exposure to other local businesses.

By stacking multiple advertisers onto a single oversized postcard, they spread out the cost, create an affordable local advertising product, and keep the difference as profit.

To find advertisers, they reach out to local businesses via Facebook Messenger

Hey, I’m Rachel… We’re sending out a postcard to 2,500 homes in Miller Creek. Spots start at $150 — would you be interested?

The math

• 16 advertisers × $150 = $2,400 revenue
• Printing, postage, and fulfillment = $1,300
• Profit per mailing = $1,100

Rachel and Dalton have done 20 mailings in about seven months, so they’ve likely profited $20,000 in that time

Pretty straight-forward business that could be replicated in many areas.

• Zachary Hourihane

• Founder of Swiftologist

• $50,000 estimated monthly revenue

From Side Hustle Nation…

• 10 Creative Side Hustles That Make Real Money

My favorite story there

Zachary Hourihane quit his marketing job to be a full-time Taylor Swift content creator.

Today he’s got 250,000+ followers across YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and was featured in HBO’s documentary about the Swift-Scooter Braun controversy.

The crazy part is Zachary’s Patreon, where he has 10.1K people paying $3-25 per month for exclusive content

That’s a minimum of $30,300 per month, but probably more like $40K/mo.

Factor in other revenue streams (YouTube ad revenue, podcast sponsorships, etc.) and I suspect Zachary is pulling in around $50K each month

SHN wonders…

Could you do this in your niche? Gaming, sports, TV shows, whatever you’re obsessed with? The playbook is there: bring real expertise, be consistent, build community, monetize through subscriptions.

Another angle is to become a superfan of popular software and teach others how to use it

Like these folks…

• $200K in 3 Years Helping People With Notion
• $6500/Month Helping People Use Zapier

• Mike

• Entrepreneur

• $190,000 Annual Net Income

Mike writes…

I was a painter in the Chicago suburbs working for an a**hole. I made $25 an hour…

I did a fair amount of side work for extra money.

One weekend I did really well on a fairly big side job and made about $2500 over the weekend (this was basically a windfall). I posted before and after pictures in a local facebook group and the post went viral.

I ended up booking two weeks worth of work from that post (and more as time went on)…

I figured screw it… I spent $1200 on a POS van and quit my job… I was able to make around $100k in my first year as a solo operator.

Fast forward a few years and we’re doing $2m annually, I’ve got a 50/50 partner, the business is extremely well systemized and I work 0-5 hours per week on that business.

I’m not exactly killing it financially because we have a lot of overhead in order to keep out of the day to day, but I’m making $180-200k with complete flexibility.

Clearly he worked a lot more than 5 hours per week to build the business

But just goes to show how much money there is to be made in simple, blue collar service work.

And how hands-off such a business can become with the right systems in place

• Sebastian Mattsson

• Founder of Launchli

• $232 monthly recurring revenue

From an interview with Sebastian Mattsson

Sebastian is a 19-year-old founder from Sweden…

After years of digital marketing, design, and experimenting with online businesses, he stumbled into SaaS, and built Launchli…

Within 30 days of launching, he reached his first 100 users, completely organically.

A couple of weeks later, he’s at $232 monthly recurring revenue from 8 paying users

Not a ton of money, but also pretty impressive considering he built Launchli with an AI coding tool: Lovable (aff link).

Sebastian writes…

Lovable genuinely changed everything for me. It removed every technical barrier I had… [It] basically gave me the power to build real applications without being a coder.

His advice for other founders…

Don’t overfocus on features. Your product isn’t the problem. Your distribution is.

If you consistently show up where your users already hang out, give value, and talk to people, you will get users, even with no audience, no ads, and no budget.

If you have an idea for an app or software, spend a weekend building with a tool like Lovable and see how it goes

• Matt Moody

• Founder of Salina311

• $500,000 annual revenue

From a recent breakdown of Salina311, a daily newsletter for Salina, Kansas (pop 46,000)…

27k free subscribers, 2.5k paid subscribers… Started by Matt Moody, a serial AI/ML entrepreneur, in 2021

The $500K/year revenue comes via

• Advertising: $180K
• Subscriptions: $220K (digital & print)
• Events: $12K
• Legal notices: $95K

The really interesting part…

The content in Salina311 is all automated by specialized agents. Some examples:

Public Meeting Agent: Transcribes public meetings on YouTube with OpenAI Whisper, identifies key points, turns key points into headlines, writes articles and sends to Ghost by API, sends Matt a text message to review (by Twilio)

Interview Agent: Uses Gmail API to conduct back and forth async interviews with public figures. Once interview is finished, drafts article, sends to Ghost by API, and sends Matt a text message to review…

Scraping crime statistics and local crimes committed into a weekly crime newsletter

Scraping obituaries posted elsewhere and parsing those submitted by forms into a weekly obituaries section

There’s an 80-minute interview with Matt on YouTube if you want to dive deeper…

What newsletter content could you automate with AI?

Perhaps an interview-focused newsletter for a particular niche using that interview agent?

