I Tried 5 Claude AI Side Hustles — Only ONE Replaced A Full-Time Income

I tried five side hustles that you can do with Claude AI, and only one of them was good enough to replace my full-time income as a pharmacist. And let me tell you this, it's not that the other four didn't pay. They took hours that I'll never get back, and every one of them looked like a smart idea when I started. And that's what makes this tricky. On paper, all five are real businesses. People really do make money building AI chatbots, running marketing agencies, ghostwriting, and making faceless videos, as well as many other side hustles. And Claude AI makes every single one of them faster to start. So the question was never whether these side hustles work for somebody. The question is why the four of them didn't work for me and why the fifth one did, even though it's the one that I would have bet on the least. And the answer came down to one thing. It's the same thing that separates people who get stuck at a few hundred dollars from people who replace a full-time income. And once you see it, you'll notice it in every side hustle pitch that you come across. The good news is that you don't need a special background for it, a big following, or a technical skill that you've never used before. If you spent years getting good at something at work or in your life, or there's problems that you've solved, you already have most of what the winning side hustle needs. Claude AI just helps you with the rest. So in this video, I'm going to be walking you through all five Claude AI side hustles that I tried, what each one looked like day to day, where four of them went wrong, and the one that replaced my full-time income. And I'll be showing you proof along the way. So if you appreciate me making this type of content, you want to see me make more of it in the future, then let me know by gently cheering that like button. Let's jump into it right now. Okay. So the first side hustle that I tried was selling physical products. So I tried this one with both Amazon FBA as well as Shopify dropshipping. And there's several different physical products I tried to sell, but one of them was called the Booty Kit. So the timing looked perfect. It was around the pandemic time. Gyms had closed. People were turning spare rooms into home gyms and products like mine were already selling for other people. So I listed on Amazon, put some ad money behind it, and I waited. And almost nothing sold. Now, here's how I think about it now. Amazon is the biggest store in the world, and I had a decent product on the bottom shelf in the back aisle next to 100 others that looked just like it. Shoppers walking past don't stop for the one that they've never heard of. They reach for the brand that they already trust. But Shane, couldn't you just have put more money into ads? I did, and the inventory still sat there, and I was putting in hours every week and getting nowhere. But today, Claude AI can write your listings, your ad copy, and your product descriptions in an afternoon. And that's useful, but it also means that even more sellers are crowding onto that same shelf. The market is even more saturated than it was back then. And a side hustle where every single customer starts as a stranger doesn't grow into a full-time income. Something has to bring people to you first. Keep that in mind because it's about to matter. All right, number two was building a digital media agency. So this one's called a lot of different things, a digital marketing agency or just a marketing agency in general. And I know you're probably going to judge me for this next one, and that's fine. But I bet almost everyone who's ever tried to make money online has tried some version of this. Build a digital marketing agency. And the numbers back that up. There are over 71,000 digital agencies in North America alone. And the reason it's such a popular pitch is obvious. You don't need a product. You don't need an inventory. You just need a laptop, a service that you can deliver, and one client willing to pay you a retainer. And today with Claude AI, you can write the ad copy, build a landing page, and plan the campaigns, all just with Claude AI without having to hire a bunch of contractors. So I tried it. I messaged the local businesses every single day. And once I finally landed the client, the real problem showed up. But Shane, once you had clients, wasn't the hard part over? You made money, right? Well, that's what I thought. But every new client was just one more person who could call me at 9pm. And more clients meant more hours, not more freedom. And that's not a side hustle that grows into a full-time income. It's basically a second job. And today, there's a new problem on top of that. AI is letting clients quietly bring a lot of that marketing work in-house. So the tool that makes an agency easier to run is also making it easier to replace as well. And that's when I noticed something. The people who weren't getting replaced had built a name for themselves. They weren't fighting for attention in somebody's inbox. People were coming to them. And that idea stuck with me a lot longer than the agency did. Quick break. I'm going to be doing a live training on how to start YouTube step-by-step for beginners this week. It is a completely free training, no strings attached. In fact, I'm giving away even more bonuses at the training. Just as an example, I'm going to be giving away my niche validator. And this is going to be available for both Claude as well as ChatGPT, which is a super valuable piece of software where you can finally figure out what the best