The Advent of "HustleGPT"

How AI tools are being used to super-charge solopreneurs and side gigs 💡

Friends,

One of the most fascinating things about the Generative A.I. movement, is the curiosity of people and the consolidation of all of these tools around side gigs, coders, builders and how solopreneurs, whom I like to call “indiepreneurs” are using them. It takes courage to strike out on your own, and build a project, startup or tool around this new nascent technology. Some AI Newsletter creators for instance, even go on to found related startups.

I’m always seeking people to write about this topic of AI in the Solopreneur life, because innovation comes from the pioneers, tinkerers, entrepreneurs and people willing to take risks and even build in public. In 2023 we’ve seen more solopreneurs embrace AI than ever before. From indie hackers, to the no-code movement, it’s pretty epic.

So what in 2023’s reality does this look like in the arena of Generative A.I. augmentations and copilots? Hustle GPT is a creative approach to monetize GPT-4 by its users started by JacksonFall and his viral tweet. Today our Guide will be Helghardt Avenant who has a Newsletter you can check out called aptly, AI Super Founder.

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Read this on a web browser for the best reading experience, it’s a long one with many visual cues.

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By Helghardt Avenant , September, 2023.

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How AI tools are being used to super-charge solopreneurs and side gigs

In March this year, Jackson Greathouse Fall, set GPT 4 to work with $100 to hustle and make as much money as possible, without doing anything illegal. So, what happened in the last 6 months? Is anyone actually making money with AI?

Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the biggest AI hustle of them all? As we have all seen, from Gutenberg's printing press to mobile phones, every major technology leap has led to new business opportunities unimagined previously. Innovation cycles aside, what stays constant is the entrepreneurial spirit. With the advent of GPT-4 giving us a glimpse of AGI, the question on the mind of the entrepreneur is “What if I could employ AI to do the work and make money for me?”

Personally, I don’t like the word “hustle” as it may imply short-term thinking and opportunistic land-grabbing. That being said, as with any gold rush, there would be no shovel maker without the gold digger. In this article, I take a deeper look at AI tools, projects, and trends that are giving superpowers to entrepreneurs on all levels. I also try to distill what this means for the future of the creator economy, indie hacking, and startups in general. 

If you are looking to catch up with what the hustle is going on in AI and how you can leverage it to super-charge your entrepreneurial instincts, this article is for you. 

What business opportunities are AI enabling?

22 million views later, Jackson Greathouse Fall’s greengadgetguru.com AI hustle is dead. He acted as the human-in-the-loop human with AI writing website copy, creating a logo, drafting blog content, running an ad, drafting a Tweet, and even raising funding. At some point, Jackson’s HustleGPT business had $1,378.84 cash on hand. 

HustleGPT did not end up making any money for Jackson, but founders, builders, and even fraudsters across the board have been turning their eyes to AI and how they can use it to make money.

Not only has the industry been moving fast releasing new innovations, but it has also had a compounding effect, setting off sparks in the mind of entrepreneurs wave-on-top-of-wave. Below I highlight the recent releases and what may have gone through the mind of an entrepreneur on each event.

AI is a game-changer in so many ways:

1. Transforming all industries all at once - Every industry is bound to leverage AI in some way or another. At a minimum, it may not completely disrupt every industry, but it will certainly become as common as the software itself. 

2. Global all at once - It is possible for anyone with a computer and access to the internet to use and build AI applications.

3. Attracting top talent - Talented engineers are quitting their jobs to pursue specific problems that can now be solved because of AI.

4. Does not sleep or get tired - It is easy to spin up a swarm of AI Agents with access to special skills/tools to relentlessly work towards a specified objective.

5. AI makes it viable now - There are certain things that were just not viable before AI, but now that it is, new market segments are opening up. For example, drone companies may have been targeting cattle farmers, but before AI, selling a drone to a farmer to manually view video material is not that valuable. Now that it is possible to use AI to count cattle, measure crop yield, calculate cattle growth rate, etc. it is a different story.

