689: 18 AI-Assisted Product Ideas You Could Build and Sell

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1:17We've got 15 at least of these to go through. And to help me out, he's no stranger to the side hustle show. Longtime listener, serial side hustler from do you even blog.com and code playbook.com. Pete McPherson, welcome back. Thank you, Nick. I appreciate you having me on again. You bet. So you were just last on only a few months ago, episode 659. If you want to go back in the archives and check that out. There was a lot of interest around that because you were talking about using AI to build software, sometimes recurring revenue software, the holy grail of side hustles. That's right. And so episode 659, if you want to go check that one out, we talked a little bit about idea generation in that episode.

1:56But today, we figured we'd just open up the brainstorming wishlist here and just throw out some ideas. And so I want to tee this up with an idea that is kind of been on the top of my mind. And I want to get your take on how feasible this would be. And so I'm calling this kind of the content curator tool, for lack of a better word, because every week, me and my assistant, we spend some time looking for interesting side hustle stories. And we include those in our newsletter at the bottom, like, hey, we found this, you might also be interested in this. Oh, so and so made, you know, 5000 bucks last month selling ice cream at community events.

2:33Like, oh, okay, I didn't know you could do that. Like, just random little side hustle stories like that. So one, could you build a curated newsletter and you train it on your own voice? Like, I'm still big on like the newsletter model. But the curation part is time consuming, especially if you got to recreate it every single day. The second use case that I see would be like, okay, could you create a summary of 10 of these that you find every week and build me an outline that I could use for an episode, right? And so that would be a very specific use case. I think you could do this in just about any industry, hobby, niche, like in the car business.

3:05Everybody in the car business subscribes to automotive news. Could you create a digital automotive news that had a unique voice, had a unique perspective? We've talked to local curators who are talking about community events in their local hometown. There's a lot of work that goes into building something like that. I'm wondering if there's a way to scrape, for lack of a better word, but like somehow automate that curation process. Yes. Well, there's always a way, period. The question is, is it viable or not? I would argue this is a great idea. The first thing that popped in my head were these old RSS feed conglomerators.

3:42I can't even remember the names of them. FeedBurner, and there was a handful of others. A lot of these things stopped working or closed down. I don't know if you remember this, like probably maybe six years ago, eight years ago or something. Yeah. Like Feedly was one that I used. I remember people complaining, like, are you kidding? I use this every day. Yeah. Google Reader. Yeah. Yeah. I think it would be totally viable to be able to input certain sources. Maybe it's like, maybe it's like a creator you already follow. Maybe they have a blog. Maybe they have a YouTube channel. Maybe they have social media.

4:15It would be cool if you could put in any channel like that. Or even their email address. There are ways to just like create a fake email address for your app, receive that email, and then automatically do something with it. So, yeah, I think it'd be cool to create this like conglomerator with a bunch of different sources and then fine tune with AI probably some different prompts that'll like format it into what you want to see. Have it emailed to you daily or weekly to like comb through. Yeah, I think that's totally viable. Yeah. I think that's a great idea too. Like, I think that's actually viable for financial gains, not just like, can you make it?

4:55I think that's good. Yeah. It could be a consumer facing thing. Like, could you send, you know, do the formatting and send that out to people? Like here's, here are the coolest articles we found about gardening or parenting or whatever this week, you know, put your own unique spin on it or whatever. And it could be an internal tool as well to help guide, you know, future episode content and stuff. Hey, you get a load of these top 10 side hustles of the week that you never heard of. Boom, boom, boom, boom. I think that'd be fun. Would you like to hear a really somewhat similar idea actually that's on my list?

5:23Let's hear it. I initially called this, there's a bunch of, I have a feeling we're going to release a bunch of really crappy names by the way. It's just idea. So I named this content bank. This was originally an idea for creators like us, podcasters or YouTubers or marketers or whatever. Originally, it's not anymore. I'm going to read what I wrote and then I'm going to read my new idea. I wrote down a searchable database of all of your content aggregated across all of your channels, social, email, YouTube, blog, podcast, everything. Just a database links to everything, maybe even like a little AI summary of a piece of content.

