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- A Better Lemonade Stand #326
A Better Lemonade Stand #326
Insights, trends, & tools to build a better online business.

Welcome back!
If there’s one thing I love, it’s research. And if you’ve been following along, you’ve probably noticed the surge of new AI deep research tools hitting the market. What once took hours—or even a full research team and a hefty budget—can now be done solo, in minutes, thanks to AI models that don’t just search… they think, analyze, and deliver ready-to-use reports.
This week, we’re diving into how solopreneurs are turning AI-powered research into their secret weapon and how you can too.
Let’s get into it. 👇
🥷 Trend Spotlight: How AI research is now solopreneurs secret weapon.
🧑🦰 AI Efficiency: How Simon Høiberg replaced half his startup team with AI agents.
💰 Monetization Strategy: How Nat Eliason made $200K in a week by pre-selling an AI course.
🏆 Work Less, Earn More: Shaan Puri’s formula for turning what feels like play into a high-paying business.
📩 Newsletter Recovery: Ben Collins revived his stalled email list using AI lead magnets, YouTube, and LinkedIn carousels.
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💛 Sponsor
Omnisend analyzed 23+ billion emails to uncover the following:
Top 10 most-used emojis (Time for a refresh?)
Most-mentioned artists (Taylor, Drake, or Beyoncé?)
Cats vs. dogs vs. chickens: inbox animal showdown
Pop culture: TV, movies, and sports in emails
Overused phrases and “oops” moments
Discover 2024’s trends and what’s next for 2025!
📈 Trends
🥷 How AI Research Is Now a Solopreneur’s Secret Weapon
Deep research used to take weeks and thousands of dollars—now it takes minutes and pocket change.
No team. No enterprise budget. Just AI is doing the heavy lifting.

Let’s break down strategies you can use to turn AI-powered research into a profitable business asset.
📉 AI Research is Booming—And Prices Are Crashing
AI Research Tool | Best For | Cost |
---|---|---|
It provides quick, structured insights for trend reports, summaries, and fast competitor analysis. | Free | |
Dominates real-time web research, pulling from multiple sources (including Reddit & Stack Overflow). | $20/month | |
Best for long-form, multi-step analysis, making it valuable for business strategy, market reports, and deep technical research. | $200/month |
Corbin Brown put Gemini Deep Research against ChatGPT and found:
Gemini scanned 506+ websites (including Reddit & Stack Overflow).
Google Docs-ready reports with structured citations.
Stronger creative insights—even suggesting new AI business ideas.
Meanwhile, Perplexity Deep Research offers 42+ sources per query, 93.9% accuracy, and instant results—for 90% less than OpenAI. Insane numbers.
🏷️ How to Turn AI Research Into a Business Asset
Deep research isn’t just information—it’s a product, a consulting tool, and a lead magnet.
Here’s how to monetize AI research👇
1️⃣ Sell AI-Generated Trend Reports
Businesses and solopreneurs pay big money for insights—but hate doing the research.
You can use AI tools to compile in-depth market reports and sell them as digital products.

✔️ What to Sell:
Industry breakdowns (e.g., “The Future of AI in B2B Marketing”)
AI-researched market trends & competitor analysis
Consumer psychology insights
High-value strategy guides
Use Perplexity Deep Research to generate 10-page trend reports in minutes—then package and sell them.
✔️ How to Monetize:
Sell reports on Gumroad, Skool, or Patreon
Offer AI-powered research services
Launch a paid newsletter with exclusive data
2️⃣ Go From Generic to Data-Driven
The highest-paid consultants don’t just give advice—they give insights.
With AI research, you can back up your recommendations with real-time market data and competitor analysis, making your services more valuable.

✔️ High-Value Consulting Offers:
Competitive Analysis – "Here’s what your competitors are doing—and how to win."
Consumer Insights – "Your audience wants X, but you’re giving them Y. Here’s the fix."
SEO & Keyword Research – "Here’s exactly what your customers are searching for."
3️⃣ Use AI Research to Build Authority
Most people repeat the same recycled business insights.
To stand out, publish data-backed insights instead.

