Looseleaf template

AI wrappers are tools that send info to an AI API and give you the output. That's the simple version.
There's a lot of hate (and jealousy) out there that you shouldn't build one, they're not real businesses, you're not providing value, yadda yadda yadda.
But, plenty of people are making a ton of money from them. That's business.
The simplest wrappers provide an interface for you to upload a photo, a PDF, input something and send it to OpenAI (other APIs are available 😉) with instructions (e.g. pull out the data in the pdf into a nice format, what is a formula for finding X in a cell, etc).
Now this kind of business won't necessarily change the world. But I'd argue that most businesses shouldn't have that goal anyway. If you want to make a bunch of money, with a small team, from selling a simple thing that you can build quickly, then I'm all for it (it's what I did). More people should do that instead of raising from VCs, hiring a bunch of people and following the glorified startup dream covered in TechCrunch.
It could change your world.
If you could make $500k/year from doing this (and you knew how), why wouldn't you?
Okay, enough talk, let's look at some examples:

• Formula bot - $200k-300k/year revenue - 1 person team
  
• PhotoAI - $900k/year revenue - 1 person team
  
• PDF AI - $500k/year revenue - 1 person team
  

Let's break them down;

Formula Bot by David Bressler

• After asking ChatGPT for Excel formula help, he thought a dedicated page could do well for this use case.
  
• The site started as a simple page with no paywall or log in.
  
• He shared it on the Excel subreddit and got interest
  
• He used no-code bubble to go from MVP to real product (with paywall and login)
  
• He got traffic from Reddit, then grew into influencer marketing (think TikTokers) and an affiliate program
  
• He only spent $5k on marketing
  
• Currently makes $300k per year
  

It's now a fully-fledged product with all sorts of bells and whistles built around the first very simple 'AI wrapper'.
The takeaway: You can launch something bare bones, find where your audience is that would find it valuable, iterate on the thing, test payments, and test new features.
Opportunities: You could do the exact same thing for Notion Formulas, Airtable Formulas, and Coda Formulas (seriously, why do they all do their own formulas?!).
Also, 'Notion templates as a business' have generated several folks; $300k, $500k, and $1M in ONE year.

Photo AI from Pieter Levels

Firstly, Pieter Levels is a prolific (and successful) founder of many things (as well as countless failed things). But the art is in his launches;

• It started as avatarai. AI tools let you upload photos and get several ai-generated versions, but only if you know how to work with APIs (can code).
  
• So levels set up a landing page, a typeform to upload your photos and a stripe link to pay.
  
• He manually downloaded the photos users uploaded and used the model on replicate to generate new versions for you
  
• He sent them to his customers
  
• That validated his idea and has since built a proper product around it, he continuously tunes a model to make images better over time.
  
• He's making $80k monthly recurring revenue, with 90%+ profit
  
• He's using affiliate programs and influencer marketing to grow but early on he was just tweeting about it.
  

The takeaway: You only need the most basic MVP to get going - You can build a simple app like this using a form, connect it to Zapier, ping replicate, hugging face, openai etc, and return the output to a customer. Now the world does not need another AI avatar app, but niche it down enough and you end up with something like Headshot Pro from Danny Postma - which is (unsurprisingly) focused on professional headshots. Also making $300k+ a year.
Opportunities: you could make an image restoration site for old photos, an object removal tool, or a product ad builder - many of these have been done, but niche it down to a specific industry that doesn't use AI much and you could find a good opportunity. OpenAI now has a vision API which can 'understand' what's in an image - you could build a simple tool that identifies brands and products in an image. Sounds pointless? Deep.ad built this (pre-OpenAI APIs) and was acquired by private equity last year - likely for single-digit millions or more...

PDF AI by Damon Chen

Damon is a founder and saw this app 'Looseleaf' for sale (it was making $0) and was 48 hours old.

• He bought a domain pdf.ai for $10k (not something we can all do, I admit)
  
• Users upload a pdf and can ask it questions "what does this bit mean" "explain the legal jargon" "what is my termination clause" etc
  
• He makes $500k/year with over 500k customers
  
• He uses affiliate programs and influencer marketing
  
• There are a ton of ai <> pdf options out there, and that's unsurprising when seeing the search volume
  

The takeaway: there are plenty of ways to look at what's out there already and write it off (imagine being the looseleaf founder now!), but figuring out some of the specifics, how it looks and works, how you talk about it etc can make all the difference.
Opportunities: niche down again; bankstatementconverter.com makes $13k/monthly recurring revenue, which does a very similar thing to pdf.ai but it focuses on converting your bank statement (duh!) - detangle.ai focuses on legal documents. Where else are there industries with a lot of jargon or painful 'reading through docs' that could be explored? Understanding medical records, insurance claims, terms and conditions, government and policy. The list goes on.
Edit: formatting

I want to render a looseleaf paper that turns over to reveal it's back side with after effects. I have an animation of the looseleaf floating with text on it already. But for the reverse side, I want to render 400 different versions, each with slightly different text/imagery. How can I make a template where I can 1) insert the 400 different graphics to the back side of the paper. And 2) Render all 400 unique videos into short 5 second clips of the paper flipping over.

