u/igel27

A few years ago, I started doing a weird little side hustle: cleaning up and organizing messy digital files for small businesses and freelancers.

Not websites. Not social media. Not “AI automation.”

Just… digital clutter.

People would have years of random PDFs, screenshots, invoices, contracts, photos, downloads, duplicate files, and folders named things like:

• FINAL.pdf
• FINAL2.pdf
• FINAL_REAL.pdf
• FINAL_REAL_USE_THIS_ONE.pdf

I’d organize everything into a sensible folder structure, rename files consistently, remove duplicates, create simple spreadsheets/indexes, and make it easy for them to actually find things later.

The funny part?

I expected people to think it was ridiculous.

Instead, some people were genuinely relieved to hand this mess to someone else.

The work itself is incredibly unglamorous. Sometimes I'm basically getting paid to stare at someone's Downloads folder for hours. 😂

But that's what makes it interesting as a side hustle.

There are a lot of “boring problems” people will happily pay someone else to solve because they don't want to spend their own weekend doing it.

It also taught me something I didn't expect:

A side hustle doesn't necessarily need to be innovative. Sometimes it just needs to remove an annoying problem that people keep procrastinating on.

Curious what other weirdly boring side hustles people here have tried.

What's something you've made money from that sounds ridiculous when you explain it to someone else?

Curious what everyone has in their current link-building stack.

I’m especially interested in tools for:

• Backlink/competitor research
• Finding relevant link prospects
• Outreach and follow-up
• Guest posts or niche edits
• Digital PR
• Tracking acquired links

I’m not looking for a best SEO tools list. I’d love to hear what you’re actually using in your workflow, what saves you the most time, and what you stopped using because it wasn’t worth it.

Bonus points if you share the tool + what you use it for?

I’ve noticed that with tools like Gemini Notebook, it’s easy to experiment with a bunch of features for a few days and then go back to the same basic workflow.

What I’m more interested in now is finding the features or habits that genuinely save time over the long term.

For example, instead of asking broad questions, I’ve found it more useful to give the notebook a specific job: compare two pieces of information, identify contradictions, turn a collection of notes into a structured outline, or point out what information is still missing.

That seems to produce much more useful results than simply asking it to “summarize everything.”

For people who use Gemini Notebook regularly, what’s one workflow, prompt structure, or habit that you initially overlooked but eventually became part of your normal process?

I’m especially interested in practical uses rather than obvious “summarize my notes” examples.

I’ve noticed that with tools like Gemini Notebook, it’s easy to experiment with a bunch of features for a few days and then go back to the same basic workflow.

What I’m more interested in now is finding the features or habits that genuinely save time over the long term.

For example, instead of asking broad questions, I’ve found it more useful to give the notebook a specific job: compare two pieces of information, identify contradictions, turn a collection of notes into a structured outline, or point out what information is still missing.

That seems to produce much more useful results than simply asking it to “summarize everything.”

For people who use Gemini Notebook regularly, what’s one workflow, prompt structure, or habit that you initially overlooked but eventually became part of your normal process?

I’m especially interested in practical uses rather than obvious “summarize my notes” examples.

I wanted to experiment with building my own search API, so I started with a simple idea: take a query, search through a bunch of data, rank the results, and return the best matches.

Simple enough.

Then I started adding things.

Fuzzy matching? Sure.

Filters? Why not.

Ranking? Obviously.

Pagination? Might as well.

Caching? At this point we’re committed.

Now I have a tiny search system that is considerably more complicated than the original problem required. 😂

The funny thing about building search is that “just find the matching items” somehow turns into a rabbit hole of ranking, relevance, indexing, performance, and edge cases.

I’m curious what other people have built just to learn how search works.

What’s the weirdest or most unnecessarily complicated search project you’ve made?

I’ve been experimenting with Gemini Notebook and realized I use it differently than I expected.

Instead of asking it to just summarize everything, I’ll dump in a bunch of notes, articles, or documents and basically talk through the topic with it.

Sometimes I already have an opinion and just ask it to challenge me.

Sometimes I ask it to explain something like I’m completely new to the subject.

