Side hustles
Frequently Asked Questions
TrustMRR just hit its highest monthly traffic ever. When I launched the marketplace with open revenue data, I wasn’t sure it would work. Startup acquisitions are usually private. I was wrong. Every day, about a dozen startups get listed, buyers and sellers exchange 350+ messages, and one startup gets acquired. For the past five months, with every feature I shipped, I kept thinking: next month it’s over, the hype is gone. But I kept building anyway. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. Few succeed because most stop. If you keep fighting, you can do it too.
Today, I'm excited to launch my lifelong passion project, Grand Old Books!! 🚀 There are 1000s of beautiful novels of the past, not in English, locked up in old PDFs, with no physical copies left. We started with Indian texts and brought back 12 books in 6 languages with pictures and annotations. This is, and will always be, completely free. We can't let time wash away history. Please comment to let me know what book you'd like to see added.
I made $81,683 in February 2026. ⭐️ TrustMRR — $33.3k 📈 DataFast — $19.7K 🧑💻 CodeFast — $14.9K ⚡️ ShipFast — $8.8K 🐥 Twitter — $3.2K 🍜 Indie Page — $530 💨 Zenvoice — $394 🛡️ ByeDispute — $333 🎞️ YouTube — $211 🚀 LaunchViral — $129 🌱 HabitsGarden — $129 📚 WorkbookPDF — $57 My vibe-coded startup marketplace is now my #1 source of income with the 3% acquisition fee. My SaaS DataFast overtook my boilerplate ShipFast and my course CodeFast. And PoopUp did not make revenue this month 😭
Am i the only dork who still loses money on this xD https://trustmrr.com/special-category/op… Then again can't complain in my new role as OpenAI troublemaker. 😅
OpenClaw startups - Verified revenue on TrustMRR
Yes here is my 10 minute breathless rant about why I'm so excited about Notion Workers + Custom Agents... Context: I spent this afternoon building a custom agent to help me manage Shiori (a side project I shipped last weekend). I gave the custom agent everything it needs to understand what's happening in my product (email, log drain, sentry alerts, stripe payments, etc) and to do work on my behalf (access to coding agents). In an afternoon of tinkering, this agent can: - Diagnose bug reports proactively by looking through past email conversations, system logs, and database records - Draft replies to user questions with the correct answer based on past email threads, or help me proactively reach out to churning paid users - Self-construct a database of feature requests with an understanding of who is requesting the feature and how they're using the product today - Answer any question I have about how people use the app and what I should be thinking about next - Initiate Claude Code workflows to open PRs proactively in the background when someone sends a bug report or feature request This custom agent is now my "Side Project Chief of Staff" (I don't really know what a chief of staff does but this sounds right). I didn't write a single line of the worker code because I didn't need to: models are so good that I can link to the Workers readme, yap my desired outcome into a microphone, and I get a super-personal and highly-capable AI agent out the other side. So fucking cool. The future is now! I'm excited to see what everyone makes.
If you have applied @ycombinator you should also consider these equity-free grants too 1. @GoogleStartups : $100k in credits 2. @vercel : $3,600 in credits 3. @aforevc Grants $1,000 4. @joinedgecity grants : $5k-40K 5. @emergent_vc : upto 100k 6. @thielfellowship : upto 200K
how to build a bootstrapped startup without funding: 1. pick a problem you personally have. if you don't use your own product daily, quit now 2. skip the pitch deck. open your code editor. ship something ugly in a weekend 3. charge money from day 1. free users give you nothing but support tickets 4. use boring tech. PHP, SQLite, vanilla JS. frameworks are a trap that mass waste your time 5. host on cheap VPS ($5-20/mo). not AWS. you don't need kubernetes for 1,000 users 6. do customer support yourself. it's the fastest product feedback loop that exists 7. automate everything you do more than twice. cron jobs > employees. 8. grow on Twitter/X by building in public. your journey IS the marketing 9. keep your burn rate near zero so you never need to raise. ramen profitable > series A 10. say no to investors, cofounders, and "advisors" who want equity for intros i've been doing this for 10+ years now. no employees, no funding, no board meetings the entire VC game is designed to make you think you need permission to start you don't
AI models made you a superhuman. For 20 years, software barely moved. Now a guy in his bedroom with AI can compete with a 10-person company shipping slow and overcharging for bloated UI. You don’t need to reinvent anything. Just take a boring cash-cow product and make it 10x better: •Fair pricing •Cleaner design •Faster onboarding There’s a gap. Your only job is to close it.