6:04And here's the thing. And here's what triggered this, a new idea searchable. And the more I think about this, I actually think a cool side hustle app would be search on steroids. As in, what if you had your own search bar that you could specify where it searches? So I'll just give you a really personal example. I would use this all the time. I'm pretty sure I would use this like three times an hour if I had it. A search bar that would search my Google Drive, my Facebook account, my Obsidian, Asifdian is like my note-taking app on my computer, my calendar, and Apple reminders. That's all I want.

6:44Like, I don't want it to search anything else. But if I could have a tool that I just search for something and it searches all of those things and gives me results, I would pay handsomely for this, Nick. What do you think? I guess I don't see myself using it. Oh, really? Well, here's the use case for me. I'll get emails from listeners and be like, do you remember the episode where you talked to so-and-so and she had a business? you know and they're trying to find and it's like usually that triggers enough like oh yeah that sounds familiar i think you're thinking of this person or this episode and so i can kind of go through my own mental database for that but i'm i often joke that i wish my house was as easily searchable as gmail like where do we put the keys where can we find the you know the kid's sweatshirt you know so there is a there's something valuable in search but i'm not i don't know if i have maybe I don't have that much, that big of a library or like that big of a problem finding stuff.

7:36I definitely do. I would use this all the time. Also, why can't you search your house like that? The big fail. So we registered like our kids emails, you know, when they were born, like, you know, first name, last name at gmail.com can offer the life of us figure out where we put the password. Like it was pre recovery account, you know, set up a backup and like none of that. And so they're like, I forgot my password, Google. And Google's like, well, what was the last password do you remember? You're like, no, no, no, you don't understand. We don't remember any of them. So it's like unrecoverable.

8:04Yeah. What if you could build an app that could search your house? Like you have blink cameras these days, outside and inside. I have three personally, mostly outside, just security cameras or whatnot. I know there's a way to tie into that. And I watched a couple of YouTube videos months ago, like six months ago of people coding, searching live video or almost live. As in like the AI was analyzing the video like once a second or so. And you could say like, where's the red ball? And it would show you the red ball. Like this was six months ago. You could probably build something that could search your keys.

8:42Yeah, that's an interesting one. So Content Bank is for creators who've been in the game for a long time. They've got a huge body of work that they want to be able to find specific documents or specific clips or something like that. Multi-channel. It has to search blog email youtube that stuff one thing we do do is like in creating clip shows is searching transcripts or specific like we did this on the recent burnout episode i need to find the episodes where people are specifically talking about how they felt burnout how they dealt with it how they overcame that and so trying to find those specific clips but that's those transcripts are all in google drive so it's like one channel search yeah still a good idea though you want me to go again or you got one?

9:23I got one. This actually comes from my wife who does photography as a side hustle. And I was like, what would be on your wishlist of an app? And she's like, I want to know the angle of the sun for like lighting purposes for photography based on a Google map location or a Google Earth location. I need, I want to go here and I want to figure out at six o 'clock, is it better to show up at six o 'clock? Is it better to show up at eight o 'clock, right? Where's, where's the angle of the sun? And I feel like this has got to be totally viable based on what It was just historic atmospheric data or astronomical data?

9:58Astronomical data. I have no idea. I'll tell you what. Instead of commenting whether I would use that because I wouldn't, because I wouldn't have any need for it, I was totally picturing in my head. First of all, I think you could mostly ignore Google Maps. I think there are actually APIs, which if you want me to break down what an API is, I'm totally willing to, or I'll just skip it for now. I think there are APIs out there by third-party companies you and I have never heard of. You probably do some Googling and discover a lot of that data is readily available. It's not in an app form. It's not like your wife could choose on a map.

10:36Like, I am here, and it's 7.30 a.m. on a Tuesday, July, whatever. Like that, yeah, you could build around that. But I think that data would actually be really easy to find. That's my guess. Yeah, I'm kind of with you. Latitude, longitude, and then you'd add the interface layer on top of it to make it usable. Also, I'll just continue brainstorming ideas here. One thing that would take that the extra mile for me, I could see doing, is when in the next five days is it going to be best to shoot? Let's say you had that option. It'd be like, no, Tuesday is actually stormy, cloudy, or whatever. but it could say hey Wednesday it's supposed to be partly cloudy with a late sunset at 9 27 p.m and that light would be perfect or something like that yeah all right what else you got okay uh let's stick with this theme of readily available data because I know for my next idea here the data's out there somebody just has to like finesse it so I call this voice to kcal this has been on my ideal list for like a year and a half.

