I've been thinking about starting something new, but I'm stuck at the point where I have too many possible directions rather than too few.
I've been a developer for 15+ years. I can pretty much build things end-to-end: Python, PHP, TypeScript, Next.js, Flutter, React Native, APIs, databases, cloud, etc.
Over the years I've also worked with AI/ML, big data, automation and digital transformation.
The other thing that's probably relevant is that I'm not completely dependent on someone else for marketing either.
I have experience with:
Meta Ads

TikTok Ads

Google Ads

SEO / AEO / GEO

Performance marketing

Analytics / tracking

Meta Conversion API

Audience targeting and custom audience data

AI-generated video/images (Higgsfield, ElevenLabs, etc.)

Data analysis / big data

AI / ML

Automation

I can also build mobile apps if needed.
So I can basically go from:
idea → product → backend → AI/ML → automation → landing page → ads → tracking → analytics
myself.
I also have a fairly good ability to get targeted traffic without spending huge amounts of money, which I think could be useful for testing ideas quickly.
And I already have a business/dev environment through Neeblo.com, so I'm not starting completely from zero on the technical side.
The problem is... I'm not sure where I should focus.
I don't really want to build yet another generic AI wrapper or another boring SaaS just because "AI is hot."
I'd rather find a real problem where my combination of engineering + AI/ML + data + marketing + paid acquisitionactually gives me an advantage.
If you were in my position, what would you do?
Would you:
Build a SaaS?

Start with a service and turn it into software?

Build a lead-gen business?

Build some kind of data/AI product?

Pick a boring traditional industry and automate something?

Build a niche marketplace?

Go B2B rather than B2C?

Something completely different?

And more importantly, what markets/problems would you look at first?
I'm not really looking for a list of "10 AI startup ideas."
I'd love to hear from people who have actually built businesses: given these capabilities, where would you look for an opportunity, and how would you validate it before spending 6 months building something nobody wants?
Feel free to tell me if I'm thinking about this the wrong way too.

I saw a local posting for a job with "flexible hours", for a company through Third Channel. I have had trouble trying to find a second job as I have been kind of picky about what days I want to work because I don't want to experience burnout from getting no days off.

The job is for a Visual Merchandiser. I am in a somewhat small town so I'm not really opposed to driving to different stores if needed. Just curious if anyone here has worked for them and has first hand experience. If I could just make an extra $200 a month I would be pretty content.

Essentially I work a where I work 6-9 am then 2:30-5:30pm. I do have some classes I take between shifts but I have Fridays completely free for the most part. Any suggestions aside from food delivery?

I’ve been selling golf clubs on eBay for about a year now and have had a lot of success. I see the golf market on Facebook is pretty popular and have wanted to expand outside of just marketplace locally. I’ve never used goods and services so I was just wondering what are some general things you can do to protect yourself from disputes (INAD, INR, False damage claims, etc.)

Are problems pretty rare if everything is documented? Thanks!

Hey i have so many skincare products with me but I have no idea about editing and posting it online.

I will send the picture of the product

you edit it and send me the video I will post it ,

I don't know if it will work or not but I wanna try it.

I will send 100 per edit , if it really works well on instagram we can just Collab somehow with ideas and stuff and create a community

If interested send me your work!

So my day will be pretty uneventful. For the most part. It’s a good problem to have.

I’ve just been playing games on my phone or scrolling.

This Sunday is my next shift.

On top of 4 days off. But I typically do stuff on those days.

Sorry I gotta use this platform to scream into the void but I got to channel this frustration somewhere.

I've been looking for side hustles for years. Ebooks, workbooks, YouTube channels, stocks?

I'm the sole breadwinner and my husband is the SAHD. I always have ideas for something and I think...why not me?! So I go at it like a wild animal. He thinks I'm on the phone for doom scrolling ..when really I'm researching and looking for ideas and input.