As you can see, everything is moving really fast, but it is still very early! So where do you start if you want to get into AI?

Below I created a diagram to demonstrate the different levels of business opportunities in AI. On each level, I highlight a couple of projects for more context. The bottom of the stack represents the most difficult and resource-intensive, high barrier-to-entry opportunities that likely have the biggest and longest-lasting impact, whereas at the top of the stack is the lowest-hanging fruit with the most activity and noise.

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Best newsletter posts by the Guest Contributor

• Autonomous AI Founder - Can AI start a startup?

• Build Something AI Wants

• Co-Pilot for Everything

• Vibe Media and AI-Augmented Experiences

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Content and communities in AI

Creators, social media and AI Art

For better or worse, social media feeds are slowly but surely filling up with more and more AI-generated content. Creators are using AI to express themselves in interesting ways, generating content more frequently and attracting more followers. Take for example this architect’s AI art post on Instagram.

AI art is not going to make everyone popular artists overnight. In fact, what I am noticing is how it is making already popular artists even more popular. Tools like PlaygroundAI are making it easy for anyone to get into AI Art. No need to know complex prompts. It is easy to copy or remix prompts others have used already.

PlaygroundAI has added more advanced features to now also edit images using AI.

Pieter Levels, the OG indie hacker, is leveraging generative AI for his solo startups interiorai.com and photoai.com generating $63K and $50K in MRR. 

42fiction is an interesting social media experiment I am working on. The idea is to upload a photo that generates an experience in a parallel universe.

Kyle Goodrich launched a really cool generative AI camera, called DreamGenerator. 

Robert Scoble made a list of 1,000 AI Artists on Twitter.

Now with the recent announcement of Meta AI making image generation available across all its applications, the floodgates have really opened up.

AI training guides

The low-hanging fruit for any new technology wave is creating content and if possible, charging for it. 

For example, I found over 2000 results when searching ‘ai prompt engineering’ on Amazon, most with very few reviews. While ‘AI prompt’ guides may feel like being offered snake oil, there is definitely value in having a strong understanding of how to do AI prompting and quickly being able to find usable prompt examples to reuse. There are plenty of free prompt guides and resources that will do just the trick. Below I highlight my two favorite free guides:

• Prompting Guide - The go over the basics and take a deeper dive into various techniques. Everything from Zero Shot Prompting to Multimodal CoT Prompting. They also have an awesome directory of LLM papers that are maintained on a daily/weekly basis.

• Midlibrary - Amazing prompt library for Midjourney.

AI courses 

There are plenty of courses on everything from machine learning to prompt engineering. Andrew Ng is perhaps the most prominent and highly recommended AI course creator. He has done courses focused on machine learning, deep learning, and more recently general AI applications. 

Another course example is Peter’s Buildfast Academy with a focus on helping builders get up to speed building AI projects.

Although not a training guide or a course, Mindjoy is one of my favorite AI startups to watch. They are leveraging AI to help teachers confidently teach up-to-date technical subjects, even if they are not technical.

AI newsletters

Here are my go-to AI newsletters:

• Ben’s Bites - A daily newsletter of curated AI startups, demos, news, and more.

• Superhuman - Leverage AI to boost your productivity.

• AI Supremecy - Longer form articles featuring the latest AI news.

• Matt Schlicht's AI Newsletter - Deep dive articles, in particular about AI Agents.

• The Strategy Deck - Very detailed AI market overviews.

I started AI Super Founder, exploring the role of AI in starting/running startups. You can find a longer list of newsletters on this Twitter thread.

AI tool directories

My favorite directory is Top AI Tools. No login is required, includes a screenshot of the project’s home page, easy filters and is updated frequently. Opentools AI has a cool search feature where you can type what you want to do and it finds the best-fit tools. 

More AII tool directories:

• Top AI Tools [4825 tools]

• There Is An AI For That [8254 tools]

• Futurepedia [180 tools]

• Opentools AI

• AI Tools Directory

AI influencers

I tend to be hesitant of accounts that promote AI tools where it is obvious that they are getting paid to do so. Tag lines like “6 free and simple AI tools” are a dead giveaway that is meant to be clickbait, but it can still be informative to quickly learn about new projects.

