I know creating websites for local businesses isn’t as simple as some social media posts make it seem. You see posts like: find a small business on Google Maps, copy their information, use some AI website builder, write a simple prompt, and abracadabra — you have a website you can sell. But in reality, there’s a lot more involved: backend work, research, design, legal pages, testing, deployment, maintenance, outreach, and actually convincing a business to pay you. I’m still pretty new to using AI to build projects and trying to make my first money from it, so I’m curious whether this is actually doable. I’ll be honest: I use Claude for most of my coding and a lot of the design work. At the same time, I’m learning from it and I do have some background knowledge in coding. I recently built a tourism-related project almost entirely with Claude. I still had to handle things like finding and preparing images, building the backend, testing everything, and all the other parts that come with actually finishing a product. And honestly, that was already tiring — before even getting to the arguably harder part: outreach and finding customers. So my question is: Is it actually realistic to use AI to build websites/products for local businesses and sell them, especially as someone who is still learning? For those of you who have actually done this, I’d love to hear what worked, what didn’t, and whether you think it’s still a viable way to make money in 2026. And yes, I used chatgpt to write this properly for me because I was afraid my wording would look like gibberish on a plate lol submitted by /u/mikezxnotfound
Originally posted by u/mikezxnotfound on r/ClaudeCode