Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 1:12 - The case study nobody expected 2:14 - The uncomfortable place every winner starts from 2:26 - The question you have to answer before you begin 3:45 - The rule that decides if you're in the stream or the desert 4:03 - The time machine exercise that surfaces your hidden skill 5:54 - The strategy almost nobody applies to AI 6:02 - The guy who beat every miner without lifting a pickaxe 7:45 - The one platform that flips the whole game 8:57 - The data signal that reveals perfect timing 11:17 - The one thing every example here has in common 14:29 - The skill you ignore because it feels obvious 14:37 - The single question that transformed an 18-year-old's channel 15:46 - The AI skill that interviews you to find your niche 16:44 - The part everybody overthinks 18:17 - The tiny channel with the surprising outcome ---------- SALARY DISCLAIMER: All income figures presented in this video are sourced from Glassdoor reports at the time of editing. These represent reported salary ranges for full-time positions, which may differ from freelance, contract, or part-time opportunities discussed. Actual earnings vary significantly based on experience, location, skills, hours worked, and current market conditions. The figures presented represent potential earnings according to third-party sources, not guaranteed results.
These videos are for entertainment purposes only and they are just Shane's opinion based off of his own life experience and the research that he's done. Shane is not an attorney, CPA, insurance, or financial advisor and the information presented shall not be construed as tax, legal, insurance, safety or financial advice. If stocks or companies are mentioned, Shane might have an ownership interest in them. Affiliate links may be present, the offers and numbers presented may change over time so please make sure to confirm that the offer is still valid. Some offers mentioned may no longer be available or they have been changed. Please don’t make buying or selling decisions based on Shane’s videos. If you need such advice, please contact the qualified legal or financial professionals, don't just trust the opinion of a stranger on the internet and always make sure to do your own research and enjoy this family friendly content.
Sources and further readings for jobs and college degrees: bls.gov(bureau of labor statistics) nces.ed.gov(national center for educational statistics) payscale(provides information on jobs and degrees)
AI Generated·May contain errors
Video Summary
AI Generated
This video presents a strategy for building a scalable AI side hustle by focusing on solving existing problems rather than developing new technology. By adopting a \"pickaxe\" strategy—selling the tools and knowledge needed to navigate the AI gold rush—individuals can create high-margin businesses through education, consulting, and content creation.
By the end of this video, you're gonna know
the fastest cloud AI side hustle to your first $1,000
even if you're a beginner.
And it is not the one being shoved
down your throat right now.
This is not freelancing, it's not selling prompts,
and it's not building the next AI app.
And it's definitely not doing some complicated automation
for businesses that you're never going to finish.
It is becoming the person who solves a problem
that people are already paying to solve,
but you have to do it in one very specific way,
and that way is what the next five steps are all about.
And this is coming from somebody
who has personally started a side hustle
that made 10K a month and grew it into a business
that's now made over $10 million online.
And I was using cloud AI before anybody else
was talking about it.
And I use it in almost every part of my business.
And I've also helped my community members
generate over $100 million in results.
And I recommend to them the same cloud AI system
that I'm about to show you in this video.
So here's what I have learned
from watching it happen over and over again.
Every single time a new technology shows up,
there is a playbook that works,
and it is not a new playbook.
It goes back hundreds of years,
and I'm gonna show you exactly where it comes from.
And I'm so confident in this playbook
that I picked a random 50-year-old in my family
just to see if it would work on them.
And that was my brother, Zach.
He's in his 50s.
He had never made a dollar outside of his career
in his entire life, and he is not a technical guy.
And 29 days after he started,
he was making a full-time income, $214 in a single day,
which is a $70,000-plus year run rate.
So if you can pull that off in his 50s with zero tech skills,
you've got no excuse.
And before the comments fill up
with this whole AI is just hype thing,
let me get ahead of you.
Half the slop that you're scrolling past right now
on YouTube is hype.
I completely agree with you.
It is lazy garbage from people
who have never earned a dime in their entire life
from what they tell you to do
and have no idea what they're talking about.
So this is the honest, unsexy version.
It's not overnight and it is not magical,
but it's not BS either.
It's just the one move that pays the fastest.
And I'm gonna show you real people, real revenue numbers,
and real search data along the way
so that you can see for yourself that this is not theory.
Now, if you appreciate me making this type of content
and you wanna see me make more of it in the future,
then gently cheers that like button
and let's jump into it right now.
All right, step one is to start where it hurts.
So here's the question that almost nobody asks
before they start a side hustle.
If you want a complete beginner to hand you $1,000,
what actually has to be true?