niche for you is. So do not miss out on this training. Make sure you sign up for it down in the description and the pinned comment below because you only get it if you join the training. So if you don't join now, you might miss it. But that being said, in the workshop, you'll get to meet me, you'll get to ask me questions directly. So I look forward to meeting you. So click the link in the description, the pinned comment below. Make sure you put it on your calendar. And if for whatever reason you missed out on it, you weren't able to attend, make sure you still click that link because we might be having workshops in the future as well and you'll be the first to know about it. So yeah. Hope to see you there. And now back to your regularly scheduled programming. Okay, so the next one was ghostwriting. So I actually had an edge going into this. You know, I have a real doctorate, six years in pharmacy school, real credentials framed on the wall. So I didn't pick some random topic. I only wrote about topics that I knew a lot about. For instance, medical writing, like health content. So wellness brands, supplement companies, clinics, places that need someone who actually knew what a drug interaction was. And I thought, finally, a real edge here, not a fake one. And this felt like the easiest yes of my life. Because I wasn't learning a new skill, I was just getting paid for what I already knew. Now here's what that looked like day to day. I'd get the brief, I'd type out everything that I knew, paragraph by paragraph, and then I'd shape it into what the client actually wanted. And it worked. I went from one piece a day to several, and I thought, okay, I finally cracked it. But Shane, you're a doctor. Shouldn't that be worth something? You'd think so, but here's the truth about ghostwriting. Nobody pays for your doctorate. They pay for a word count. I'd see job posts paying 10 cents a word for medical content, same rate as someone writing about vacuum cleaners. And I wasn't building anything. Nobody knew my name, and that's the whole point of ghostwriting. My name goes on nothing. So I had real knowledge, I knew the material, and I could write it fast, and I was still stuck at the bottom, in a market that didn't really know that I was a doctor and didn't care. So the writers charging real money weren't better than me. I mean, they weren't even better writers. They just weren't strangers. Clients knew who they before the first email ever got sent. And that's the one thing I still didn't have. Now the next one I was sure would be the easiest of the lot, and that was faceless content. So this is where you use no camera, no face, just a script, a voiceover, some stock footage, and a topic that seemed like it would take off on its own. And these days, you can even just have AI record the voiceover for you. Now I actually started several of these types of channels, and to be fair, this is what initially got me into YouTube, as well as content creation as well. So there were several different niches that I picked, but one of them was weird facts, right? So the kind of channel where you never see a real person, just images and a narrator, and I outsourced the scripts, paid for the voiceover, bought the footage, and uploaded it. And it just sat there, a few hundred views, then a few hundred more, and it never really moved. But Shane, millions of people watch these channels, shouldn't this have worked? You'd think so, but nobody was following me. They were following a topic. And there were a thousand other channels covering that same topic, with the same footage, and the same kind of narration. Uploading twice as often as I was because they were doing it full-time while I was just doing it part-time. And I also realized there's absolutely nothing stopping someone from across the world from doing this as well. So with some of these other side hustles, for instance, you kind of do have to be a Westerner or American to properly market to other Westerners or Americans. But with this particular one, you really don't need that at all. And that means you have about 10 times the amount of competition as if you were doing one of those other side hustles. And yeah, Claude AI can write those same scripts in seconds today. But a faster script doesn't give another reason to come back to your channel with no face. And I was adding one more anonymous video to a pile of anonymous videos that all looked the same. I wasn't really bringing any value to the market. So no face, no name, and no reason for anyone to return tomorrow. And a channel that nobody comes back to was never going to replace a full-time income. So there you have it. Every side hustle that I tried came down to one thing and one thing only, which is I did not have people who already knew, liked, and trusted me. And that's the most important thing. They did not trust me enough to hire me to build their chat bot. They did not trust me enough to give a client a run. They did not trust me enough to pay me to write for them. And I was struggling everywhere because I had no audience. So I stopped and I asked myself a different question. Where do people already trust a total stranger before they've ever bought anything from them? Businesses run on trust. That's it. That's the whole game. Once people watch you enough, they just know that you know your stuff. They stop being someone that you have to chase down and they start following you instead. So that's what I built next. I decided to build a personal brand on YouTube, and it's the best decision I've ever made. So let's talk about the pivot. So why YouTube? Well, it's not