u/LeadingJuggernaut892

As a freelancer in college, I am trying to run UGC ads using AI tools for a couple of small brands. I have tried a few and are noting down their pros and cons.

So for talking-head / avatar UGC (person to camera reading a script), HeyGen, Hedra or Sync.so are more purpose-built - Hedra especially for expressive character/lip-sync.

Morphic has a UGC Ads workflow plus Virtual Try-on and product-video workflows, and the multi-model canvas means you can mix a Seedance shot with a Kling shot in one place, then cut variants on the timeline.

Runway/Pika will give you nice individual clips but you're assembling elsewhere and re-rolling for consistency

In my experience, any AI UGC needs a human pass so it doesn't read as obviously synthetic so for a scrappy brand doing lots of ad variants , I would prefer a studio tool that does product + a timeline all in one place.

do you guys have any suggestions? also what is your guy's workflow like?

I made this list for those looking to make roughly $800 a month which is enough to matter without being a second full time job. Me and my friends did these while we were in tetr college where running these projects was part of our curriculum. I personally did 6 of these

I have roughly ranked them by time taken to earn your first dollar.

1. Fixing broken automations : Many small businesses are using  a broken Zapier or Make workflow. You can audit and fix the workflow and also charge monthly to watch it. Easy to pitch as the client already knows there is a problem.

2. Rebuilding Landing pages : In my experience, early founders focus more on product landing pages instead of customers. It can be done in one day and the  deliverable is visible, which makes it easy to pitch and add into potential portfolios

3. Notion or Airtable systems for small teams : Most early stage startups are messy and want theur operations in one place. A single well built client tracker is a few hours of work and the service can be renewed every month.

4. Data cleanup and migration : companies moving from one CRM to another have large records with  inconsistent formats. The client pool is smaller, but pays well if you find the right customer.

5. Niche Chrome extensions : Building a niche tool that removes a thing  or solves a single that is annoying. Free with a paid tier, or one-time price, built with a good and easy UI. Its also pretty easy to scale if demand rises.

6. Repurposing long video into clips : Podcasters and streamers produce hours of footage and are constantly looking for clippers, Especially now many small podcasts are opening and a lot of them have ability to pay. I have personally done this so I can make money while listening to my favourite podcasts xD

7. Technical fixes for Shopify stores: There are ton of shopify stores and their website is hilariously slow, you can reach out and fix it.  You can try Image compression, app cleanup, theme bloat. The result is measurable which makes it one of the easiest things to sell because you can screenshot the proof.

8. Booking assistant for local service businesses: Target local Clinics, salons, tutoring centres, repair shops. They miss a lot of clients because of mismanagement. You can build an AI agent for them, charge a setup fee or maybe a subscription model. You can let them use the product and watch their growth first.

9. Technical writing and documentation: . If you can read code and document properly, this is one of the highest per hour freelance rates available online

10. Teaching AI tools: Non technical companies pay a lot right now to teach their employees about AI. A two hour workshop for a marketing team is a good chunk of change. You might need some reputation / personal branding or even some contacts to pull this off though.

11. Localisation with a human pass: Fix AI translations then change what doesn't land culturally. Works best if you're properly bilingual in languages that aren't oversupplied.

12. Selling templates: A good source of passive income, you can build an auth setup, dashboard starters, deck templates, financial models and sell it to others again and again

13. Discord and Slack bots for communities: Most communities die down in a week because of not proper operations. You can build onboarding flows, moderation, event reminders.

14. Programmatic SEO sites: This is a long shot and takes time but is good for passive income. One data source, a template, and a few thousand pages that each answer a specific long question. It may take months to earn but then it earns passively without any effort.

15. Niche Directory sites: Pick something specific enough that there's no organized place online. You can charge for listings once you have traffic. It is mostly for people who have hobbies and turn it into some income. The work is mainly  the initial data collection and getting some users.

