🗞 What's New: Why AI can't replace my $1k/mo human assistant

Happy Saturday! I got a little personal with this one:

• Personal assistants > AI. I shared a list of founder-specific tasks my personal assistant does better than any of the new AI models.
• Are AI agents making you rich yet? If not, check out these 25+ AI agent opportunities for indie hackers.
• This $50k/month business started out as an unusable API. Learn how its founder found product-market fit.

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As someone who spends an hour daily talking to ChatGPT, pays for premium AI subscriptions, and integrates AI tools throughout my workflow, you might think I'd have replaced my human assistant by now.

Not even close.

In this candid breakdown, I explain exactly what tasks my remote assistant handles that AI still can't touch — from maintaining inbox zero and managing an editorial calendar to providing sales support and forum curation.

For founders wondering where the human/AI line currently sits, this is a practical look at what $1,000/month of human assistance still delivers that the latest tech can't.

Read the full article →

Here's today's Indie Mini! Let us know what you think of it.

The daily puzzle is generated by AI, but that doesn't mean you should use AI to solve it… 👮‍♂️

Play today's puzzle →

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There's a lot of talk about AI agents these days, but most of it is speculative — without any actionable insights for founders.

So here's something from an experienced founder (Jotform's Aytekin Tank) to get your creative juices flowing:

A list of dozens of untapped AI agent ideas that you can launch as new products or use to streamline your existing business with.

Read the full article →

Initiate, then iterate.

Iteration is how you'll make your product great.

But initiation is how you'll make your product… a product.

—@channingallen

This piece on Alex Florescu and his company ShortPixel is a masterclass on how to evolve a product over time.

What began as a clever but unusable image optimization API transformed into a $50k/month business by focusing on what customers actually needed.

The key insight?

Building something technically impressive isn't enough — you need to make it accessible. By pivoting to create a WordPress plugin that non-technical users could easily implement, Alex found product-market fit and scaled to processing 20 million images daily across more than a million websites.

Read the full article →

Did you like today's stories? Did they suck? Which ones?

We're constantly changing things up to make this newsletter more useful, so let us know what you think by replying directly to this email. We read every reply!

Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to Aytekin Tank and James Fleischmann for contributing posts.

—Channing