because YouTube pays well on its own, which it does, but it's really because it makes every other business work better. Think about it like this. Imagine you've created the world's best skincare brand. Your products genuinely work, but nobody knows who you are. No one has heard you explain skincare. No one has a reason to trust you. So why would they spend $50 on your serum instead of buying from a brand that they already know? That's the problem with most online businesses. People think that they're selling a product, but they're actually selling trust. And YouTube is one of the fastest ways to earn the trust. People see your face, they hear your ideas, they watch you solve problems, and over time, they stop seeing you as a stranger. So when you finally recommend a product or a service or a course, they're buying from someone that they already trust. And I didn't understand this until I met my mentor, Sam. Now, Sam moved here from Lebanon, and his English wasn't great. And he wasn't famous. His YouTube channel had about 10,000 subscribers. But between YouTube, brand deals, and the wedding photography business that his channel generated, he was making between $10,000 to $20,000 every month. And that completely changed how I thought about YouTube. See, I'd met influencers with millions of followers who could barely make a living. They were broke. But then I met someone with just 10,000 subscribers on YouTube who had built a thriving business from it. And that's when it clicked. Subscribers aren't the asset. Trust is. And trust builds a lot faster when you pick a niche. And a million random viewers can't do that for you. But a few thousand of the right ones can. Like Carla, for instance, who has a small channel. Not many subscribers, not many views. But because her niche is that specific, it doesn't take thousands of people watching. It takes one person who needs exactly what she does. And that's what happened. That one person turned into a six-figure client. And we were able to help her do this after she joined our community Then you've got Chad Adams. He had an e-commerce supplement business, then he switched to YouTube and he didn't pick fitness, that's the ocean, he picked one type of person. Busy professionals over 30, that was his niche. Because every video spoke to that one group, he built a community that trusted him and then built a high ticket offer around that exact audience. But here's why most people quit YouTube before they even find their niche. They think that they have to do everything themselves. They have to be a researcher, a writer, an editor, a thumbnail and title expert, and that's four different jobs. And for years, you really did have to learn all of them. But this is exactly where Claude changes the game. With the right Claude systems installed, it can research your niche, help you validate your ideas, write your scripts, brainstorm better titles, and help plan your content. And by the way, if you're struggling to find your niche or you need help with any of these systems, definitely attend the live training by clicking that first link in the description and the pinned comment below. But Claude takes care of most of the heavy lifting so that you can focus on being the face of the business instead of trying to master four different careers at once. So now you're probably thinking, well, cool, Shane, I'll start a YouTube channel. Great, so what the heck are you going to make videos about? Because this is where almost everybody gets stuck. They think that they need to magically wake up with the perfect niche. You don't. My brother Zach is a perfect example. Zach had spent years working in the trades. HVAC, electrical, plumbing, general contracting. To him, it was just normal, nothing special. And if I'd asked him, what should you teach on YouTube? He would have said, I don't know, I just fix stuff. And that's the problem. The things that feel ordinary to you are extraordinary to someone who's never done them. So instead of trying to figure it out ourselves, we dumped everything that Zach knew into Claude. His work history, his interests, the jobs that he's had, the things that people constantly asked him for help with. And then we used a prompt that I built called the niche validator, which is exactly what I'm giving away at my free live training this week. So if you want it, you gotta show up. Click that link in the description and the pinned comment below. I don't make the rules. Well, actually I do, but still. You gotta show up to know how to use it correctly. For now, here's the home-cooked version. It's not the niche validator, but it'll get you moving. I want to start a YouTube channel in niche for audience. Ask me a few questions and suggest a clear channel angle and 10 strong video ideas. Now, it would come back with things like who your audience actually is, how much buying power they have, what they struggle with, and what they'd actually pay money for. And even your first 30 videos if you want. And watching it happen with Zach was honestly kind of insane. Stuff that he'd ignored for years, Claude recognized as valuable almost instantly. And we helped him build his channel, and just 29 days after he started, he had his first $214 day, and his best month was over $18,000. And I didn't cherry pick Zach. I picked my own brother with zero tech skills and documented the whole thing publicly. If it had flopped, everyone would have seen it. And what his story really shows is that most people don't have a niche problem, they have a perspective problem. They're too close to their own expertise to see what it's worth. But the thing