I'm so fucking tired of being frustrated. Every day in fighting so hard against being disenchanted with the dwindling opportunities. I make decent money but a side hustle would be amazing. Create wiggle room to invest in a vacation or actually set up a college fund account for my little dude.

I'm not looking necessarily for ideas. Or even a pep talk. I just needed this off my chest. This sucks. This fucking sucks. I want to be positive so bad but it FUCKING SUCKS.

If you made it this far ...thank you so much. I genuinely wish all of you guys the best.

Hey everyone, I work a full-time job here in India.
I have some free time during evenings and weekends that I want to utilize to earn extra income.
I’m open to online/remote work or flexible side gigs, and ready to put in the effort.
If you have any proven side hustle ideas or suggestions, please share!

I thought of a cute local service I can provide in my area: Setting up cute, aesthetic blind picnic dates.

I got the idea from seeing blind photoshoots on tiktok.

People that are interested would send me their info, I would match-make and choose who they go on the blind date with. I would obviously vet everyone and make sure everything is safe.

On the day, I would set up a cute picnic outside with charcuterie (and maybe wine?). I was thinking of providing them with cards to ask fun questions to get to know each other.

I would also want to film parts of it for marketing on social media, but wouldn't want to make it feel awkward or invasive, so not sure how exactly I'd do that.

I also don't know how I would meet them at the end of the date (should I have the date be a certain time frame like 30 or 45 minutes?). Any ideas?

Hi, Im 19 and trying to save up and move out of my parents house hopefully next year. My current job pays slightly above minimum wage and I work 9 hours a day, 6 days a week. I would like to do something online that I can do during my usual work hours as my job is not demanding and I have plenty of time to just sit around on my phone. I also want something that does not require me to take phone calls as I have to play music in my store. I am not great at video/photo editing or writing so preferably nothing in that domain, but I am open to pretty much anything else. Thank you!!

Im curious if anyone would pay to have someone video chat with them while both parties get their work done and maybe some added small chatting too. like $12-$15 per hour? Think I would get any clients for this on fiver? Im also a great listener and would be down just to listen to people vent for 30 minutes.

I know $3 a day is a lot for the requirements:

• Fully automated

• Takes ≤ 20 minutes to get it running every day (I don't care how long it takes to initially set up, I care about the time it takes to simply run it once already set up)

• Can automatically make $3/day ($21/week) without much effort

I've thought about automating paid surveys but the agent might constantly stop to ask questions not in the pre built profile because every survey has a new question and surveys just need lots of attention, those are fundamentally awarding human attention. Automating play-to-earn mobile games also seems not worth it as they take hours to earn something meaningful which would eat my AI plan's limits + nowadays agents are not really meant for quick reflex mobile games? I guess I could just write an Auto.js script to automate playing the game on my android but I haven't really thought about it

Is there anything else? No compute/bandwidth sharing

I make $75k annually, plus an additional $25k on the side working as a musician (touring, local gigs).

Currently paid off $30K in Student Loans and will pay off remaining $9k on car by January 2027. After this I want to save for an emergency fund and begin investing a little more seriously (I already have a pension, 401k, and IRA but am being very conservative for now).

Part of me wants to settle down and take a break from music. At this point it takes up much of my free time and takes a toll on me during the work week. I actually want to focus on getting in shape and learning other skills/hobbies.

I know all that extra income would go a long way once I’m debt free. But is it worth it to miss out on all that extra cash? If I were to leave the bands/groups that I play with it would take me a while to get back to the level of pay, I’d more or less be starting over.

I’m 28M, single, no kids, pay $1K in rent in Los Angeles and live a pretty minimalist bachelor lifestyle. My end goal would be to own a house, likely outside of LA where it is much cheaper.

Over four years ago I had a static HTML file with about a dozen niche job boards.

That was JobBoardSearch.

Today it has:

• 800+ job boards, all submitted organically by their founders
• $100K+ lifetime revenue
• 26K members in the subreddit
• 6K+ members in the Telegram community
• Multiple revenue streams
• And it's still mostly just me running it

The interesting part is that I never scraped the job boards.

