Ask HN: Ideas are cheap, so what ideas can make $100k/year?

As a freelancer myself, I see a business generating only $100k a year as essentially gig work or a relatively stagnant, unsuccessful venture. With that revenue, employing someone part-time is a stretch due to administrative costs, especially in G7 like countries. At $100k, you can’t afford significant outgoing costs. I wouldn’t consider it a true business unless it generates at least $200–300k annually, employs at least one full-time person, and most importantly, aims to build something bigger. Otherwise, you’re better off with a regular job to avoid the stress, as few businesses go from $0 to $8–10k a month with just a few days of effort.

Yes, there are exceptions, but those people usually spend years in successful businesses or deeply know their field. They’re not simply prompting ChatGPT to create a solution and building a website around it.

To answer your question, I’d focus on “apprenticeship” tasks an AI agent could handle with minimal data. Businesses invest in training and hiring for specific roles, so there’s value in offering cost-effective, streamlined solutions that cut out middlemen. For example, transforming basic photos into professional headshots is a clear and valuable application. It eliminates the need for a photographer with expensive equipment and studio space in a costly location (city centre), is highly automatable, and uses customer-provided data without needing to save it.

As for what value is, I can’t define it precisely, but for me, it’s about providing a service that benefits everyone involved—personal growth for me (knowledge, money, or enjoyment) and cost-effectiveness for the company or customer. Of course, you could take a more philosophical approach to it.

find a way to flip direction of all home improvement and repairs. e.g. right now:

- I have $80,000 to renovate my kitchen

- there are A LOT of companies that will want this job

- however, it is ME, the person with all the money that needs to spend enormous amount of time trying to find companies on angi and google and yelp and god knows where else

- I have to keep notes or shit as different companies come to my house to give me quote, send me emails with 3D models and whatever

- then I have to in some way parse through all that to pick a company for this job

what I want is a place to post this job and then have companies fight over this job, submit proposals etc… with some AI bullshit to sift through and help me decide. then I want to be able to negotiate price by pitting one proposal against another to get the best thing for the best price

note that this is applicable to both large and small jobs, this example above works well even if the job is as simple as toilet replacement or snaking my pipes.

and of course this could work for other things, not just home improvement… “I have $75k budget and am looking for a pre-owned luxury car…” - dealerships come to me vs. me spending 11 weekends driving around or “I have 3500sq ft home in 22040 zipcode, give me a quote for house insurance” or “I have 2015 tesla s and 2020 audi etron in 22040, two drivers with pristine driving record, need quote for car insurance…”

This is more like $1bn/year idea though…

Ideas are cheap.

Execution is what matters. And business model.

Market, price fit, strategy. And the team. These must be aligned.