Sal Aiello and Monica Powers managed to establish their highly profitable side hustle within a mere four days, all while keeping their initial investment under $200.
Their journey began with brainstorming side hustle ideas, during which they turned to ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot, for market research insights. As they delved deeper into the process, they realized they possessed the expertise to formulate precise questions that elicited valuable responses from ChatGPT—something they believed others might not be familiar with.
Sal Aiello, a seasoned CTO with a background in tech startups, and Monica Powers, a product designer who currently oversees a strategic design and branding company known as Mascot, recognized an opportunity. In March, they embarked on the creation of an AI-powered research tool: Users could provide information about their ideas via a form, and the tool would streamline the input to ChatGPT, optimizing the utility of its responses.
The thought that crossed Aiello’s mind at that moment was, “Maybe we can turn this into a marketable product.”
Within a few days of conceiving the idea, Sal Aiello and Monica Powers officially launched DimeADozen, targeting “want-repreneurs” seeking to rigorously evaluate their business concepts. Their service charges a reasonable fee of $39 for a comprehensive report, swiftly assembling results in a fraction of the time it typically takes traditional analytics agencies or search engines.
In approximately seven months, DimeADozen, which was evenly owned by Aiello and Powers, generated an impressive revenue of over $66,000, as evidenced by documents examined by CNBC Make It. Apart from minor expenses, such as $150 for the web domain and $35 for hosting and a database, almost all of the revenue translated into profit, according to Aiello.
In the previous month, a significant development occurred as they secured a deal to sell DimeADozen for $150,000 to a husband-and-wife team, Felipe Arosemena and Danielle de Corneille. Both are highly qualified professionals—Felipe is a software engineer, while Danielle is a product designer. They intend to transition DimeADozen into their full-time occupation, a decision endorsed by Aiello and Powers, who will continue to contribute as company advisors while dedicating around five hours per week to the endeavor.
In Aiello’s words, “It really does print money,” underscoring the tremendous success and financial rewards that DimeADozen has brought to its founders.
AI side hustle
Monica Powers and Sal Aiello crossed paths last year at a virtual startup founder meetup event, hosted by the renowned Silicon Valley startup accelerator, Y Combinator. Quickly, they began collaborating during their free time, embarking on a journey that led to the development of multiple other side hustles, with further plans for expansion.
Although their other ventures haven’t attained the level of success reached by DimeADozen, Aiello characterizes it as the first AI research tool explicitly designed for testing business concepts. This innovative tool employs the information it receives to generate responses using hundreds of pre-written ChatGPT prompts, subsequently organizing these responses into comprehensive 50-page reports. These reports delve into the hypothetical company’s potential investors, customers, and competitors.
While it’s possible to achieve similar results using Google, Aiello emphasizes that it would be a time-consuming process with less dependable results. According to him, “There’s no reason you can’t do 1,000 Google searches and get the same results, [but] it’s a no-brainer to lean on somebody [to do it faster].”
Powers and Aiello also leveraged their expertise in prompt engineering—a technique involving the targeted questioning of chatbots to obtain precise responses—to minimize the risk of AI hallucinations. Aiello explains that AI hallucinations occur when chatbots produce information that appears suitable but is entirely inaccurate. Although DimeADozen can’t guarantee the complete elimination of these occurrences, Aiello asserts that they mitigate them by adjusting the prompt parameters and adhering to stringent prompting standards. This process involved weeks of fine-tuning to ensure the expected responses.
In Aiello’s vision for the future, he envisions the possibility of the tool being acquired by a prominent cloud-based software giant like Salesforce, aiming for it to become a ubiquitous resource for businesses to validate and acquire insights about their operations.
Source: cnbc.com