11:39I love calorie tracking until I hate calorie tracking what I eat. There are apps that do it really well, but you're like searching for your food exactly. And then there's serving size and then it's so on and so on and so on. Like it's kind of cool. And then you do it for like four meals and you're like, wow, this is a massive pain. Yeah. I've used MyFitnessPal like off and on for years. And the reason it's off and on is because it's tedious. It's such a hassle. So first of all, a billion dollar idea would be to make that 10 times easier, however you can. That's just my billion dollar idea. Have you seen the ones that do, like you're just supposed to take a picture of your plate and it somehow knows what that food is and it gives you an estimate?

12:24Yes. Okay. Great idea. I actually think that's way harder than what I'm about to say. Mine's like an in-between. It's not as useful as that, but it's more useful than typing it in. I would like to just talk at the app and say, like, I just had a Culver's Double Deluxe Butterburger. It's amazing, by the way. The best fast food burger you can buy. Your entire day's allotment of calories in one sitting. Oh, my God. It's so much. I don't even know how many, but it's a lot. And I just had fries and a large Coke Zero. I just want to say that. Literally hit the record button. Say that. The app will transcribe it.

13:02it'll send it to ai for some some formatting some structuring which is actually really simple to do like it'll break it down into okay meal object one burger the name of it culver's double deluxe or whatever that is and then query that same database that my fitness pal is yeah like how many calories is that i know that data is out there i think the easiest version of this slide hustle i think the picture thing is actually better but actually i could be wrong but i actually feel like that's way harder. I don't know. I just want to talk to it. I just want to record for 20 seconds, say my entire meal, say I had two servings of this or three servings of this, and then boom, calories.

13:42No, I like it. And then the exit plan, obviously, that would be a great acquisition target for a MyFitnessPal, which I think is owned by Under Armour. So there's definitely some players out there in this space who would be, you would think they would want to add this to their tech stack. Yeah, I would hope so. They better, else I'm not going to use their F anymore. More with Pete in just a moment, including a couple quick ways to validate demand for your product idea, plus lots more AI ideas to spark your creative energy coming up right after this. Are you still overpaying for wireless? It's time to say yes to saying no.

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16:47One tool you could use is Ahrefs, but I imagine any keyword research tool would probably have similar functionality. You can plug in one of the AI tool directories. I use Matt Wolf's future tools.io for this example. And then you want to look for their organic keyword footprint, like how, where are they getting traffic from? And I looked for keywords that started with AI in this case. And some of the stuff that comes up that they're already ranking for that, that, you know, there's demand for it. Cause there's like a certain search volume around this was AI portrait generator, which I thought was kind of interesting.

17:21And you've seen people do pet portraits inspire you know make make my dog look like a you know renaissance era so it's like okay that's a thing ai recipe generator was had 2000 monthly searches ai symptom checker which you can't can't imagine anyway that would go wrong but 1500 searches for that a couple interesting ones were ai minecraft skin generator with 500 searches a month and a keyword difficulty of seven meaning not very difficult that's on a scale from zero to 100 ai prayer generator 400 monthly searches with a kd keyword difficulty of zero did you use ai to start generating prayers people i thought that was fantastic and then the ai face combiner had a and then there were actually a lot of variations of kind of like a face mesh type of keyword people looking for that kind of tool but 250 searches specifically for the face combiner tool i guess to maybe see what your future kid might look like i don't know what what would be the use case of combining faces but people are looking for it that's interesting and then another method that you can look for and absolutely free uh you know without paying for hrefs or another tool is just to look for on reddit is there an app that you know in quotes is there a tool that is there or you know looking for an app blank you know and those types of keywords people will be like typing in you maybe see something exists or you might have other people chiming in oh i totally wish that existed or alternative to blank, you know, alternative to Canva, alternative to Ahrefs, alternative to ConvertKit, stuff like that.

