I Built an AI Idea Machine — 7 Shipped Products in 6 Days

Scot Gardner — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 21:14:49 +0000

Six days ago I woke up with the same problem I've had for years: I love building things but stumble with what to build.

So I built a machine that figures it out for me.

The Pipeline
Three cron jobs run daily on my M5 Max:

6 AM — Trend Scraper: Scrapes Reddit, Hacker News, and Product Hunt for trending topics, pain points, and market gaps
6:30 AM — Pain Extractor: Extracts specific, actionable pain points from the raw data and scores them against my skills
7 AM — Digest: A Cola-powered AI digest lands in my chat — ranked app ideas with monetization strategy, build effort, and target audience
The scoring matrix weighs: market demand, competition, my skill fit, build time, and monetization potential. Top idea each day gets built.

What Shipped
Day Product Type Price Time
Mon ⏰ Tab Reminder Chrome ext $4.99 3h
Tue 🚀 ShipDrop SaaS $9.99/mo 4h
Tue 🛡️ Trial Guard macOS $0.99 3h
Wed 📊 Prediction Tracker Web Free 2h
Thu 🎤 TalkBoard macOS $9.99 6h
Thu 📅 Simple Calendar macOS Free 2h
Sat 🧹 SlopClean macOS $9.99 3h
Stack: SwiftUI, FastAPI, Stripe, Cloudflare Tunnels, oMLX (local LLM), whisper.cpp, GitHub Pages.

What I Learned
The machine is better at ideas than I am. Tab Reminder? I'd never have thought of building a Chrome extension. But it scored 92/100 because 900+ people upvoted a Reddit thread about losing tabs.

Daily building kills feature creep. When you have 24 hours, you ship MVP. No polishing until someone pays.

Free products drive paid. Simple Calendar (free) gets traffic. That traffic sees TalkBoard and SlopClean. The funnel works.

macOS apps are the sweet spot. 2-4 hours to build with SwiftUI. One-time purchase. No server costs. No churn.

Reddit will call your work "AI slop." Got this on my first post about ShipDrop. Hurt for about 5 minutes. Then I kept building and shipped 5 more products.

The Hard Parts
Code signing on macOS 27 beta — Apple's hardened runtime blocks everything. Spent 2 days debugging a missing com.apple.security.device.audio-input entitlement.
SFSpeechRecognizer is broken on macOS 27 — complete TCC crash. Had to integrate whisper.cpp from scratch.
Distribution is harder than building. Chrome Web Store review. Product Hunt scheduling. Reddit spam filters. Gumroad setup. Landing pages. Every product needs its own distribution playbook.
What's Next
The Idea Machine fires again tomorrow at 7 AM. I've got a Product Hunt launch Tuesday for TalkBoard. And I'm working on bundling — 3 apps for $19.99.

I'm a retired network engineer living in an RV in Gettysburg, PA. I taught myself Swift and Python over the past two years. If I can ship 7 products in 6 days, you can ship one.

Ask me anything about the scoring pipeline, monetization strategy, macOS development, or building while living in 200 square feet.

SG1 Labs — Small, useful Mac apps. One-time purchase. No subscriptions. No IAP. No bullshit.

DEV Community: Scot Gardner

I Built an AI Idea Machine — 7 Shipped Products in 6 Days