The answer is that you have to make their pain stop.
That's basically how business works.
Now, maybe right now you're thinking
that you wanna start an AI automation agency
or maybe you wanna build an app.
Both of those can work,
but I want you to think about
why they work in the first place.
Take the AI automation agency.
Nobody pays for one of those because AI is cool.
They pay because their business has operations
that are inefficient and inefficiency
costs them money every single month.
And that's the problem.
The automation makes it stop and that is the solution.
That's the entire business.
Because think about it like this,
who is more likely to spend money
out of the two people here?
The person who wants brighter and whiter teeth
or the person who has a crippling toothache, right?
People buy much quicker and they pay more money
to get rid of an existing pain.
Now, of course, in this case,
it's the person who has a crippling toothache
that will spend more money.
Now look at an app.
There's a tool called WhisperFlow
and the entire product is this.
Instead of typing, you talk
and half the people in this industry use it now.
So they do not sit here prompting anymore,
they just speak.
And that company is now worth $2 billion.
Not because the technology is impressive
and not because they built
the most complicated thing in the world,
it's worth $2 billion because nobody actually wants
to sit there typing paragraphs into these tools.
So they found exactly where the pain was.
They found exactly where the annoyance was
and they found exactly where it hurt.
So here's the rule that I want you to hold onto
for the rest of this video.
Money flows towards pain.
Market demand is just a fancy way of saying
that people are already trying to hand somebody money
to make the pain stop.
So your job is to just be the person who shows up
and fixes the pain.
Money already flows in a certain direction,
kind of like water.
Put yourself in the middle of the stream.
Do not walk out into the middle of the desert
and try to open a business there
where there's no money flowing.
So how do you find your pain?
I want you to do something that I call
the time machine exercise.
Imagine that you had 15 minutes with your younger self.
What would you tell that person to save them
the most amount of time, money, effort, and heartache?
Write every single one of those things down.
Pause the video and actually do it if you need to
because in about 95% of cases,
the answer is already sitting on that list.
So in many cases, it might come from a profession
that you've already spent years in, for instance.
Sometimes it comes from the on-ramp to that profession,
like the certification or the degree that you got.
And very often it comes from a pain
that you personally clawed your way out of.
Now, of course, there's exceptions to this rule.
For instance, there's female dating coaches for men.
Obviously they're not helping
the younger version of themself,
but that's why I said this works in 95% of cases,
not 100%.
Now, an example of this is the community member of mine
named Josh took IT and cybersecurity,
which most people would call a boring profession
and turned it into $186,000 in a single month.
So why does that work?
Well, he teaches other people
how to get into high-paying cybersecurity careers.
And why do people buy that?
Because people are in pain of having a job
that doesn't pay well.
And the solution to that problem
is to get a high-paying job.
And one of the ways to do that is with cybersecurity.
Now, remember what we're actually building here.
This is the side hustle.
It's not a full-time job
and you do not have 60 hours a week to throw at it.
So we cannot afford to pick the option with the worst odds.
We need one that has the highest chances of success
for every hour that you put in.
And so the first way to give yourself
a high chance of success
is to pick something that you already know a lot about.
Let's just say you're racing a hundred meter race.
If you pick something
where you already know a ton about that subject,
you're gonna be starting on the 90 meter line.
And of course,
even if the other person is way faster than you,
if they're starting on the zero meter line,
you're gonna beat them to the finish line every single time,
even if they're Usain Bolt.
And the second way to maximize your chance of success
is to sell the pickaxe, not the gold.
Because we need the highest chance of success
for every hour that you put in, like I said before.
And in every single gold rush in history,
that has never been mining.
So let me tell you about the guy who got rich the fastest
in the California gold rush.
His name was Sam Brannan
and he never mined a single ounce of gold.
Gold gets discovered near Sutter's Mill
and Brannan owns the only store
between San Francisco and those gold fields.
So before he tells a single soul,
he quietly buys up every single pickaxe,
every shovel and every pan in the entire city.
Then he runs through the streets of San Francisco,
waving a bottle of gold dusk and screaming
that there is gold on the American river.
And he did not start that rush to help anybody.
He started it because he owned all the shovels.
So he bought pans for about 20 cents
and sold them for $15.
And in nine weeks, he made about $36,000,
which is the equivalent of $1.5 million today,
literally enough to retire.
So he became the first millionaire in California
and he never touched a pickaxe.
Now there's a second guy from that same gold rush
that's worth knowing as well.
Levi Strauss also never mined.
He sold supplies too, but he did something extra.
He made the jeans that became the symbol
of the entire gold rush.