And sometimes I just throw a messy collection of notes at it and hope it can figure out what I was trying to say. 😂

The interesting part is that I’m starting to think of AI less as a search box and more like a second brain that I can argue with.

I’m curious how everyone else is using Gemini Notebook. Are you mainly using it for summaries, research, studying, brainstorming, or something completely different?

I started saving egg trays because I thought I’d eventually find a useful purpose for them.

That was 3 months ago.

I now have a stack of egg trays that has become tall enough to qualify as furniture.

Every time someone asks, “Why are you keeping those?”

I say, “I have a project.”

What project?

I don't know.

But at this point, throwing them away would mean admitting defeat. 😂

I’ve noticed that when I ask an AI coding assistant something like “fix this bug,” I often get a solution that looks right but creates another problem somewhere else.

What worked much better for me was giving it a very specific structure:

Context: What the app is supposed to do
Problem: What is actually happening
Expected: What should happen instead
Constraints: What it should NOT change
Task: Diagnose the root cause first, then propose the smallest fix

The last part made the biggest difference.

Instead of immediately asking it to rewrite the function, I ask it to explain what it thinks is causing the issue before changing anything. That gives me a chance to catch when the AI has misunderstood the code.

For example:

“Before modifying the code, identify the most likely root cause and point to the specific logic responsible. Do not rewrite unrelated parts. After explaining the issue, suggest the smallest possible change.”

It doesn’t magically make every answer correct, but I’ve found it reduces those frustrating situations where the AI “fixes” one thing and breaks three others.

For those using AI heavily for coding, what’s one prompting technique that actually made a noticeable difference in your workflow?

I used to think the best way to get better results from Gemini was to give it as much context as possible upfront.

It actually made things worse.

When I started working on longer projects, I noticed that throwing the entire background, requirements, notes, and previous decisions into one conversation made it harder to get a useful answer. The responses became less focused, and sometimes I had to repeat what I actually wanted.

What has worked better for me is breaking the work into smaller stages:

• Start with the goal — explain what I’m trying to accomplish.
• Give it one specific task — instead of asking it to handle the entire project at once.
• Keep important decisions in a separate note — especially things I don’t want the model to reinterpret later.
• Review the output before moving on — correct mistakes early instead of carrying them into the next step.
• Feed the relevant result into the next stage — rather than dumping the entire conversation back in.

The biggest difference is that Gemini seems much easier to work with when each step has a clear purpose.

It also makes mistakes easier to spot. If something goes wrong, I can usually identify which step caused the problem instead of trying to untangle a huge conversation.

I’m curious how other people are using Gemini Notebook for longer or more complicated projects. Do you keep everything in one notebook/context, or do you deliberately break your work into smaller pieces?

I used to throw a bunch of links and notes into one chat and then spend more time figuring out where each piece of information came from.

What I like about notebook-style workflows is being able to keep the source material together and ask questions against the same collection of documents. It makes research feel less like starting from zero every time.

One thing that helped me a lot: I started adding a short note explaining what each source is actually useful for. That makes it much easier to come back weeks later and remember why I saved it.

How are you guys organizing your notebooks? Do you keep separate ones for each project, or do you prefer one big notebook with everything in it?

I’m always curious what people are actually building rather than just hearing about the latest SaaS trends.

Drop your SaaS below and keep it simple:

• What problem does it solve?
• Who is it for?
• What stage are you at?
• What’s been the hardest part so far?

No need for a polished pitch. I’m more interested in the real challenges you’re running into and what you’ve learned along the way.

One thing I’ve noticed with AI tools is that giving them more autonomy isn’t always better. Sometimes the best result comes from letting the system handle the repetitive work, then having a human step in when a decision actually matters.

Curious how others are using AI right now: do you prefer fully automated workflows, or do you keep humans involved at specific checkpoints?

I’ve noticed that MRR can look healthy while the business is quietly leaking customers, especially when churn and retention aren’t being watched closely. For SaaS founders, what metric ended up being the biggest “aha” for you NRR, churn, activation, CAC payback, something else?