Someone should make a YouTube series where they invite a vibe coder to build a startup from scratch on a specific theme (i.e., OpenClaw wrapper, gamified app, B2B SaaS) until they make $1. @thepatwalls's Starter Story would make a perfect fit. I'd be a hardcore watcher of the channel.
you're NGMI if you don't post on these subreddits to get your first users: r/InternetIsBeautiful (17M) r/Entrepreneur (4.8M) r/productivity (4M) r/business (2.5M) r/smallbusiness (2.2M) r/startups (1.8M) r/EntrepreneurRideAlong (593K) r/SideProject (430K) r/Business_Ideas (359K) r/SaaS (341K) r/thesidehustle (184K) r/ycombinator (132K) r/indiehackers (91K) r/MicroSaas (80K) r/GrowthHacking (77K) r/growmybusiness (63K) r/vibecoding (35K) r/AlphaandBetaUsers (21K)
I have AIDHD. The models are so good that I’m working on 5 different projects a day. At first it felt like distraction, but I’ve shipped more features and apps in the last 3 months than ever before. AI made building fun again. It’s a better programmer than me, so I can focus on creativity instead. I’m grateful to be alive at this moment. Decades from now, people will look back at this era as the best time to be a maker. Huge respect to the people building the models so idiots like me can just make stuff.
how to use openclaw to spin up 24/7 digital employees and build cash-flowing assets: 1. spin up openclaw (mac mini, vm, orgo, whatever) in a workspace so you can run 5–10 machines at once (main agent + sub-agents) 2. pick one boring workflow inside one industry (distributors, real estate, insurance, law firms) 3. map the workflow tip-to-tail (email/trigger → legacy software clicks → downloads → parsing → upload to crm) 4. use claude code to build the “under the hood” python pipeline (openclaw becomes the operator + trigger, code does the heavy lifting) 5. productize it as a repeatable bundle: “setup + 30 days management + new workflows each week” 6. use upwork as the lead source and the sandbox (it tells you what people pay for right now) 7. turn the best-paying workflow into a vertical workspace: 20 skills, 8 sub-agents, one invite link 8. sell it to bigger companies as “ai employees for this department” (with clear outcomes + SLA) "BuT yoU cAn'T bUiLD a BiG coMpaNY dOInG uPwoRk deAls" think about it like this “how does a $1k automation gig turn into a big company deal?” like this: 1. upwork gives you paid reps + proof someone pays for the workflow 2. those reps become case studies (“saved 12 hrs/week”, “uploaded 5k records/day”, “reduced ops errors by 80%”) 3. you stack 5–10 workflows in the same vertical 4. now you’re selling a package and not a one off deal which is tough 5. bigco buys packages because procurement 6. understands scopes + outcomes openclaw is the wrapper. claude code is the factory. sub agents/skills are the workforce. the vertical bundle is the product. episode is live on @startupideaspod i will never gatekeep i want to see you win in this openclawed world i am rooting for you watch.
let me tell you something my friend this is not the time to cancel subscriptions this is not the time to play it safe this is not the time to "wait and see" right now is the time to go fucking ALL IN >max out your Claude credits >burn through your $200 ChatGPT plan >spend all your tokens and top up AGAIN it's time to experiment, to build and PRINT a shit ton of money
how to use claude code + outscraper + crawl4ai to build a profitable online directory in 4 days for under $250 1. scrape 50k–70k raw records with outscraper 2. use claude code to clean, dedupe, and structure the data in passes 3. run crawl4ai to verify live sites and filter junk automatically 4. then enrich one layer at a time: inventory, pricing, images (claude vision), amenities, service areas “BuT aN oNlInE DiRecTorY isn’t a ReAl bUsiNesS” first it’s traffic + leads. then it’s premium listings. then it’s vertical saas (crm, quoting tools, booking). then it’s agents handling intake, routing, follow-ups. then it’s the transaction layer. episode is available on @startupideaspod you start with organized data and you end with owning the workflow directories are kinda like a trojan horse. watch
