Ask HN: Ideas are cheap, so what ideas can make $100k/year? As AI agents get better and better, we are all in the verse of having our day to day work changed in radical way. Thus, I would like to know what boring business exists that are so commonplace yet can manage $100k/year? It could be anything and any domain! Since it all boils to execution, I want to understand where there are values. What is value in general? |
Yes, there are exceptions, but those people usually spend years in successful businesses or deeply know their field. They’re not simply prompting ChatGPT to create a solution and building a website around it.
To answer your question, I’d focus on “apprenticeship” tasks an AI agent could handle with minimal data. Businesses invest in training and hiring for specific roles, so there’s value in offering cost-effective, streamlined solutions that cut out middlemen. For example, transforming basic photos into professional headshots is a clear and valuable application. It eliminates the need for a photographer with expensive equipment and studio space in a costly location (city centre), is highly automatable, and uses customer-provided data without needing to save it.
As for what value is, I can’t define it precisely, but for me, it’s about providing a service that benefits everyone involved—personal growth for me (knowledge, money, or enjoyment) and cost-effectiveness for the company or customer. Of course, you could take a more philosophical approach to it.
- I have $80,000 to renovate my kitchen
- there are A LOT of companies that will want this job
- however, it is ME, the person with all the money that needs to spend enormous amount of time trying to find companies on angi and google and yelp and god knows where else
- I have to keep notes or shit as different companies come to my house to give me quote, send me emails with 3D models and whatever
- then I have to in some way parse through all that to pick a company for this job
what I want is a place to post this job and then have companies fight over this job, submit proposals etc… with some AI bullshit to sift through and help me decide. then I want to be able to negotiate price by pitting one proposal against another to get the best thing for the best price
note that this is applicable to both large and small jobs, this example above works well even if the job is as simple as toilet replacement or snaking my pipes.
and of course this could work for other things, not just home improvement… “I have $75k budget and am looking for a pre-owned luxury car…” - dealerships come to me vs. me spending 11 weekends driving around or “I have 3500sq ft home in 22040 zipcode, give me a quote for house insurance” or “I have 2015 tesla s and 2020 audi etron in 22040, two drivers with pristine driving record, need quote for car insurance…”
This is more like $1bn/year idea though…
The other tasks, getting quotes and prefiltering, could be done by a virtual assistant if it's frequent enough.
Execution is what matters. And business model.
Market, price fit, strategy. And the team. These must be aligned.