🤑 $5M/year testimonial biz, $4.9K/month from directory business & $60K/year side hustle for parents

$10M+ Salesforce exit, $3.8K file converter app & more.

👋 Hi and welcome to today’s edition of Venture Radar — where we uncover real internet businesses making real money, and break down how they do it.

In today’s write-up, we’re sharing curated articles, posts, videos and business we found interesting on building boring and underrated businesses. Let’s deep dive into it.

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🥷 STEAL THIS BUSINESS IDEA

Steal this business idea: Vertical AI for blue-collar industries

Construction firms, laundromats, HVAC contractors, quick-serve restaurants, none of them are building AI tools in-house. But all of them are drowning in paperwork, calls, scheduling mess, and outdated software.

The opportunity? Build AI-first tools that replace the patchwork of CRMs, spreadsheets, and paper forms these businesses run on.

Start with one vertical. Example: An AI assistant for HVAC businesses that handles scheduling, dispatch, quoting, and auto-fills government rebate forms.

These companies don’t want another SaaS dashboard, they want work off their plate. Your product should talk like a helpful operations manager, not like ChatGPT.

Get it right, and you can expand into payments, inventory, upsells, and multi-location rollouts, just like the last wave of vertical SaaS.

Big pain, low competition, and no need to teach users how to use AI. You do the thinking, they get back to work.

Steal this business idea: Build anything that targets one of these 17 pains.

You don’t need to invent a new problem to build a great consumer app. Just pick one of the 17 problems below, because these will never go out of business:

These aren’t trends, they’re human defaults. Problems people wake up with, search about at 2AM, and throw money at when they’re frustrated or tired of feeling stuck. Every one of these has a growing community on Reddit, YouTube, TikTok. Every one has people trying random products, advice, courses, apps, supplements, because nothing fully works yet.

If you’re building in B2C, start here: Pick one of these problems, obsess over how people currently try to solve it (what’s broken?), and make a small product that feels like a cheat code.

• “Corn blocker” Chrome extension + daily accountability chat?

• AI coach that motivates you to go to the gym every morning?

• Focus trainer that locks your phone + rewards you for sticking to your deep work block?

• Dating assistant that rewrites your Hinge prompts and gives daily conversation prompts?

None of these need to be massive. Just focused. Build a small wedge product that hits one of these pain points really well, gets people real results, and you can always expand from there.

And remember: people will pay to solve the same pain over and over, especially if your version feels simpler, funnier, faster, or less cringe than what’s out there.

Steal this business idea: Ad spend optimizer for startups.

Managing Meta, Google, TikTok ads is a mess. Every platform has its own UI, budgets get scattered, and most founders have no clear idea what’s working.

The opportunity? A simple tool that pulls in all paid channel data and tells you: what to pause, where to shift budget, and what’s underperforming.

Start with solo founders and early-stage startups. Keep it no-frills: plug in accounts, get recommendations.

Later, layer on:

• Creative analysis using public Meta ad libraries

• Alerts on spend anomalies

• Benchmarks vs. similar accounts

Eventually, go upmarket. Big companies have massive budgets, messy orgs, and no clear view of ROI. That’s the real money.

Build this right, and it becomes the CFO's favorite growth tool.

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🏇 REDDIT

How a simple VA system brings in dozens of warm leads weekly

From a Reddit post where a founder shared their process to get 30–40% reply rates on cold DMs...

• First, they made a list of direct competitors

• Then used the Meta Ads Library to find which ones were actively running ads

• For each ad, they tracked new comments — these are people already showing interest

They hired a VA to monitor the ad comments daily. Whenever someone commented, the VA would send this DM:

“Hey [Name], noticed you were checking out [Competitor Page]. We actually offer [Core Offer], often at a better price or with better results. Want me to send more info?”

Since these leads were already in the market, the reply rate was unusually high — 30–40%.

Two spin-off ideas:

• Build an AI agent to automate this fully, then sell access to lead-gen teams

• Start an agency offering this service with trained VAs

The boring $150/hour business hiding in plain sight

From a Reddit thread where someone asked: What’s a “boring” business that quietly makes a fortune?

• One reply: sprinkler repair. The user’s dad did it for a while—charged $150 to replace a sprinkler head that cost $20–30 and took just a few minutes to fix.

• Most jobs involve digging a small hole, unscrewing the broken part, and replacing it—low skill, high margin.

• Another person chimed in: they just paid $400 to fix a wet spot in their yard caused by a storm-damaged sprinkler. Didn’t want to dig in the heat, so paid someone to fix it while they stayed inside.

No fancy degrees, no big equipment—just dirty hands, a few tools, and lots of demand.

$5K+/month real-world businesses—compiled from Reddit

From camera flipping to custom HVAC services, this list breaks down actual businesses making over $5K/month.