that feels ordinary to you is exactly what makes your channel worth watching. So now let's talk about why YouTube is the mother of all personal branding platforms. Because there's a lot of different social media platforms that you can use, but why YouTube? Well, here's a number worth knowing. Around 3 million creators are monetized on YouTube right now. And in 2024, it paid out more than $32 billion to partners globally. And that's just the money that you can make from AdSense alone. Those are the ads that pop up on your channel. And that is a tiny fraction of the total amount of money that you can make on YouTube. For instance, on our channel, that's probably about 2% of our total income. So there's already 3 million creators on YouTube and more are joining every single day. So yes, the competition is real, but here's what people miss. Every other app runs your attention. A post lasts a day, maybe a week, and then you start from zero again. YouTube is a search engine and a social platform at the same time. People find you when they're searching for an answer, and they keep finding you for years. A video that you make this month can still be bringing in viewers, trust, and sales for long after you've forgotten that you've made it. And more and more of those people are watching on TV in their living room, sitting back, giving you their full attention. And there's one thing that nobody on YouTube can copy from you, which is your experience. They can copy your topic, they can copy your video ideas, but they can't copy the years that you spent learning what you know. That's what people come back for. And I didn't see how far my own channel could go at first. Even when it was paying me more than my full-time job, I kept working for two more years because I don't like taking risks. And then one day I realized it wasn't a side hustle anymore. It was just my income. And that's when I quit my pharmacy job and went full-time on YouTube. And as a side note, I was actually making over $10,000 a month on YouTube for over two years before I decided to quit my pharmacy job. In fact, there were some months where I was making as much as $30,000 a month on YouTube. But there's some others that quit a lot more quickly. Take Nurse Jen. She'd never made a video in her life, never even thought about it, and her exact words to me were, I'd never really thought about it, the thought of looking at myself on camera. But she started anyways. Plain webcam, just talking about the one thing that she'd lived inside of for 33 years, which is the healthcare system, and specifically, staying healthy as you get older. And soon, after her first video took off, she had a full-time income. And within her first month, two of her videos passed 500,000 views, and she was making a full-time income. Later on, one of her videos crossed over 900,000 views in its first month. Why? Because Jen had spent decades working inside of U.S. healthcare, one of the hardest systems in the world to find your way through. And millions of people need someone who's been there on the inside to explain it to them. And Jen did that for them, so they trusted her. So when she stacked her personal offer on top, she wasn't starting from zero. The people who'd been watching her already knew her face, her voice, and how she thinks. So signing up was an easy yes. And the best part is she now quit her stressful job as a nurse. She travels full-time in her camper van, and she literally records her videos on her webcam on her laptop. Yes, the built-in webcam on her laptop in the back of her camper van while traveling. Pretty awesome. And that is the kind of independence that this side hustle gives you. You make one video, and even years later, it will still make money for you. Take Judd Albright. He had the audience, he had the credibility, he even had a feature in Business Insider, but none of it was turning into that much money. Why? His offer was scattered. He was trying to help everyone, with everything. Nobody knew what they were actually paying for. But we built his offer around the exact result that people already came to him for, and that clarity landed him his first client. Then something else happened. One of his best videos, seven best remote side hustles, got banned. Months of work, gone overnight. We helped him appeal it, got it reinstated, and that same video went on to perform more than 40 times his channel's average. And that's what a personal brand on YouTube gives you. Once you have it, you don't have to chase the income. The income chases you. But let me tell you something honest. When I started on YouTube years ago, AI wasn't advanced like it is now. But also, the platform was looser. Fewer rules, way more room to figure it out slowly, make mistakes, and nobody was rushing you. But that's flipped now. AI can do the heavy lifting for you today in a way it just couldn't a few years ago. But YouTube has also gotten a lot stricter about who actually gets to make money on the platform. So the deal right now is genuinely different than it was even two years ago. And I checked this myself, I don't repeat comment section rumors. On February 1st, 2027, YouTube is changing what it takes to get paid for a brand new channel. Right now, it's 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. But starting in February, it's going to be 1,000 subscribers and 8,000 watch hours. So the bar literally doubles. And here's the part that matters most. If your channel is already approved before that date, you are not affected, you are grandfathered in. Existing channels in the program keep their place, so this isn't a someday