The Most Passive Online Side Hustle I’ve Ever Seen

Hey, it's Aurelius. In this video, I'm gonna show you a six-step system that you can follow to build your very own web app, monetize it, and make passive income from. By following the simple steps in this video, you can build a really simple app. Doesn't need to be complicated. You can see this Pomodoro timer that I built, and honestly, it took me less than an hour. So in this video, I'll run through the steps with you, and rest assured, there's no coding or technical skills required. All right, so let's begin. We're gonna start with an idea. We're gonna ideate what it is that we wanna solve, okay? So what is the problem in your niche? That's where we are going to begin. The reason why I started with this Pomodoro timer is because if you've seen any of my videos on my channel, you may have noticed a Work With Me series. So this is just one example where I've got the timer right here. I'm sitting, I'm working. The whole idea is so that you and others can basically work with me side by side where you're watching it and then working alongside, helping you stay focused, helping you stay productive. And with that, I also add a thing called a Pomodoro timer, which follows a 25-minute focus period with a five-minute break in between, going for like about four sessions. So I thought, wouldn't it be cool to have a timer that we can put on the side, let's say using our phone or our iPad or second device, so that we can put that timer, add some cool white noise, background music, or piano music so that we can concentrate, focus, rather than being distracted by many other things like notifications, people outside, whatever it may be. I want to mention that the idea that you come up with doesn't need to be revolutionary. It doesn't need to be groundbreaking or anything that someone has already made, that's already big, and you want to copy and emulate what they've built. It doesn't have to be like that. It can just be something really simple, such as a calculator, some sort of timer, some sort of plan, whatever it may be to make it easier for your customers, your audience, your clients, whoever they may be. So the key word here is being specific, being specific about what that problem is. So you're targeting that one focus problem rather than trying to focus on multiple issues and problems that you're trying to solve. So think about the finance stage, right? There are many calculators that you can build, such as home loan and repayment calculators, budgeting planners and calculators as well. The best way to come up with ideas is to load up Claude, load up ChatGBT or your favorite LLM. Think about your niche. It, of course, has memory of you, what your business is about, and then prompt it for some ideas for a really simple, tiny web app. Now, once you have your idea, this is where we use tools and leverage tools like Claude, ChatGBT or the like, and then get it to help you write a prompt because we're going to harness, of course, the power of AI. We're going to vibe code our way to building a web app. So you can see I've loaded up Claude here and I've simply prompted Claude to help me write a prompt to build a Pomodoro timer where I'll be using a vibe coding tool to build. Want a clean, neutral aesthetics, the ability to change from 25-minute to 50-minute intervals, so on and so forth. So you can be as specific as you want, detailed as you want. Of course, the better, more detailed you are, the better the output usually, okay? So, and this is what Claude has given me, right? Very specific, really detailed, all these point forms. It actually came up with a lot of this stuff without me having to even prompt it. So what I did was I took probably three quarters of this, not too much. I didn't want specifics like the tech preferences. I don't have a care in the world about what tech to use because we're simply using a vibe coding tool. We're not looking to fully scale it in the future. Okay, moving on. Step two is to choose a platform to build your web app. The specific tool that I use to build my Pomodoro timer is Hostinger Horizons. You can see the interface. We've got the main interface here with the chat area. Works just like ChatGPT, Claude, where you're prompting in natural language so that you don't need to code. You can see all of the texts I've written, all the refinements, tweaks, iterations. All of that was done by simply writing. You can also, of course, use your microphone. We're going to actually make some refinements so that I can demonstrate how easy it is to use Hostinger Horizons to make those refinements. But in order to get started, we do need to sign up for Hostinger. I've linked up Hostinger down in the description box below, and there's a coupon code that you can use, which will give you an additional 10% off. Once you're on that page, you can view the plans. And the one I would get started with now that I've built my app, I know how it works, is the starter plans, because mainly for the AI credits. Now, with AI credits, you can go back and forward with the AI, make those refinements, and then each time you make those refinements, it deducts so-and-so amount of credits. Basically, when you're prompting for a change, that's one credit. So if you do want to refine it