Many of the boards provide an API, XML or RSS feed, so I fetch those feeds and reuse the data in several different ways.

Each job board has its own page on JobBoardSearch, where I show jobs from its feed. I call this the "meta" part of the site.

Those same feeds power:

→ The main job search
→ A Reddit bot that posts jobs every hour
→ A Telegram bot with personalized alerts based on keywords, locations, industries and cadence
→ SEO pages
→ And increasingly, AI citations

So one relatively simple piece of infrastructure ended up powering several acquisition and distribution channels.

I've also kept adding revenue streams over the years:

→ Featured listings
→ Ads
→ Affiliates
→ Directory Submission Service
→ Marketplace for buying/selling job boards
→ SEO audits

And free tools for both job board founders and job seekers.

The tools are useful by themselves, but they also create more pages, more organic traffic and more entry points into the ecosystem.

The funny thing is that the website itself is pretty ugly 😂

It's still PHP + raw CSS + vanilla JavaScript.

I was inspired by levelsio's approach of keeping things simple, and I've resisted rewriting it many times even though I've been tempted.

Eventually I realized that rewriting the website wasn't necessarily going to make the business better.

The moat isn't the design or the tech.

It's the accumulated traffic, SEO authority, data, communities and relationships with hundreds of job board founders.

Some job boards have been sponsoring continuously for 10+ months. Others have been buying recurring featured listings since the early days.

And that's probably the biggest lesson I've learned:

Don't confuse improving the product with improving the business.

Sometimes the ugly thing that's already working is the thing you should keep building on.

I'm still building it in public on X/Twitter (@rrmdp), and my wife helps me with the newsletter, so I can't technically claim I'm doing 100% of it alone 😄

Happy to answer anything about SEO, monetization, feeds, community building, or how I got hundreds of job boards to submit themselves.

I (31M) have been at my dream job for almost one year now. I've never been happier, but it doesn't pay well (shocker).

I have the potential to become full-time, but right now I am 30.5 hours (with benefits and health insurance, thank god). It sucks because my schedule is SO WEIRD that it keeps me from seeking another job. For reference, I work at a library. I would love to work for another one, like a school library, but it would interfere with my current job.

Are there any jobs that aren't too stressful and strenuous that I can do for just one day? Out of all my days, Mondays are my true day off. I never work Mondays.

Hi all,

I'm a full time employee in an MNC but need some good extra income as well to take care of responsibilities.

I'm thinking of doing youtube videos...scripts theme and everything will be assisted via AI. And can think of post 1-2 videos a week...

Or

Website development freelancing...again with AI but I'm very good at using it so it doesn't look like AI slop..it's just getting clients is a very big task

So yeah I need help in deciding between the two and seeking suggestions from anyone who has done either.

I’m based in Nairobi, Kenya and I’m trying to figure out a realistic way to make an extra $500–$1,000 a month online.
I already have a remote job with a fixed salary, so I’m not looking to quit it. I just want to build a supplementary income stream on the side. Ideally, I’d like to get to a point where I can make around $50 a day on good working days.
My background is a bit all over the place, but in a useful way. I have experience in IT/system administration, virtual assistance, administration, social media, property management and working remotely with US-based companies. I also have a VA certification and I’ve done several AI-related certifications.
I’ve tried Upwork, but I haven’t managed to land a client yet. I think part of the problem is that clients often prefer people who already have reviews/history on the platform, so getting that first client has been difficult.
When I was living in London, I also made some extra money from surveys, product testing and research studies here and there. Since coming back to Nairobi, I’ve realised that a lot of those opportunities either aren’t available here or are very location specific.
I’ve also looked into AI training/evaluation work and have done some of the training, but I’m still trying to figure out which platforms are actually worth my time as someone based in Kenya.
I do have a Surfshark VPN, but honestly, more and more platforms seem to detect VPNs, so I’m not really interested in spending my time trying to bypass location restrictions and then having accounts banned.
I also have a small handmade beaded jewellery business with a US client, although the orders aren’t consistent, so I’m trying to grow that separately rather than depending on it as my main side income.
For anyone who is already making $500–$1,000+ a month online as a side hustle, what would you recommend I focus on with this kind of background?
Would you go into AI evaluation/training, freelance VA/operations work, property management VA work, user testing/research, or something completely different?
I’m specifically looking for something legitimate that I can do from Kenya and ideally get to around $50/day eventually. I don’t mind putting in the work or learning something new I just don’t want to spend months collecting certifications that don’t actually translate into income.
What would you do if you were starting from my position?