16. A paid data newsletter: Write newsletters with data reports like  hiring in one sector, price movements in one category, new launches in one niche, something that people can find online. A bit mundane and boring but its good money especially on platforms like substack.

17. Micro SaaS wrapper: Pick one small problem and API. Define your tool’s speciality clearly and target a set of audience. Set price low so it doesn’t affect them much. DO NOT go behind the unicorn startup dream.

18. Redesigning onboarding flows: Take a product's signup, screen record yourself using it  and send the founder the video with three fixes or ideas. This works as free outreach and converts into paid work. Again might require some personal branding/ reputaton for this

19. QA and bug hunting on pre-launch products: Early stage founders do not have much test coverage.  You can help with structured bug reports with fix and steps that make their product more secure and efficient.

20. Internal tools for local businesses: Pitch small tools like a booking sheet, an inventory tracker to local businesses. Something that saves their cost. Again, works best if you have some local credibility or contacts.

I think I have a half decent idea for a SAAS but I need to validate this idea before I dump time and potentially money into it. I just need a working demo to show potential customers if they would be interested in such a Service.

Now my dilemma is, should I hire someone or just vibecode this myself? obviously Hiring someone would maybe get me a better product, but I want to know if this product will justify the cost first.

I am considering getting started with the top tools like Emergent, bolt and Lovable, but i am not sure which one to proceed with at this stage.

Any thoughts? Opinions?

So one of my collegemates, He mentioned that he had built an internal erp for a client that replaced a tool that the company was using that cost them around 5k a year and I was mindblown.

Have any of you made a tool that has replaced a software? I am not asking about the basic stuff like " I rebuilt Notion" , or the scheduling tool that someone had posted here recently. Something of real value that replaced something. What did it take y'all to build.

So one of my clients has requested me to help with a photoshoot for one of their product lines, And We did the both , a 2800 professional photoshoot with a photographer friend of mine as well as Generating some images as well.

The photoshoot obviously won on Texture, Anything to do with reflections and the products that had fine print on the packaging

But the generated set wins on the fact that it was convenient, Could make any changes I wanted on the same day and No rescheduling issues lol.

I am eventually letting the client decide and she chose a few of the "Hero" photos and asked me to Generate the rest. Thats savings of around 70% and overall seems like a win-win situation for everyone involved.

What do y'all think?

I have a very small team ( Just me and a few friends) and We have been freelancing for 2 years while in college. The whole time I have been the one who prepares every proposal for us and they dont look that good. Hiring a designer feels like overkill and not hiring one makes it look like our documents are made by an amateur 6 man operation ( which it is) and I couldn't tell how much that's costing us until someone put us next to a bigger competitor.

I started building in gamma and not in powerpoint recently which took the time It take to flesh out a proposal from around 3 hours to about an hour each. But there is still a ceiling.

For those of you who managed to break this ceiling, was it a hire, a freelancer on retainer, buying templates, or something else entirely? Genuinely looking for any advice when it comes to this.

Everyone seems to say that creative volume is the lever now. I wanted to run a lil Experiment to find out if that's true or just something people repeat. So, I tracked it properly for 2 months.

First Month: 8 creatives, my normal amount
Second Month: 40 creatives, same spend . same audiences.

Findings:

What happened was that CPA went down by 7%. Interestingly it wasn't linear though. Most of the gain came in the first 15 creatives, then it flattened hard and the hit rate got worse. 2/8 were usable in the first month, whereas only 6/40 in the second. So the absolute number of winners went up but the percentage went down.

The winners in month two were weirder, two of them were things i'd have never used if i was only making 8.

Another factor here was the actual argument for volume. More creatives means more chance of better performance, but that also means more risky choices can be made and sometimes its those bets that pay off.

the flattening kinda bothers me though. Did it stop at 15 because i ran out of ideas? No clue. Maybe i need to try a bit more. Has anyone pushed past 40 and seen any progress?