and refine it, depending on the app that you're building, 70 AI credits is more than enough. I found that 30 AI credits may just be enough, but because I want to tweak it further, I want that flexibility. So again, the starter plan is what I recommend. So if you select that, you'll land on the checkout page, where you can choose between going monthly or 12 months or yearly. Of course, if you go with the 12 months, you will save. And again, the coupon code that you can enter is Aurelius. That'll give you a further 10% off. You also get a free domain name. And if you want to check out the app that I actually built right here, I'll link it in description box below. I've named it Immersion, and this is Spanish for immersion. So continue on with the rest of the checkout process. Once you're in your Hostinger dashboard, you'll find websites. And under websites, you'll find Horizons. This is where you can add a new website. So simply choose Hostinger Horizons. It'll take you to the prompt field where you copy and paste all of that text prompt from Claude or ChatGBT, or you're free to simply type away describing what tool you want to build. So in my case here, I am in Claude. I will just copy and paste all of the text that I want. Not the tech preferences, but everything else right here. So yes, you can put it all there, copy and paste, add any image references so that Hostinger Horizons can refer to those images. Maybe it's an interface that you like, a color scheme that you like, and that's another thing to know. If you're looking for a specific color scheme, then you can use a tool called Colors, and then this will automatically generate a color scheme for you, depending on what you like, what you're going for, what tool you're building. Perhaps you're in the health industry space, and you may want to have something vibrant, something fresh like greens, or if you want something fun like this, you can do so. And what you're going to want to do, and at least this is what I did, is I screenshotted basically this whole thing where it even includes the color code right here, and then I upload it as a reference, okay? So that you can prompt it also to follow that specific color theme, and then it'll use it on the smaller aesthetic details, like the accent colors and all of these things. I wanted something a bit more calming, and that's what I've implemented. Now, on another note, in terms of thinking about what your app is going to look like, you can use Claude Design. So in Claude Design, you can prototype. Here we are in Claude, and then if you look on the left, and this is only on the web, okay? You can't use the Claude app. We can click on Design. And then from Design, we're going to choose Prototype. Give it a name, and then we're going to use High Fidelity, and then Create. I've got my own design right here, Pomodoro Timer app. This is just to demonstrate what it can do for you. You've got the web app version, and also the mobile version. It does work, it's a prototype, and this will help you gather ideas in terms of how you want your app to look like, the aesthetics, the fonts, perhaps. And then what you can do is take this over to Hosting Horizons, where we can give it some reference, right, once we write our prompt. That way, it's got some sort of idea of how you want your app to look like, rather than the AI coming up with it all for you. Now, once you've hit Submit, let it do its job of building that. It may take about five minutes or so. And once it's generated your web app, you'll see something like this, right? On the left side, you've got your chat prompt, and the right is a real-time view of your web app. You can switch between desktop and mobile view, so automatically is mobile-friendly. Bear in mind that what you're seeing right here is the refined version, so I did have to make a few iterations, prompt it to change this, change that, change a few colors, some text. I just want to give you a quick demonstration of how my app works. So we've got the timer here, I can play it, and you can see the countdown, and we've got a five-minute break in between. You can go standard mode or a 50-minute interval, so it's literally 25 or 50 minutes with a five-minute or 10-minute break. And right here, you can see music, right? White noise that I can add. So inspiring piano, or we can switch it to calming rain. Here we go. We've got ocean waves, fireplace crackling, and one more demonstration, maybe cafe ambience. So pretty cool, right? When someone uses this app, they can also play some white noise, too, in the background. And yes, implementation of all of this was also done using the chat prompt. However, I did add some custom music and sounds using a free stock music and sound effect place called Pixabay, and then you simply search up for the music genre, and then you can load it up to somewhere like Amazon S3 or wherever you can host on the cloud those music files. Again, really simple to do. You can see the prompts. I simply said, can you add the following tracks, too, with the name of each as shown? So inspiring piano, this is where it's located, the MP3 file, and then you can see the other ones that I've added, and then it did it all by itself. So yeah, we are at the refinement stage. This is where you can go ahead, make