For my work, I spend my time with a looseleaf binder, hand writing onto pages. Some are simple forms that I use all the time, and others are unique. (They're script pages.) I am trying out the Note Air to see if it can replace this heavy paper system, but there are some issues I haven't been able to overcome yet. Here's what I need to be able to do: Annotate a template that I've previously prepared. Pull single pages from a multi-page PDF to use as templates that I then annotate, ideally with multiple layers that I can show/hide. Collect all of the pages I wrote on into a daily PDF document that I can export (with my chosen layers of annotations) and email. Replace original pages of a multi-page PDF with individual annotated pages as I create them (or similarly, transfer layers of annotations I made on copies of the pages to the original pages so they can be shown or hidden).
I see that the basic Notes function covers a lot of this, but I can't find an app that allows me to export individual pages out of a PDF to save locally and then use those as templates in Notes. Put another way, the tricky bit is replicating this: I have a script in a looseleaf binder. I pull certain pages out, write all over them, send copies by email, (save all of the day's pages to a folder,) then put the annotated pages back into the original binder. Some days, there will be script pages I didn't expect to write on, so I need to be able to do this all from within the Note Air, not relying on having prepped it all the day before using another device. Am I asking too much? Is there software available that makes this possible? Either a PDF editor that handles it all, including the layers of annotations and exporting individual pages, or else a way to move pages in and out of the PDF to be used in Notes? Thanks for your advice.

A few years ago I was just getting ready to launch a children's charity project here in Toronto. We had setup the legal entity, made a website and just finished designing business card templates which I took to Fedex Office to print for myself and the two other founders. I spent a good twenty minutes deciding on the final touches with the lady working there at the time and then left them to do the work overnight and courier me the cards the next day. When the cards arrived at my house, the sets for my two colleagues were perfect, but mine were totally the wrong dimensions (not standard business card size and poorly cut). I went back to the store and showed the cards to the manager, he agreed they messed up and said they would redo my set for free.
Fast forward a couple days and I get a call saying the revised cards are ready to be picked up. I had a late meeting with an employee from my day-job (the charity is a side-gig) so when we finished we happened to be close to Fedex Office and the two of us popped in to pickup the cards. The same lady who originally helped me finish the design was working (along with another Fedex Office person) so I went up to her and explained the situation and said that there should be a stack of cards ready for me. She found them right away and said that there was a note on them from the manager saying the cards were already paid for and that I just needed to show proof of purchase to collect them. Unfortunately I did not have my original receipt (because by this point at least 10 days had passed) but I did have the bank statement on my iPhone, also the fact the cards were couriered to my house originally (they only send stuff to you if you've paid for it), plus the fact that she totally remembered me because she spent a significant amount of time working on the cards plus the fact that she could simply type my name in the system to bring up the receipt...but no, she insisted on seeing the original.
Well I really wasn't in the mood to have a long argument with her, so after a few minutes of this, I said "look, I have meetings tomorrow for the charity and I need the cards. I'm not willing to pay you twice (even though it was only $30 or $40 it was the principle of the thing) and so I am taking my cards with me (they were already on the counter right in front of me) and leaving you with the 'proof' copy (the first one they made which they staple to a piece of paper and have you sign before they print a big batch) so if there is any problem you can have your manager call me tomorrow". Upon seeing this, the 35-year old 250 pound woman promptly came around from the counter and up to the front door of the store and proceeded to lock the door and barricade herself in front of it.
I then approached the woman and calmly informed her that she was engaging in an act of forcible confinement and that I was going to take a photo of what she was doing and then call the police. As I was taking out my phone, she picked up an empty cardboard box (that you would use to store about 500 sheets of looseleaf paper) and at first I thought she was trying to block my photo but in fact she actually swatted at me and hit me on the shoulder. I was totally shocked by this point and her co-worker decided this had gone far enough and he suggested she let me go. I left and both she and I separately called the police. The cops made me pay a second time for the cards (Fedex Office refunded me a couple days later) and told me that they didn't think the assault was serious enough to justify a charge. I then went directly to a courthouse and filled criminal assault charges myself (who knew that you or I have the same power to press charges as the police!) and a few days later there was a hearing where a judge and prosecutor listened to my charges and decided to accept them and a warrant was issued for the arrest of the crazy Fedex Office lady. I wrote a letter of complaint to Fedex but they completely ignored it and never got back to me despite multiple calls etc.
TLDR: Due to a series of bizarre events, the night manager at at Fedex Office once locked me in the store, barricaded herself in front of the door and then assaulted me in front of two other people...oh and I learned that in Canada any citizen can lay criminal charges that carry as much weight as those laid by police.