18:50So you see people teeing up those types of things as a way to invalidate demand. Like, well, it's not just in my head. Other people are looking for this too. Yeah, for sure. All right. What's next on your list? Okay. I got a fun one. I don't know if this is in demand per se, but I would try it as a parent and maybe you would too. I'm calling this Chore Forge. F-O-R-G-E. Chore Forge. Okay. And this would be a game for families, presumably people with kids. And I would like to turn household chores into a productivity game. That's it. We each have our own little user account and avatar and it's cute and it's cartoony.

19:32And we, the parents, can customize the chores, obviously, that we do, that our children do, et cetera, and customize the rewards. Charts, points, leveling up. You know what I mean? Like some sort of productivity game, but based on familial chores where each person can be competing against each other. My daughter and my son can be competing. It's just a random idea. Okay. I would love kids versus parents. Like when we pit the kids against each other, it's like a recipe for heartache and sadness. But if they're competing against the parents, they're all in. I like that too. Yeah, it's brilliant.

20:08Okay. So you're like, okay, get, you know, earn five points, take out the trash, empty the dishwasher, earn 10 points, like stuff like that. Yeah. And not only that, I'll tell you my kids personally and probably everybody else's, they love cute creatures. It kind of reminds me of the old Tamagotchi. Do you remember those things? Sure. You know, little Tamagotchi toys from the 90s. If they could start as like a small cat, a kitten, or a small dog, or a raccoon, or a horse, or literally anything, and if they could see their character progressing, leveling up. Oh, yeah. It's all about leveling up.

20:40Two and a half weeks left, 100 points, and then your character levels up. If they see that happen, they're locked in. Yes. I will probably never have to tell them to do this ever again. Yeah, it's like the evolution of your Pokemon. Yeah. They're like, what other chores can I do right now? I want to see my character level up right yeah tour forge i think this could actually be big that's that's kind of cool yeah okay what's next on my well this is actually one i've been trying to build in clod and it is the podcast transcript editor suggester thing right where i'm i record for 60 minutes like i want to i want to trim the bottom 10 of this episode where it was just you know got boring it got repetitive like that's what i typically do as part of my editing process and historically that's been a manual review of you know reviewing the transcript and say okay here's where it kind of went off the rails this this question didn't really land okay i'm going to trim that and what i've been trying to do is you know feed in examples of past you know before and after transcripts into clod and saying based on the style of the side hustle show here's the next raw recording episode can you please provide your your editing suggestions and your ad break suggestion like where's a natural breakpoint and it hasn't quite it hasn't quite hit yet where it's like yes that's a dialed in process and it kind of chokes on it because it's like sometimes these are 20 30 pages of you know if you record an hour of audio like it's a really long document i'm having a hard time with that but that's something that i've been trying to build for for my personal use case and imagine other podcasters might use that as well yeah we're really close on that i feel like the past six or seven months, AI models continue to get better.

22:15We know this. The context windows continue to get larger. Now it's a million tokens on some of these models or whatnot. I think within even a couple of months, we're going to see a new round of context windows. And right now, like that hour podcast and that transcript, it's like 30 pages. That's like right at the limit where you're starting to overload the models. I think three months from now, it's not going to be a deal anymore. I think you'll be able to just be like, here's literally 500 ,000 words from this podcast. Tell me this exact thing. And I think that'll be, I think that'll be better.

22:48Yeah. Give me, give me the best 80 % of it. Give me the, give me the best 90%. Maybe there's like a sliding spectrum on, you know, what you want the suggestions to be. And of course you can't just, I wouldn't just hand that off to the editor and say, go, it's like, you're still going to have a manual review process, but the hope is it would speed up that process a little bit. Totally. You want to stick on podcasting for a moment? Sure. Here's what I hate about podcasting. I love podcasting. I've done 400 interviews, like whatever what i stink at is following up with my guest to like give them some marketing materials and here's a google drive with some share images and some oh i don't know copywriting for facebook or instagram or whatever i hate that and i hate sending those emails like i never do that stuff because i'm lazy no me neither and ai do that for me right so a lot of these ai podcasting tools are focused on editing and rightfully so that's another huge time suck by the way and maybe a little bit of marketing like show notes or time stamps or stuff like that that's all well and good i feel like there's not as much that will automatically take my transcript and email my guests with stuff that they could use i haven't seen a whole lot of that at least so i think there's an idea there yeah here's a handful of clips that you know were auto generated in riverside and here yeah there's yeah there could be something to that because it's i never do that and it's like sometimes it's two or three days later like shoot i forgot to send you a message your episode went live on thursday and uh thanks again for joining me but that's usually the extent of it like i don't typically ask or bank on anybody sharing it and it's like when they do it's like a bonus and let's be really clear here nick nick did not actually send me that message after our last podcast interview a couple of months ago i don't think i don't remember seeing it.