Regular trousers got ripped apart pending for gold,
but his did not.
And so he was not just serving the rush,
he was marketing it so that more people would go mine.
Right, and as a side note here,
if you were pending for gold
and your trousers got ripped up all the time,
that would be very painful and annoying to you, right?
So he solved a painful problem.
But back to the part about marketing it.
And this is the part that almost nobody does.
It's not just about selling the tools.
It's about writing the hype of the thing itself.
Think back to the dot-com bubble.
The people who got the richest
were not the people buying up domain names,
it was the people who controlled the narrative
and the attention.
The magazines, the TV guys, the people standing on stage
telling everybody where the gold was.
We can do the exact same thing right now,
and the way you do it is with content,
specifically YouTube.
Now I do wanna pause very quickly here and say something.
If you were to create an app,
your chances of success are exceptionally low.
And typically business models like that
are a winner-take-all game.
Meaning there might be a thousand different people
that create an app,
and one of them takes the entire market share, right?
Just look at social media platforms.
There's only a few of them that won,
but there were thousands of them that started up.
So you probably don't wanna play a game like that, right?
You probably wanna play a game
where there can be thousands of winners,
and they just take a smaller slice of the pie.
So much smarter than creating an app
is creating a business where, for instance,
you help other businesses use AI better, right?
So maybe installing systems and processes
using AI into other businesses.
Or you make content helping a specific type of business
or person use AI better for their specific uses.
So let's talk about how to do that with content,
specifically with YouTube.
So let me show you exactly
what this looks like right now today.
This is a guy named Nick Sarayev.
And I wanna be clear about something
because I have a lot of respect for Nick.
This is not a criticism at all.
This is a very smart play.
He figured out something that most people have not.
About six months ago,
he put out a video called
Clod Code Full Course 4 Hours Build and Sell.
And that video has now done 2.2 million views.
Now watch this.
This is the Google Trends for the term Clod Code.
Look at where he posted that video.
He did not show up after the wave.
He caught it on the way up.
Now here's where it gets interesting.
If you look at vidIQ,
it says that his channel makes about $4,500 a month
from AdSense alone.
So those are just the ads that pop up
on his YouTube channel.
And that's great.
But if you look at his profile,
it links out to a paid community
and there's 2,400 members paying $184 a month.
And if you were to calculate that out
about how much he's making,
it's over $400,000 a month,
monthly recurring revenue.
So ask yourself the obvious question.
Why is this guy not out there
running an AI automation agency himself?
Because he clearly knows how.
But teaching people how to do things pays more.
It pays faster and it comes with way less delivery headache
than doing the thing yourself.
And by the way, this is not a bad thing.
I'm not saying that he is scamming people
or anything like that.
He's just making a smart bet.
He could have taken his skills
and made a certain amount of money
doing the AI automation agency thing himself.
And he could have hoarded
and just kept all the knowledge to himself.
But instead he's sharing with a bunch of other people
how to do it.
And he's probably making significantly more money
by doing that than if he just did the agency himself.
So instead of chasing automation clients one at a time,
he's selling the picks to everybody mining that gold.
And it's a win-win situation for everyone involved.
He's helped a ton of people
start AI automation agencies themselves.
And he's making more money by talking about it
than if he had done the thing himself.
But how does he get those 2,400 people
into the paid community in the first place?
Well, it's obviously his YouTube channel.
Now here's another one.
A community member of mine named Sean.
Sean got into Amazon book publishing before it was big.
And he made millions of dollars
publishing books on Amazon KDP.
And then he starts his channel around 2018.
And if you pull up the search data for Amazon KDP,
the volume was still tiny back then.
Then it explodes.
Probably about six to 10 times the search volume
over the following stretch.
And Sean is smart, so he expanded.
He kept publishing books,
but he also started teaching other people how to do it.
Because again, that's the smart bet.
He learned how to do the thing
and he could have kept making money doing the thing,
but he could make five to 10 times more money
teaching other people how to do it.
And that's a win-win situation for both parties involved.
Because in many cases,
teaching other people how to do the thing
scales way harder than doing the thing yourself.
And notice the one thing
that every single person I have shown you has in common.
They all have a YouTube channel
and they all picked a really good niche
at the right time as well.
YouTube and building your personal brand
just got 10 times easier and nobody's talking about it.
And the reason it got 10 times easier is because of AI
and specifically Cloud AI.
And that's what we're gonna be talking about
in this week's live training that we're doing.
Click the link down in the description
in the pinned comment below.
I will be there.
I'll be answering questions before, during, and after.