That being said, every now and then I discover influencers that try to give an objective view of what the AI tools can do. I can recommend Paul Covert for beginners. He goes the extra mile when creating demos and trying out new AI products by making them very visual and guiding you step-by-step. For example, in this Tweet thread, he demonstrated how to use Canva ChatGPT Plugin to generate a logo. Paul recently also created a free No-Code AI Guide.

AI builders

Following AI hackers and builders on Twitter is my favorite way to stay up to date with the latest trends. These builders specialize in creating exciting demonstrations of potentially big ideas that may be possible very soon. Most prominent of them all is probably McKay Wrigley who likes to create demos that create code from voice commands, create and host an app with AI, code a website from a sketch, etc. 

McKay is getting a lot of traction for his demos. For example, his latest post had over 1 million views in less than 12 hours.

I also made a demo video recently where I developed a prototype to generate a business canvas from a simple idea input. I found that creating demo projects is becoming significantly easier with the help of AI.

AI hackathons and communities

Alex Reibman is a great follow on Twitter if you want to stay up to date with the latest AI hackathon projects in San Francisco. He attends all the major events and live streams the presentations and winners in Tweet threads. Links to the 3 most recent AI hackathons featured by Alex with winners from each event.

• Gen Lab AI Hackathon - Gitwit: Build your web app with prompting. Generate, deploy, and share apps instantly. 

• AI Agent Developer Arena - Invited 100+ engineers to take an exclusive look at the latest advancements in AI agent ecosystem

• Anything But Wrappers - San Francisco’s top AI engineers came together to see what’s possible with fine-turning and only 4 hours of hacking.

There are many AI communities. Cerebral Valley seems to pop up most often as a go-to AI community in San Francisco. On this Twitter thread, they are sharing the upcoming AI events scheduled in SF as well as a list of AI jobs.

Agencies, services, and developers

Christopher Morrisr’ “How to Make Money with AI in 2023” highlights 14 ways to make money with AI all of which are related to using AI for consulting or services businesses. 

A common concern is that AI will take over all our jobs, especially digital jobs. However, what I have noticed is how existing domain experts are using AI to do their jobs better and how new entrants use AI to upskill faster.

Let’s look at photography for example. Now that it is possible to edit photos using Adobe Photo AI, photographers can simply do what they already do faster by prompting what they want to edit. A good quality photo edit requires a high degree of attention to detail, which the AI can’t sign off on nor is it something a novice eye can do on the same level as a professional. On top of that, as a prerequisite, you still have to understand how to use Adobe without AI.

Another example is software engineering. Although AI is able to generate code, it is not going to make engineers obsolete. It is however leveling the playing field for more people to get into software development and upskill really quickly with the assistance of AI. Replit CEO, Amjad Masad, has an interesting take: “For 10x engineers it basically helps them type faster (we’ve calculated a 30-40 percent productivity boost). For people who weren’t coding before, you can’t even put a multiple on it. It’s infinity X”

Agencies that are leveraging AI as part of their existing services, anything from photo editing to software development, will outsmart their traditional counterparts that decide not to do so. It starts slowly by building internal tools that can help with automating manual workload while still signing off on the final deliverables. 

AI wrappers and plugins

An AI wrapper is a simple application that sits between the AI and the user. The wrapper fulfills a specific function to augment the AI’s ability, for example, browse online, summarize a PDF, send an email, etc. It is a common way to simplify the interface for the end user instead of using the ChatGPT chat interface directly. For example, LampBuilder, an AI landing page generator, uses GPT 3.5 in the background to generate startup landing pages. Everything from the copy, colors, layout, icons, and illustrations is generated with a set of re-programmed prompts. This diagram explains how it works.

This article looks at 8 AI Landing Page Generators with example sites, video recordings and feature breakdowns.