• Derek Carlson

• Founder of Bend Buzz

• $10,000+ monthly revenue

Derek Carlson runs Bend Buzz, a 3x weekly newsletter about Bend, Oregon (pop. 108,000).

He recently shared that it took him 13 months to start earning more than $10K/month from the newsletter

Breakdown is 80% direct ads. 10% other (job board, premium memberships, etc), 10% social media deals. 

Expenses around 20% for ads, tech, and a freelance writer…

14k subs. I have two ad spots per newsletter and charge anywhere from $300 – $500 per ad, depending on the client. 

He says he barely does any outreach for advertisers; they all come to him

Regarding the job board…

Grabbed a free WordPress plugin that I added to my website… Folks can post jobs for $25 and I include them in the newsletter every Wednesday.

Derek apparently ran ads to grow fast…

I just hit 10k subs in my local newsletter and about 1/3 of those have been organic… if you can’t invest in ads you’re gonna have a really hard time growing the newsletter to a point where it’s worth the time and effort.

For organic growth, posting in the r/Bend subreddit (example) worked well…

I was lucky that my subreddit and mods were very receptive to the posts.

• Chris Cerra

• Founder of RemoteBase

• $100,000+ revenue

A recent interview with founder Chris Cerra…

• How RemoteBase Grew from 112 Subs to a 6 Figure Newsletter Business…

How Chris describes RemoteBase…

We find and curate the best accommodation deals for the digital nomad or the traveling remote worker… some people [say it’s] like Scott’s Cheap Flights for Airbnb.

Chris started the newsletter in 2019  

Growth was slow initially, and he paused operations for several months during the pandemic.

Now he’s got almost 11K subscribers, sends 2x per month, and has earned $100K+

Each edition of the newsletter (example) is a big list of Airbnb deals with ad spots in between.

Chris also has a premium upgrade for the newsletter, but it sounds like most revenue comes from the ads in the free version

Another example of a curated newsletter…

• $1000/Week Curating Content From a Popular Website

What kind of information or data could you curate that a niche audience would find valuable?

Perhaps something also related to deals, like RemoteBase and Scott’s Cheap Flights. The latter became a multi-million dollar business

• Kai Stone

• Entrepreneur

• $170,000 monthly revenue

Kai Stone posted recently on YouTube…

Sounds crazy but it’s legit

Some real client websites he shows in the video, nothing too fancy…

• designbyvigor.com
• dewittconstructionllc.com
• kdpplumbing.com

Kai emphasizes that he’s not just selling a website here, but a system that will get home service businesses more customers

The core of that system is the website, plus automations to capture and nurture leads that come through the website.

He has 574 clients paying him $297/month for the basic system, and a few paying up to $1,500/month for additional services (eg. Google Ads management, SEO).

All the sites and automations are built on HighLevel (aff link)

Kai says in the video…

I’m not sitting here pretending this is easy, but it’s super doable. I have very average intelligence. I have gnarly ADHD. I’m not super tech-savvy at all… if I can figure this out, I promise you, anyone could figure this out.

• Lenny Tim

• Founder of Le Mobilities

• $3000 monthly revenue

Nick Loper shares…

• 15 Things You Can Buy on Amazon to Make Money

#13 on the list is a mobility scooter that sells for $675.

Nick writes…

It supports up to 265 pounds, has flat-free eight-inch tires, a maximum speed of 3.7 mph, and a driving distance up to 12.4 miles per charge.

Lenny Tim went with a higher-end scooter but found it used for about $500 on Facebook Marketplace. Brand new ones are about $1,500. He gets his money back within one to three rentals at $250 a week plus $75 delivery.

The interesting thing Lenny did is he didn’t buy that first scooter until he had a critical mass of inbound inquiries.

Back in 2019, he just built a website to test demand. He didn’t buy any equipment, just built a nice site to see if people were calling or making requests.

He tried to get a domain that would match search well (Le Mobilities), did basic backend SEO, put up good pictures and info, and opened a Google My Business page. When several requests came, he bought the equipment.

Now Lenny earns $3000 a month renting out mobility scooters part-time

Surely a market for this in many populated areas.

Buy anything at wholesale that people buy… shirts, hats, toothpaste… go on TikTok Shop and Whatnot and start selling it. Go hard and every single person here can make $1M in profit a year in 24 months…

Live social shopping, it’s a half a trillion dollar industry in China… this already happened.

Every single person in this room, if you’re willing to work, will make $1M in profit selling plants, glasses, mugs, ties…

Meanwhile, Liah Yoo recently posted on YouTube…

She has her own beauty product on TikTok Shop, but anyone can promote it and earn commission

A creator discovered the product. They used it. They saw results. They were compelled to share it with their own followers. And boom, 3,000 bottles sold in 1 hour.

Apparently that oil sells for $28 a bottle. At 20% commission, that creator would have earned $16,800 in that one hour

You don’t actually need to do this live on TikTok, and you don’t need to build up a big audience.

More examples…

• She Earned $2970 in 30 Days By Leafing Through Poetry Books
• He Earned $9913 From This Simple 30-Second Video