The most common paths? Service-based operations (cleaning, construction, HVAC), e-commerce reselling (Amazon, eBay, niche parts), and tech/consulting gigs (AI agencies, HubSpot setups).

Some started with $20 and basic tools; others scaled to $400K/month. Interesting patterns: AI is helping in marketing and coding, but rarely in manual labor services.

Whether you're hunting for a full-time idea or a cash-flowing side hustle, this thread is a goldmine of low-noise, high-margin businesses. (More Here)

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🗃️ SIDE HUSTLES & BUSINESSES

Virtual house manager for busy families and built $60k/year side hustle.

Hannah Morgan built a $60K/year side hustle by helping overwhelmed parents manage their family logistics, all virtually.

Through her business, Heron House Management, she acts as a remote “house manager” who takes over the endless to-do lists families struggle with: booking doctor appointments, registering kids for summer camps, coordinating travel, keeping calendars in sync, and more.

Here’s how it works:

Parents share their kids’ ages, interests, schedule, and budget. Hannah’s team then plans out the entire summer, suggesting camps, handling all registrations and forms, filling in care gaps, and even helping families time their vacations. It's like having a personal assistant for your home life.

She made $60K in her first year, all remote, no overhead. This is a replicable service that more people could offer in their own networks, especially in dual-income households or urban areas where time is a premium. (More Here)

$3.8K+ in weeks from a local file converter app.

Jake Manger built HowToConvert.co, a drag-and-drop file converter that runs locally on your device, no data ever leaves your computer.

In a sea of online converters that upload your files to the cloud, Jake spotted an obvious gap: privacy-conscious users wanted a simple, fast, local solution. He made it happen.

• Earned $5,886 AUD (~$3,857 USD) in his first full month

• Reached over 800 paying users within weeks

• Handled everything solo, product, logo, marketing, and launch

The app converts 3,000+ file types (documents, videos, images, audio) and got its initial traction from a launch post that hit the top 10 on r/macapps. That single post drove a massive wave of early users.

It’s a textbook play:

• Spot what’s broken in a crowded category

• Solve it simply

• Go where your users already hang out

This idea proves that even in saturated markets, a privacy-first, user-friendly spin can still win, especially if you build distribution into your launch. (More Here)

He sold his Salesforce consulting firm for $10M+

Greg Poirier started CloudKettle in 2015 to help enterprises get more value out of their Salesforce setups, improving pipeline, conversion rates, retention, and even security.

Over time, his boutique consultancy built a reputation for high-stakes, high-regulation clients who needed more than just Salesforce setup, they needed optimization, protection, and ROI.

• Specialized in Salesforce for regulated industries

• Focused on pipeline growth, churn reduction, and security

• Built over 8 years into a firm worth $10M+

About a year ago, CloudKettle was acquired by BCE in an 8-figure exit.
It’s a clear path: start by offering niche, high-value services for an essential platform, then scale with expertise, reputation, and depth. (More Here)

He built and sold a simple AI workflow for $1,000

Mike Futia sold a small but powerful automation for $1,000, built using no-code tools and AI. The client worked at a CRM company and needed a better way to find unhappy customers using competitors’ products.

Their team was manually checking review sites like Trustpilot. Mike turned that pain point into a solution.

• Built the workflow using Gumloop

• Scraped reviews from sites like Trustpilot based on competitor names

• Used AI to classify sentiment and output a clean Google Sheet with links, review text, sentiment, and review date

It saved the client hours of manual work and it’s a replicable idea you could pitch to other companies in competitive markets.

Find a manual task that happens often + build a niche automation = quick win (and quick cash).

He scaled a niche video service into a $5M/year business

Sam Shepler went from running a general video agency in college to building Testimonial Hero, a focused, productized service making $5M per year.

The insight? Instead of offering everything, he “unbundled” one of the most valuable services clients loved, testimonial videos and built an entire business around just that.

• His first agency peaked at $750K in revenue before selling

• To generate cash fast, he picked one high-demand offering and productized it

• Testimonial Hero now earns $5M/year doing one thing really well: remote customer testimonial videos for B2B brands

It’s a great blueprint:

• Look at what agencies are already doing

• Pick a single, high-value service

• Productize and scale it with systems

Start small. Focus hard. Go deep.

He earns $4.9K/month from a simple open source directory

Piotr Kulpinski built OpenAlternative, a directory of open-source software tools, and it pulled in $4,976 last month, mostly from ads, paid listings, and affiliate links.

The site now features over 480 tools and sees hundreds of thousands of pageviews monthly, even with dips in traffic.

• 259K pageviews in June

• $3.5K in monthly recurring revenue from sponsorships and paid placements

• Built ~2.5 years ago, now runs with minimal effort

It’s a great example of a niche content directory monetized through multiple streams. If you can curate and categorize well, there’s room to build your own “alternatives” site for paid SaaS, AI tools, no-code apps, etc.

Low overhead. Search-friendly. Compound traffic.

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