A great way to monetize AI wrappers is by developing ChatGPT Plugins. According to WhatPlugin.ai, there are over 900 plugins available and 67 new ChatGPT Plugins launched weekly (on average, from June to August 2023). This chart highlights the number of plugins by category:

To give you an idea of the business opportunity in this segment, a couple of ChatGPT Plugin developers are building in public and sharing their metrics on Twitter:

• Steven Tey posited that he generated $657 in affiliate revenue with his ChatGPT Plugin for oneword.domans.

• Sambuddha posted on Twitter that his AI Search Engine reached $600 in MRR within 2.5 weeks.

• Victor Zhang shared on Twitter his journey to $10K MRR for mymap.ai:

Bard is also moving into the plugin game. What makes Bard powerful is its integration with the Google Workspace. Imagine being able to clean your inbox, reply to emails, summarize documents, and write articles using AI and your existing tools and data.

AI Agents: AutoGPT, BabyAGI and more

Matt Schlicht’s Complete Beginner’s Guide to Autonomous Agents provides a great summary of AI Agents. Quoting from Matt’s post:

“It is "primitive AGI". It is remarkable that simply wrapping an LLM inside a loop gets you an autonomous agent that can reason, plan, think, remember, learn - all on its own. It demonstrates the untapped power and flexibility of what LLMs can do if wrapped in the right structures and prompts. The entire concept is less than a month old so I can't wait to see how increasingly sophisticated agents built off of increasingly more capable LLMs impact the world.” - Siqi Chen, Founder and CEO of Runway

Below is a diagram from Yohei’s BabyAGI, a simple agent framework, to explain how an AI Agent works:

As a benchmark for AI Agent popularity, Auto-GPT’s Github stars increasing exponentially, faster than any codebase in history.

Earlier this year I participated in Angelist’s AI Agents Hackathon. It was a great way to learn how AI Agents work. We created a Travel Agent AI that can get an instruction, make a phone call, summarize the information, and call us back to update us. Here is a demo link.

One of my favorite projects so far is that of Sanyam Bhutani who deployed 25 agents to collaborate on creating a codebase for a simple game:

More recently Yohei started deploying AI Agents to create knowledge graphs.

Interested in creating your own AI Agent? Kevin Piacentini highlights the complexities and steps in a Tweet:

Below is an overview of AI Agent SDKs and Frameworks by Tereza Tizkova.

See below Adam Silverman’s list of top AI Agents. 

Supporting infrastructure

PluginLabs offers a comprehensive suite of features to enhance and manage ChatGPT plugins, including SDKs, REST API, Stripe integration, custom domains and branding options. It provides tools for monetization, user management, event tracking, error alerting, and seamless integrations. 

Kevin Piacentini shared PluginLabs recent metrics on Twitter, reaching $11K in MRR in August. PluginLabs charges a 15% transaction fee, which translates to just over $70K MRR in plugin volume processed in the platform.

Kevin Piacentini is also working on an opensource interface for agents called AgentLabs making it easy for developers to spin up a UI for their agents. 

Model fine-tuning

Hugging Face is an open-source data science and machine learning platform that serves as a hub for AI experts and enthusiasts founded in 2017. Users can host, train, and collaborate on AI models. The platform offers the infrastructure for deploying AI, a library of over 200,000 models in areas like natural language processing, audio, and computer vision, and over 30,000 datasets for training. Users can create their own AI models, browse existing ones, and even showcase their work in "Spaces" – demos that allow others to test and experience the models. In August Hugging Face raised $235M in Series D funding round.

The screenshot below is a quick overview of the different types of tasks, libraries, and datasets that are available on Hugging Face.

Although Hugging Face is a major company, the platform is enabling side hustle opportunities itself. It is a go-to-platform for companies to headhunt engineers who have proven their abilities to fine-tune models for specific use cases. For example, on Upwork, there is already a “Hugging Face Specialist” category.

Replicate provides a platform for running machine learning models in the cloud, offering both a Python library and a direct API for execution. It hosts thousands of ready-to-use models, supports custom model deployment with its open-source tool, Cog, and ensures scalable deployment with automatic scaling and a pay-per-use pricing model.