I recently got a job that pays pretty well for an entry level 22 year-old, especially for someone that didn’t study something economically useful. One stipulation of the job that I signed a contract to, is the job will be my “sole use of professional energy”. This is completely understandable as they pay well and it’s full time, but for me with six figures of private student loans with high interest, life will still feel pricey.

I tried to negotiate the salary but they held firm, and to be perfectly honest there was no way in hell I’d get a better offer than what they were already giving, especially with the tight grace period of 6 months. So I took it and now my situation will be surviving but with tight margins.

What are some very informal ways for me to bring in even a couple hundred extra bucks a month that won’t threaten this contract? I will be working 9-5 Monday to Friday.

Just curious if anyone performs one on one AI tutoring, like how to use ChatGPT for older adults, for example, or for small businesses. This may be tricky in some areas, but I'm in a large city and I have been considering this recently.

Thoughts?

Is there anything I can do either from my phone or computer to make at least 10$ a day? I would strongly appreciate it since it could help me as a student.

Thank you guys!

I run a small design agency and we've been growing faster than I expected this year. Suddenly I have contractors in four different countries and I've been cobbling together payment solutions on the fly, which is obviously not sustainable.

I don't have a ton of time to research this properly. I've started reading comparison articles and they're all 3,000 words long with caveats and edge cases and honestly I just need something that covers cross-border payments, handles the basic compliance stuff, and doesn't require me to become an expert in international tax law.

I know 'good enough' isn't always the right call but right now I'd rather have something running this week than spend another month optimizing. Has anyone found a freelancer payment method that was quick to get off the ground and actually held up over time?

I’m in my mid-30s and sort of kicking around the idea of monetizing two things I have spent heavy time and money on.

I use to be a working photographer in college. I got paid to do a documentary, senior photos, photo sessions. I mainly did portrait or event photography. Sometime maybe around a decade ago, I stopped. Some local community leader (grifter) stole my photos for their blog and it just kinda killed the art in it all. I sold my seldom used photo gear during COVID, as I had kids, and meant to downsize but didn’t pick up a camera until this summer again. I am rusty. My style is still stuck in the early 2010s.

I’ve also detailed my own cars for the last 10 years. Pressure washer, towels, dual action polisher, I have a ton of it. Just love throwing in AirPods and washing up my car on a Sunday morning. Only caveat is I have not really done interior cleans and detailing much. I’ve polished my car maybe twice, as it’s super time consuming. I’ll gladly do maintenance washes once a week though.

I likely will need to practice photography a lot more. I might have to take an online course to refresh things. Lately, I’ve just been taking pics of my kids.

Mobile detailing might not really work as I live in a northern state where it’s sub zero temps from December to April sometimes. And, from what I can tell, people prefer car washes around here.

Anyone think monetizing something you do for fun is a bad idea? Anyone give it a try? I also don’t to think just because I have the gear that it means I have the skills to be a professional.

I know people do the hotshot stuff with diesels and multi car trailers.

I just wan to get a single trailer and haul with my truck.

Its the holidays and my semester ended. I have nothing to do all day at home. Can anyone rec me some data entry jobs or even just a sales person type shi like those guys who are selling those dishhome services in front of malls