24:32Yeah, exactly. So you can vouch for that. Like it doesn't happen. Exactly. Yeah. Nick needs this. So I'm going to create it. You may get another one, a different category, or you got another one. I've got one that is top of mind lately and I'm calling this scam detector. So sometimes you get text messages and it'll say you have unpaid parking tickets in the city of Seattle and we're going to revoke your license. And it's like from a, you know, click here and it's like a dot. Are you domain? You're like, okay, it's very clearly a scam. I'm going to delete this. I'm going to ignore it. But sometimes the line is a little bit more blurred.

25:05Like I got this IRS letter the other day and it was about a return from four years ago. Like, is this legit? Like it looks, it looks legit. And I sent it to my accountant and he was like, yeah, that's, that's legit. But I was like, is this an IRS scam? You know, it was just a weird thing. And a couple of Thanksgivings ago, I had a really, really convincing crypto ransomware scam. And it was from, you know, an email from me. And so like, there somehow it was like a phishing attack, like from look, like it was spoofed from my email account. We've hacked your system. We're going to destroy your reputation.

25:38We're going to do blah, blah, blah. And we demand this$3 ,000 Bitcoin transfer to this wallet address. And I spent like all night, like trying to lock down all my stuff, like two factor, change the passwords, you know, with the tech team, we couldn't find any evidence of a breach anywhere but it was like i'm there's no way i'm going to sleep with this going on and it's like finally realized just basically by copying and pasting like this is you know a scam that hundreds of people had received but it was like it looked to me you know having never received something like that before i looked super legit and it definitely hadn't stressed out so scam detector is the tool that you can kind of crowdsource that kind of wisdom and and protect yourself now let me throw out a knowledge nugget so first of all that's a billion dollar idea for sure I think as people get older and AI gets better and then my mother two years from now or even really now but especially like two years from now my mother could receive a phone call from an AI Pete that sounds exactly like me asking for money yeah and probably even from my cell phone number I'm guessing so yeah I think that's actually a billion dollar idea here's my nugget of wisdom though for all the things we've said I'm going to drop back from the ideas just for a second bird's eye view.

26:55For all of these ideas, I can get lost in a little bit of overwhelm like, oh my gosh, yeah, and I would need to check spam text messages and spam emails and spam calls and spam AI. I think there's a version of every single one of these ideas that can be done in a weekend. Maybe you just start with spam text, for example, or maybe you just start with this one little core feature. This one simplest version of that. I just wanted to like remind everybody in the ether. Or how about, how about you only specialize in those class action lawsuit claims where you get this like sketchy looking postcard and it's like, go to this, you know, 20 word long domain, you know, to, to submit your claim.

27:39And you're like, is this real? Cause of course I could ask for your personal information to, you know, pay you out if this eventually, you know, settles, you're like, Like, dude, is this for real? Is it even worth the, you know,$30 I might get from this to submit this information? Yeah. That's also just a content business right there, like a blog or a podcast, like preventing spam or helping elderly parents, especially in my case. I think about this all the time because my mom and dad are like, hey, did you see this thing? And I'm like, that's somebody from Russia off their laptop right now, like trying to spam you.

28:11No, this is for real, especially with, you know, you and I, somebody with hundreds of hours of their voice on the internet. It's definitely a conversation we've had to have with mom and dad. Yeah. Okay. I got one. Yeah, go ahead. So this next idea I love because I think everybody listening to this could find a network that they are already tapped into. Maybe you are an accountant and you know accountants. Maybe you are a teacher, a yoga instructor, and you know yoga instructors, so on and so forth, right? I think this idea anybody could use and customize to some network of people they have access to.