Side Project Illustrated Newsletter Now Makes $400/Month — But a Third of the AI Art Gets Trashed Weekly
Zealousideal-War7154 · reddit · 2026-08-25
An IT support worker shares his side project: a weekly illustrated newsletter explaining how building systems actually work (elevator dispatch logic, fire sprinkler pressure, rooftop air handler startup sequences), now with 1,400 subscribers after 11 months — five of which earned exactly zero, before sponsors brought in about $400/month.
Drawing on two years in building maintenance, he spotted a gap: this knowledge is either buried in 400-page manuals or mangled in 30-second videos. A key design choice is an AI-generated technician character in blue coveralls appearing on every card for a consistent identity — openly disclosed as AI-generated, with zero reader complaints.
Workflow evolution and real costs: hand-drawing in Figma for the first two months cost 6-7 hours/week and looked bad. Switching to AI generation in December didn't halve the time — it moved the bottleneck from drawing badly to curating and fixing output. Roughly a third of generated images go straight to trash every week (proportion drift, broken hands, garbled labels, inconsistent colors), patched in Canva or rebuilt. The promised fully automated pipeline never arrived and he doubts it will.
Current routine: pick topic and write Monday/Tuesday, generate and fix art Wednesday evening, assemble in Substack, send Thursday morning. Stack: Obsidian for drafting, APOB AI for character art, Buffer for social scheduling.
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