So here in India, I'd open district or Magicpin or apps like that before eating out literally anywhere and there is ALMOST ALWAYS a discount code, some offer of 20 % off , some cashback on a certain order amount etc.

But I couldn't find something similar to that for the US.. There must be something right? Ill be moving there soon for my semester exchange from TETR College , so yes there will be lot of eating out. Having some sort of consistent discount wherever I go would be invaluable for me

Learned this the expensive way. For my D2C college project at TETR, I hade to place an order from a supplier based in Guangdong, China. The samples looked great, but the bulk order came back noticeably lower in quality and really affected my grades for that project.

Now im gun-shy and over researching anyone, which is slowing me down. I want a real checklist from people who've actually done this plus I have some questions so I can do this better next time:

1. How do you tell a real manufacturer from a middle man/ Trading company ?
2. What do you do before transferring them the money?
3. Is a third party inspection on a small order ( like 1 - 5k) units overkill or worth it?

I am a small buyer So I know I wont have much leverage, but i'd rather move smartly than get burnt again.

Gonna say the thing nobody in this sub wants to hear.

The people making real money with Lovable/Emergent/whatever are not building a product. They're building custom solutions for specific businesses. A dispatch tool for one HVAC shop. A booking system for one clinic. An inventory app for one distributor. I know these are boring and specific, and u get paid.

Meanwhile half this sub is building an app, a generic SaaS for an imaginary market, and wondering why they have 3 full signups. You built a product and left the hard part (finding people who'll pay) for later. Later never comes.

Here's the uncomfortable math: building is now easy, so building is worth almost nothing. What's valuable is knowing a specific business's pain well enough to solve it. The plumber who builds his own tool wins. The freelancer who builds it for the plumber wins. The guy building the next Notion for X loses.

Vibecoding created a million people who can now do custom software work for the millions of businesses that were never going to hire a dev. That's the actual opportunity, and it's not sexy, and that's exactly why it's open.

Stop building products for a market that doesn't exist and go solve one real business's problem and charge them.

I have zero background in trades but I saw the same pattern with small service businesses in the US and Europe, painters especially, they're paying a lot for industry software that's bloated. per user, per month plans, for features most of them never touch.

For sure this is the gap so I built a dead-simple version that does the two things they actually struggle with, quotes and scheduling crews without double-booking. That's it. I'm not really a developer either, I just described what I wanted and built on a combination of claude + emergent.

still early, testing and speaking with a couple of painting crews right now…

lets see how it goes. wish me luck

I am coming to US for a semester as part of My TETR College program and I am from somewhere where you basically never drink water from the tap, so my instinct is to buy bottled water.

Is US tap water just… safe to drink pretty much around Cornell? And if we end up traveling, is it fine across the major cities? We’ll likely be visiting DC, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Bay Area, LA - anywhere i should be particularly careful with water?

Built a handful of tools for my business this year with no coding background. Stuff I wish someone told me first:

1. Describe the workflow, not the feature. "Here's how a job moves through my shop" beats "add a button."

2. Build one painful thing first. Not your whole system. One leak.

3. Give it your real data, not fake examples. It builds to what it sees.

4. Test the boring edge cases yourself. That's where it breaks.

5. Never let it "improve" something that already works. It'll break it fixing something else.

6. Expect to redo things 3 times. That's normal, not failure.

7. If you can't explain the process clearly, the tool can't build it. Fix your understanding first.

8. Keep it ugly until it works. Pretty comes last.

9. The goal is the outcome, not the app. If the problem's gone, you're done.

Curious to hear if non-coders who built their own have any additions to this list.

Maybe i misunderstood what it was but i thought submagic would help me make the clip. It just does (admittedly nice) captions on a clip I already cut myself. I still have to find the moment, cut it, reframe it, the actual time-consuming part, by hand first. I'm trying to find something that does the finding + cutting + reframing orrr maybe u know adding cinematic angles and all (maybe im expecting toomuch). Submagic only does captions.

Is there one tool that does the whole thing?