We'll also be giving you an AI
that's been designed to help you pick your niche
if you don't have one in the first place,
or if you already have one,
it's gonna help you make it 10 times better.
So we worked very hard on this AI.
People absolutely love it.
We've literally gotten hundreds of comments
from people that love it
so you do not wanna miss out on it.
And if you're watching this in the future
for whatever reason,
or it's already past the time of the live training,
still click on that link
because we will be having more live trainings in the future
and you will be the first person to know
because it'll put you on a wait list for that.
But with that being said, it's completely free.
No reason not to attend.
Click that link in the description,
the pinned comment below,
and I'll see you on the other side.
Now, I already know what a lot of you
are thinking right now.
Shane, I'm not even good at AI.
That is literally why I'm watching this video.
Good, you don't have to be good at AI.
This works with a skill that you already have.
And it is almost always a skill
that you have been ignoring
because it feels obvious or common sense to you.
And here's the thing about that.
It's obvious to you, but it's not obvious to anyone else.
So let me show you what I mean
with real people in real numbers.
Josh teaches people how to get into high-paying IT
and cybersecurity careers.
And when I first met him,
he was making less than $1,000 a month from his channel.
And we helped him get to 5,000 a month,
then 10,000, then 30,000 a month,
and then all the way up to $186,000
in a single month from his YouTube channel.
And here's my favorite part about this story.
Because of that channel,
he got job offers from two different FANG companies
and he accepted one of them.
Then he quit because the channel was paying him
so much more than the job was.
And he was not a genius and he did not invent anything.
It was very simple.
He just taught people how to do the thing
that he had already done,
which is getting into those IT and cybersecurity jobs
that he got into.
Here's another community member of mine, Antoine.
He helps people get into high-paying tech sales jobs.
And he's a busy father with multiple businesses,
so this is not his entire life,
but he's done over 100,000 a month.
And it doesn't have to be a tech job.
For instance, my brother, Zach,
helps people find the right trade career for them.
Trades, not corporate, not tech, not a cushy desk job.
And 29 days after he started,
he was making a full-time income.
And last month was his record month and he made $18,000.
And by the way, guys, it doesn't just have to be a job.
Clifford runs a channel called College Hacked
and he helps people graduate from college
and earn college credits through online schools
and do it significantly faster than a normal degree.
And it doesn't have to have anything to do
with your career or money either.
This is Cheryl.
She helps people have spiritual awakenings.
And for years, she was stuck under 50 subscribers.
And then she joined our community
and she got to 9,000 subscribers in a few months
and got monetized in that same window
and started actually making money.
So this was never really about AI.
It's about the fact
that you already know something that's worth teaching
and you probably do not rate it
precisely because it came easy to you
and you can use AI to get your knowledge out there
in a way that just a few years ago
would have taken an entire team.
And you can do it in just a few hours a week as well.
More on that here in a moment.
But let's talk about how to find the skill
that you would actually get paid for.
Because you might be thinking,
okay Shane, but how do I know what my thing is?
I don't think I'm good enough to teach it, right?
That is the single most common thing that I hear
and it is almost always wrong.
So let me tell you about a community member of mine
named Joaquin.
Joaquin was 18 years old
when we first started working together
and he was making general study hacks
and productivity videos.
And it was not working
and it was not making him any money.
So I sat him down and I asked him one question,
what are you actually good at
or what problem have you personally solved?
And it turns out he was a foreign exchange student
who got into an elite university in the US.
So we stopped aiming at people
who want to be more productive
and we aimed at helping other foreign students
get into elite universities.
And here's the thing,
it's actually the parents who pay for that.
So that's a high ticket market.
And we helped him get to around $80,000 a month
very shortly after he launched his product.
And he actually had so many people
wanting to work with him
that he had to close his program
and run a wait list
because he was getting too many people coming in.
So same guy, same story,
but completely different outcome.
And I wanted to illustrate this
just in case you think
that you have nothing valuable to share.
Joaquin was literally 18 years old
and we found something valuable from him.
There's never been a single community member
we've ever worked with
that didn't have anything valuable to share.
You absolutely have something.
So how do you find yours?
Well, let me show you.
This is a cloud skill that I built
called the Niche Validator.
You open it up and it starts interviewing you.
You answer these questions thoroughly
because the better your answers are,
the better answers you get back, right?
It's that old rule,
garbage in, garbage out, or Geigo.
So make sure you put good answers in.
And one quick tip that will change how you use this,
use the voice feature.
Do not sit there typing to AI,
just talk to it like you're talking to a friend.