the changes, and do things like change the colors, change the text, add a logo, put some logic into it, whatever you want to do. We can do full screen like this as well. So to demonstrate something really simple, you can see the alignment is quite off. We can see 25 is quite high up there. I can simply prompt it. In full screen mode, the timer is not aligned in the middle of the circle. So let's see if that fixes it. And what it's doing now is fixing the time alignment, and hopefully it will come out cleanly. All right, so that refinement has been changed. It didn't do exactly what I prompted it to do, but what's even better is it fixed it up. It added focus session, session one or four, so then I know what session I'm up to, which is even better. So as you can see, refinements like that can easily be made using natural language. One thing that the tool does not do for you is SEO optimization. Now, because you may potentially want this ranked on Google or perhaps AI searches even, that would be great, right? If someone searches on TGPT for, you know, best Pomodoro timer, blah, blah, blah. You know, you want to describe it. You want to give it some metadata. So what I've done is I prompted it to update the meta title and description to the following. So the title, In Medicine, Deep Work Pomodoro Timer, and here's a description of what it is with some keywords, right? We've got Pomodoro timer here as a keyword, 25, 50 minute, you know, focus sessions. Whenever you do a search on Google for whatever it may be, you'll see the title, you'll see the description. This is exactly what it is, okay? So add that in, otherwise it won't have it. You can also do it in code, but I know we are trying to avoid using code, but essentially it's going to add it to this index.html page. We've got title, In Medicine, and we've got the description right here, stay in flow with In Medicine. And that's just one thing to note and a quick tip for you. Also, if you do want to add legal pages to your web app, like this privacy policy and terms and conditions, AdSense disclosure, you can very well do that using Hostinger Horizons once again. So I simply prompted it to add a privacy policy in terms of conditions, Google AdSense, and it asked me for a few more details, and then it added those separate pages for me automatically. One quick tip here so that you're not consuming your AI credits, and you can check out how many credits you've got left at the top corner right there in the more options, AI credits, I've got 10 left. But if you don't want to waste it, click on edit content, and then this gives you the ability to really do simple refinements. Like let's say you want to change this here from enter deep focus to enter deep work or whatever it may be. So simple changes can be adjusted without you having to use AI credits. But everything else that you can't edit in the edit content mode, you can simply prompt it right here. At this stage, all you're going to want to do is to refine it. Don't overcomplicate it. Don't perfect it because all this really is is kind of like an MVP stage, minimum viable product. We don't want it to be perfect before we actually launch. And what I've got here, it's good enough. It's functional, it works. That's the main idea because besides in the future, I can always refine it, which I will do. But let's move on to the next step. All right, the fifth step is monetization. How are we actually going to make money from our app? All right, so we've got this app built. That's great, right? But we are, of course, having to spend money on hosting it. We're using Hosting Horizons for it. We, of course, want to make some sort of passive income. And that's one of the benefits of building a web app. You don't actually have to sell. You don't need to make hold calls. You don't need any inventory. It runs by itself. People can go directly to your website, use it anytime, and then you'll get paid, and this is what we're going to do. We're going to add ads, and that's how we're going to monetize it, which is a quick and fast way because we don't need any products or services to start selling. We don't need any sign-up forms, which you actually can do in Hosting Horizons by simply prompting it to add user accounts, okay? And you can add that right there if you do want those viewers, those visitors to enter their email address or whatever data you want and collect so that they can start using your tool. But what we're going to do is add ads from Google, right? Google AdSense is the official name. You can add ads at the top, at the bottom, wherever it makes sense, of course, but you can see what I've done. Right now, it's pending. I'm waiting for Google to approve it, but this is what we can definitely do. We can add ads. Anytime that someone sees or uses your app, they can see a relevant ad, which is important, and then click on it. Anytime someone clicks on it, you get paid a percentage. So in the description box below, I've added a link which will take you to this page, giving you step-by-step instructions on how to actually sign up for AdSense, how to actually add it to your Hosting Horizons account. Really easy to do. What I did was I signed up for Google AdSense, a brand new account, and then all you're going to want to do is go to