On Friday 5 September 2026, I asked Gemini a question.
The prompt
Name ten ways to make money, but the caveat is that these are ways to make money that the everyday man/woman or couple can do. They are working, have little to no savings and are looking for something they can do that eventually can take the place of their job. The other caveat is that the opportunities would be classed as left field, unconventional, bizarre or just plain odd.
For the record, the everyday couple is me and my wife. Even if your partner isn't directly involved, their support matters in any extra work you take on.
I was genuinely curious whether anything would come up that I hadn't already considered as a second income.
1From ten ideas to a website
At 1:58pm that afternoon, I sent the first brief to Lovable, an AI website builder. Within minutes there was a working site with 12 job cards on it.
That was the start of the Odd Job Directory.
2Three weeks, 1,132 cards
Over roughly the next three weeks, I built it out to 1,132 individual job cards. Most of that work was with Gemini, using three separate notebooks: one for the strategy, one for batching the job cards, and one for the affiliate links and toolkits.
Every card shows the startup cost, how hard the job is, the time it needs and what it realistically pays, even when the honest answer is pocket money.
3What slowed it down
It wasn't all smooth.
- Duplicates. When I asked Gemini for batches of 30 cards, it kept repeating jobs it had already given me, so every batch needed checking.
- Affiliate links. I could only add five or six at a time.
- Toolkits. These are the step-by-step guides behind some of the jobs, and they were slow to make, a handful at a time.
There's just me, so those things add up.
4Where it is now
The site does exactly what it set out to do. It gives left-field opportunities to those of us who are fed up with the 9 to 5, or in my case, the 5am to 2:45pm. Everything that helps someone find and start a job is up and running.
The add-ons are extras we think will help with some of the jobs. The affiliate links are a bonus, and every one brings the dog sanctuary a little closer to being real. That's a story for its own post.
It has earned £0 so far. That's on the £3k Lab ledger, same as everything else.
5What's next
Two separate conversations with Claude have suggested the job cards can be produced in a way that avoids the duplicates. There are also a number of cards that, although they're individual, are too close to existing ones, so they need weeding out.
It's not that I've been held back. I've put my effort into other parts of the bigger picture that I know will pay off. jonnysuccess.com is the hub that connects everything together, and time spent getting it right is never wasted.
Why it belongs here
The teardowns show what doesn't work. The Odd Job Directory is the other side of that: a free list of real, unglamorous ways to earn, with the numbers left in.