It's basically like sitting down
and having a conversation with me
because it has been trained on thousands of hours
of us helping our community clients pick their niche.
So the third link is gonna be a pack of cloud skills
and the light version of the Niche Validator is in there.
So click the third link in the description to access that
and that can get you started.
Now, the reason it's the light version
is because it needs to be personalized to you.
And there's a certain way of doing it,
which I'll be going over in the live training this week.
And so that's the first link in the description
in the pin comment below.
And that's where one, you'll get the full version
and two, you'll get training
on exactly how to find your niche.
Plus we're gonna go a lot deeper
on actually finding the skill that you can make money from
and how to actually monetize it.
So definitely do not miss out on that.
Click that link in the description, the pin comment below
and I look forward to seeing you at the live training.
But this brings us to step five
and that is now you just post.
This is the step where everybody assumes the real work is
and it is not.
The people who are winning right now
are making the simplest content on the platform.
Look at what my brother Zach actually makes.
Screen share, barely any editing,
almost like he's on a Zoom call with you, right?
He makes three videos in about one to two hours
and that's a few hours a week total.
And he writes his scripts in about five to 15 minutes.
So he told me he spent less than four hours a week
growing his YouTube channel
from zero to a full-time income in the first year.
And he even got to a full-time income
within the first month of starting his channel.
Here's another one.
Nurse Jen, she writes her videos with Claude,
feeding it her own information and her own experience.
And that takes her 30 minutes to an hour for three scripts.
Then about two hours to record.
And she barely edits because she records in software
that handles the editing with AI.
So look at these videos, recorded with a laptop webcam,
no studio, no lighting rig, no fancy lens.
And I would rather she tells you the numbers than me.
First month was right around 6,000.
The second month was right around 8,000.
This month will be right around 10,000.
So first month after getting monetized was about $6,000,
then 8,000, then 10,000.
And you only need about one sixth
of what she made in her first month
to get to $1,000 from your Claude AI side hustle.
Now, by the way, you might be thinking,
well, nurse Jen got hundreds of thousands
of views on her videos and she did.
She has three videos with over 600,000 views now.
But you don't need to get a lot of views
to make a lot of money if you're selling the right thing.
And let me show you an extreme example.
Our client Carla has a tiny channel
with about 1,400 subscribers.
Her videos are lucky to get 100 to 200 views per video.
And yet she still closed $106,000 single contract
from one of her videos, right?
So you don't need a big channel
if you're targeting the right type of person,
which is what I talked about before.
And I want you to see how many different ways
that you can get to that first $1,000.
Now, there are backups on top of backups here.
The platform will pay you directly
for the videos themselves once you cross 1,000 subscribers.
And you can recommend products that you already use
and take a cut of that, which is called affiliate marketing.
And that's really as close to passive income
as you're gonna get.
Or you can teach the skills that you already have
and you can charge one single person $1,000
or charge one single person $1,000
for you to just do the work yourself.
And that's the thing about YouTube
that I don't think people appreciate enough.
It is the only place that will pay you
to market your own skills while you are marketing them.
Every other platform on earth makes you pay
to advertise your products and services.
This one pays you to do it.
Now, I know that 99% of you
are gonna grab the free cloud skills,
come to the free training and watch my other content
and you're gonna get a ton of value out of it.
I see the comments.
I see the DMs.
I see the emails,
hundreds of them from you guys telling me
that you've got a ton of value out of my free stuff.
And I know that most of you are just gonna do that
and we are never gonna end up working together
and that's completely fine.
I always wanna make sure that I give 10
or even a hundred times more value than what I receive.
With that being said, there's a small number of you,
1%, maybe 0.1% of you
that want a one-on-one mentorship experience
or you want us to literally just do the work for you.
If that sounds like you, go ahead and book a call
by clicking the link in the description
in the pinned comment below.
It should be the second link down there.
On this call, we'll figure out where you are right now,
where you wanna be, we'll make a plan to get there
and we'll see if we're a good fit to work together or not.
But we are very limited
in the amount of people that we can work with.
To get the kind of success stories that we have,
we have to have a team of absolute superstars
working very closely with you.
And that's why we can only accept
about five people right now.
And historically, we only accept about 18% of people
to get on a call for the program.
So only apply if you're very serious
about growing and making money on YouTube
and you know the expenses associated with that.
With that being said, check out this video right here
to see exactly how we helped nurse Jen
go from zero to a full-time income
and being able to quit her job
and travel all over the United States in a camper van,
literally living her dream life
even though she started this at 60 years old.
And you can check out that video by clicking right here.