In August OpenAI launched finetuning for GPT-3.5 Turbo which makes it possible to train the model with your data on scale. Scale is promoting itself on their website a preferred partner for GPT 3.5 finetuning.

Foundation models

Working on foundation models as a side gig is perhaps off the table due to the significant costs involved in training models.

There is a lot of technical material available on this topic in academic research, market analysis, open-source libraries, and platform hosting models. OpenAI Research, Google Deep Mind, and Meta AI Research are great entry points to learn more.

In short, a foundational model is one that's trained on a vast scale and can be tailored for numerous specific tasks. Examples include GPT 4, Bard, Clip, etc. The diagram below from Samuel Albanie’s Digest Slides gives a simple visual explanation of how foundation models work:

Alex Irina Sandu created a market map of generative AI foundational models to view the various major players in this space.

In April this year, Sam Altman said that the future of large language models (LLMs) will not solely rely on increasing their size, comparing the current emphasis on model parameters to the chip speed races of the past. He emphasizes the importance of capability oversize. That being said, Google's upcoming Gemini AI, a multimodal AI model, is set to launch in December 2023.

Is Indie Hacking dead?

Last week Pieter Levels made a post on Twitter saying “R.I.P. 🪦 Indie hacking”. He makes the point by linking other Tweets stating that it is harder to get funding due to zero interest rates ending, the influx of Gen Z indie hackers jumping on the AI wave and more notable indie hackers turning their projects into startups.

At the same time, there were some bitter comments on a Hackernews post by a solopreneur. 

Personally, I don’t think indie hacking is dead, but the game has certainly changed in a couple of ways in addition to the points Levels mentioned:

• Companies may decide to develop bespoke solutions in-house.

• Big players will add the best AI use cases natively to their product suite.

• Users expect more rounded MVPs. See the picture below from Auren Hoffman.

Co-pilot for everything

In a previous blog post I unpacked the latest YC Summer S23 batch to look at all the AI startups. My goal was to see how the AI startups could be used to start startups if stitched together.

In the diagram below I highlighted the areas where YC has invested in AI startups that can meet some requirements of the startup journey across ideation, execution, and leadership.

The full list of startups with links can be found in the blog post. Below is a market landscape as a quick overview.

Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross have founded aigrant.com to fund early-stage AI startups. They have a collection of great advisors and speakers including Patrick Collison, Tobi Lütke, and more. On their website, they have listed two grant batches so far. See the screenshots below.

Conclusion

The past 12 months have been nothing short of a whirlwind in the AI entrepreneurial space. From Jackson Greathouse Fall's HustleGPT to the software-developing AI Agents, it's clear: we're in the midst of an AI gold rush. But as with any gold rush, it's not just about the glitter; it's about the grit.

The term "hustle" might have its critics (like me), but let's face it, every Gutenberg needs its printing press, every gold digger their shovel. AI, with its unimaginable potential, is the new shovel for today's entrepreneurs. It's not just about quick wins; it's about reshaping the entrepreneurial landscape, from indie hacking to full-blown startups. Pieter Levels might be sounding the death knell for indie hacking, but I see it differently. It's not the end; it's an evolution. As seen with the examples in this post, AI is enabling even more solopreneurs and side gigs.

Ultimately, I think developers who can integrate AI into their workflows stand to gain the most from this transformative wave. As Matt Schlicht highlighted in a recent tweet, he is actively seeking areas where GPT-4 can match or outperform humans and automate it.

A little bit about me

I consider it a major privilege to be writing this article and sharing my insights with you. I co-founded Rehive, a fintech platform and app builder in 2015. I am writing about AI and building prototype AI ideas.

This past year I have attended several AI hackathons in San Francisco to meet other builders, and founders and learn. I co-founded a venture studio with Michail Brynard where we are focusing on developing AI applications. I have also started a newsletter, AI Super Founder, where I am exploring the role of AI starting and running startups.

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Thanks to AI Super Founder: Future of Starting Startups for this impressive summary.