✔️ How to Use AI Research to Grow Your Audience:
AI-powered expert takes – Drop research-backed hot takes on LinkedIn.
Data-driven LinkedIn posts – Share exclusive AI-researched stats.
YouTube/TikTok deep dives – Summarize AI-generated reports into engaging content.
These tools will research complex topics 10x faster than most people in your industry.
4️⃣ Build Digital Products With AI Research
Instead of selling time, sell AI-generated research as a product.

✔️ Product Ideas:
Notion workbooks & strategy templates.
Micro-courses & exclusive AI trend memberships.
Custom AI tools or niche research reports.
🪙 AI Just Made Research a Goldmine Opportunity
With AI-powered research now costing 90% less, anyone can create expert-level insights.
That means solopreneurs can now think about offering:
✅ Research-backed digital products
✅ Premium consulting services
✅ Thought leadership through AI-generated insights
✅ AI research into a scalable business model
💡 Insights
🧑🦰 How Simon Høiberg Replaced His Entire Team With AI
Most startups spend their first few years hiring and scaling a team. But what if you could already replace half your workforce with AI agents and still grow?
Simon did that.
In this deep dive, he explains how he reduced his nine-person startup to four, automating everything from content creation to AI agent decision-making.
🛠️ How to Build an AI-First Startup Team
Fine-Tune AI for Your Brand – Instead of using generic AI outputs, he trained a custom GPT-4 model with 50+ examples of his best content, creating an AI that writes for him.
Create an AI Team – He built multiple AI agents to collaborate:
Agent 1: Generates content ideas.
Agent 2: Writes the post.
Agent 3: Reviews and edits.
Agent 4: Pushes the final version to FeedHive.
Automate Everything with n8n – The entire system runs on autopilot using n8n, a Zapier-like tool that links OpenAI, Notion, Google Docs, and other business apps.
💰 How Nat Eliason Made $200K in a Week Teaching AI
Nat Eliason didn't plan to launch another course. He swore off them. But after casually tweeting about using AI to build apps, the Internet practically begged him to teach it.
One tweet, a quick landing page, and a week later? $200,000 in pre-sales.
The Formula: AI + Teaching + Perfect Timing
Spot the Wave Before It Breaks - Nat has a track record for catching trends early (SEO, Roam Research, Crypto). This time? AI coding agents.
Make Learning the Shortcut - He realized that many people want to build AI-powered apps but don’t want to learn to code. The course showed them how.
Pre-sell, Then Build - no guessing, no wasted effort. Nat created a landing page, collected sales before making a single video, and instantly validated the demand.
Now? He mentions that his students are shipping apps—some even turning them into real businesses.
🏆 Work Less, Earn More
If hard work was the key, the guy cold-emailing leads all day would make more than the founder who automated everything.
The real secret?
Turn What You Love Into $$$.
Shaan Puri’s formula: Take what you naturally do and push it out as a product.
Loved talking business → Started a podcast → Now gets paid for it.
Built on Shopify store → Now charges $10K+ to set up others.
Curated insights for fun → Started a newsletter → Now monetizes it.
The Flywheel That Wins
1️⃣ Do what feels easy → 2️⃣ Get good → 3️⃣ The Internet finds you → 4️⃣ Get paid absurdly well.
📩 Revive Your Newsletter Growth
Your newsletter was growing—until it wasn’t. Ben Collins hit this wall. His Google Sheets newsletter hit 55K subscribers, then flatlined.
Here’s how he’s fixing it—and how you can too.
AI Lead Magnets Beat PDFs
Ditch the boring freebies—build an AI wrapper instead.
Caitlin Burgoyne used an AI pain-finder tool to grow her list fast.
Ben could launch a Google Sheets AI assistant that requires email access.
YouTube + SEO = Perpetual Growth
Find your highest-traffic blog posts and embed a YouTube video.
Every searcher finds your blog + your video—double exposure, double authority.
LinkedIn Carousels Drive Subs
People scroll LinkedIn at work—stop them with:
Carousels from your best blog posts.
Newsletter snippets with a CTA to subscribe.
🧰 Apps & Tools
❤️🔥 Firefly: Adobe just dropped its Sora rival—a text-to-video AI that turns prompts into high-quality footage.
💭 Subtitles King: Ever needed subtitles on the go (toilet, subway, office meeting)? This AI auto-generates captions for any video in any language. (See how this AI app was made here.)
🎥 Argil AI: Recording, editing, and trying to look presentable for every video sucks. Argil fixes that. Upload 2 minutes of footage, and boom—you have an AI clone that can deliver your scripts like a pro.
🧑 Astral: Savannah is building the first AI that markets like a human—it. It browses the Internet for potential customers and converts them while you sleep.
🛠️ Unbaited: Sick of engagement bait and off-topic posts on X? This AI-powered extension blurs toxic tweets in real-time.
🛡️ Notion Backups: Never lose your Notion work again. This tool automates cloud backups and restores past versions with point-in-time recovery.
🤖 Product Updates
🗣️ Grok 3: Elon Musk’s AI Power Play Against OpenAI
Elon Musk dropped Grok 3, calling it the “smartest AI on Earth.” But is this just marketing—or a real challenge to OpenAI and Google?
With 10x more compute power and benchmarks that allegedly outperform GPT-4o, Musk is positioning xAI as a serious contender in the AI arms race.
🔹 New features:
Big Brain Mode for complex queries
DeepSearch to scan X + the web
Voice mode is coming soon
Eventually, open-source (but not yet)
Musk’s play? Lock Grok inside X’s ecosystem, push for an “uncensored AI,” and scale xAI fast.
With OpenAI rejecting his $100B takeover bid, Musk is going all-in on AI competition.
🎨 Lovable: No More Burning Cash on Tiny Tweaks
Have you ever spent an embarrassing amount of money tweaking one tiny thing, like paying $10 for an extra espresso, thinking it would make a life-changing difference?
That’s been the reality for Lovable users—burning through AI credits to adjust basics like fonts or tweak button colors.
Not anymore.
Lovable just dropped Visual Edits. Instead of writing a new prompt every time you want to make a tiny change, you can now click, tweak, and move on—without wasting tokens.
💡 Why This Feature Is a Game-Changer
🔹 No More Credit Burn – Stop paying AI to change a word or color. Now, click and edit manually.
🔹 Faster UI Tweaks – Instantly change button text, font sizes, colors, and layouts—no back-and-forth with the AI.
🔹 More Control, Less Frustration – Instead of trying to explain your vision in a prompt, you can see the changes in real time.
🛠️ Create.xyz Apps Now Ship with a Built-in Database
Before, if you built an app, you had to figure out where to store data—things like user info, saved content, or preferences. That meant dealing with databases, servers, and many tech headaches.
Now, Create.xyz handles all of that for you like Lovable. Every app you build with AI automatically comes with a Postgres database—so your data is stored, organized, and ready to use without setup.
🚀 Picksy Quest: Turns better food choices into a kids' game with AI guidance & family onboarding.
📚 Everything I Read This Year: Auto-fills book covers & details using Google Image Search + Open Library API.
💼 Hustlable: Generate a business from your passion, launch a site, and start a print-on-demand shop in <10 min.
🖇️ Everything Else
🏗️ Softr Goes Full-Stack: No longer just a front-end builder. With Workflows & Tables launching in 2025, you can build, automate, and manage everything inside Softr. (🔗 What’s Next)
📝 AI Business Plan Generators: This guide ranks the best AI tools to generate, design, and forecast your business plan in minutes. (🔗 See the Full List Here)
👎 AI Misinformation: A recent audit of 10 major AI chatbots revealed a disturbing trend in fact-checking. (🔗 Get the Full Report Here)
🎨 Freepik Just Became the Ultimate AI Design Suite: Freepik is making some serious moves in the AI space, adding Google Imagine 3, Pika 2.0, and PixVerse 3. (🔗 AI Features in Action)
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