Sites and then add a new site, okay? So when we click on Add New Site, enter your domain name, and this is what we need to do before we actually do that. We need to publish it, okay? We need to go back, Publish, and then you're given an option to either use what Hosting Horizons gives you in terms of the default domain name, but it does give you a really random domain with a subdomain. But what I suggest, because with Hosting Horizons and the plan that you went with, you do get a free domain registration. So it will give you an option to use your free domain name, okay? Search for one that is available. Of course, what we're going to do is come up with a name for our app, and this would be part of the ideation phase and doing a bit more research in terms of coming up with the names, and then come up with something. So for me, it's in Miltion, and that is a .cloud extension. I couldn't find the .com, but not to worry, right? There are other extensions that you can go with. You can go with a .cloud, .ai. Some will require an extra fee, but simply go for one that does come with your free domain. Once you've got that secured, all right, you need to publish it, and then you're going to want to go back to Google AdSense, add your site, add that domain name. You can see what I've done here, and then you simply verify using this snippet, adding it to your hosting web app. So we're back here, and all you're going to want to do is either enter that snippet, right? I've got mine here, copy, and then say, add the following snippet between the head tags, okay? And then we're going to put that. Since I've already added, I don't need to do this. Now, if you don't want to use up your AI credits, here's a little cheat code. Go to code, and then you'll find index.html, and then right there is where you see the head and head. Now, I did promise no coding required, but this is not even considered coding. You're just simply locating, you're finding, and then you're adding it. I would add it somewhere kind of like just before where the forward slash head ends, right? So you add it there, paste it in exactly how Google AdSense provided it. You can see I've already added it right there, and then all you're going to want to do is save it, and then once you're done with that, go back to AdSense, and then it'll say verify my site or something like that, and then it'll find it, detect it so that it knows that you own the site. And then simply put, the last step is to get Google to review that request. That is pretty much it for monetization at this stage. You just simply wait for Google to approve your AdSense, but if you do want to go deeper, you can go to ads, go to your site, where we're going to do is click on edit, and then this is where you can plan out like where your ads are going to be placed. We've got auto ads, which I've got turned on, and we've got mobile desktop version. Let's go desktop since we can view it much larger, and we can see it's going to be at the bottom. So I only chose one at this time because I don't want to be distracting my viewers too much that it's overwhelming, right? So I've got banner ads. We can disable, enable. We've got multiple ads, related search, but we can also do overlays as well. Let's say at the top, like an anchor at the top, which we can't see yet, but we've got vignettes and side rails. We've got intent-driven ads and excluded areas as well. Like some pages, you don't want to include the ads, of course, excluded pages. You just add the exclusions, but in terms of AdSense, this is where you can control all of your ads, and that is the monetization step. Really simple to do. There's not much else for you to do on your end. At this stage, you can simply hit publish, and we are officially launched. So yeah, sixth step and final step is to publish and launch it. Side note, this is not going to happen overnight as in getting a ton of viewers, getting a ton of users to your web app. Of course, marketing needs to be involved. Let's say you've got a YouTube channel like mine. What I would do right now, because I only built this the other day, I would go back to all of my videos, add a link to that app of mine in Mercian, link it up somewhere in the description, or even the first comment and say, hey, you know, I've built a handy Pomodoro timer that you can use alongside this video, all right? And I'll put the link to it in the cloud. That's it. Even though it's obvious that, yeah, there is a timer right here, but if they want a secondary timer, they can do so. There it is, free to use. They don't need to pay. If they see the ads, they may potentially click it. And that's when you get paid. And there you go. That's how you can make your very own web app from start to finish by following these steps and using a platform like Hostinger Horizons. We've come up with an idea, prototype, thought about the color scheme, the design as well, and then simply entered everything into Hostinger Horizons, let the AI do its job, while we have got a money-making passive income web tool that's useful and solves a problem. So start your web app today, use Hostinger Horizons, link in the description box below, as well as that discount coupon, Aurelius, to save 10% off. Thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next one.