project anymore. Getting your channel monetized before February is worth something real, and the easiest time to start is now. And let me show you what right now actually looks like, because I've got two fresh ones. Dr. Muhammad Paika joined us a few months ago, and when he came to us, he got expert feedback and a clearer content plan. And not long after, his channel was pulling in hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of new subscribers. Then there's Nurse Magda. She's a certified kidney nurse who already ran an in-person training program for dialysis technicians. And her channel was made for them, a room of maybe a few thousand professionals. And she watched one of our videos, signed up for the free training, and decided to actually do something about it. And together, we turned the channel toward everyday kidney health for regular people. It's the same knowledge, but a much bigger room. One of our videos passed over 750,000 views. So same expertise, better aim. And with Claude AI taking care of the busy work, there's never been a faster way to get there. And the free training that I'm running this week is exactly where Magda started. The link's going to be in the description and the pinned comment below, so click down there. Okay, Shane, we're convinced. Now, tell us exactly how to make money on YouTube. Okay, well, there are three ways, and most people discover them in this order. Lane one is the platform itself pays you. You upload a video, and YouTube pays you for the views. Sean was already a YouTuber. He was a course creator in the Kindle publishing niche. When he came to us, he was stuck on the same number for months. And today, he's making multiple seven figures a year. And his best month so far was over $600,000. And his AdSense alone, just lane one, doubled. From the same channel, the same guy, just a different system underneath it. Lane two is inbound. Companies start coming to you. So this is different from ads. Nobody's paying you to have made a video. They're paying you because they want access to the exact people watching you. So Guy started talking about it on camera, and he had 446 subscribers. And a hearing aid company signed him for $1,500 a month. Then there's Josh Maticor. He makes IT and cybersecurity content. And once he built real authority in that niche, FANG companies started reaching out to him directly. He didn't have to apply to a single one. So that's lane two. You stop chasing companies and they start chasing you. And here's why it pays better than ads ever could. You're not competing for pennies per view anymore. You're the cheapest, most believable ad a company can buy because your audience already trusts you. Lane three is your own offer. Right? So in lane two, you're basically selling other people's products and services. In this lane, you're going to be selling your own. So this is where you stop renting out your audience to someone else's product and start selling the thing that you built yourself. So this is the one that almost everyone skips, and it's the one where the real money is. So we spoke about Carla. Her channel was small. One person watched, reached out, paid her $106,200 a year. Then there's Nicole. Her channel is GRC for mere mortals. She started with under a hundred subscribers when she first started working with us. But she kept going, and she built an audience of people trying to move into a similar field. And once she offered her own coaching and digital products to them, she had a month of over $80,000. So ads pay you for someone's attention, but your own offer pays you for solving their problems. And that's worth far more to them than a few seconds of attention will ever be worth to an advertiser. And that's why this is the one Claude AI side hustle that replaced my full-time income. The catch is that most people treat it as the last step and wait years to build it. They don't have to. If you know who you're helping and what you're helping them with, You can plan it from your very first video. Okay, so let me tell you the actual math behind everything that you just watched. I didn't get lucky once. I got unlucky four times and then worked my way to get lucky once. That's the real ratio. So if you're sitting there thinking, this works for Shane, this works for his clients, but I'm not built for this. I want you to sit with something really quickly. Somewhere on this platform right now, a grown man is filming himself making pickle flavored soda in his kitchen with zero editing skills. And it looks like he's filming with a camera from the 1990s. And he pulled almost 11 million views from the video. And this is a video that didn't have a good title, didn't have a good thumbnail, didn't have a good intro, and the production quality was absolutely terrible. Somewhere else, there's an old man giving advice to younger generations, and it has over 38 million views. Again, recorded with a potato for a camera, very bad production quality with very little editing. So if that works, boring is not the problem. Starting is the problem. My main channel makes about $20 per 1,000 views from ads. And that's the number that everyone assumes is the ceiling on YouTube income. But it's not. It's the four. Across everything I actually do, layered properly, I typically average about $300 to $500 per 1,000 views. And that's just on my main channel. On some of my other channels, it's a lot more than that. So same views, 15 to 25 times the money. So the difference is not the audience. It's what you build underneath it. Now, most of you watching this are never going to work with me directly, and that is totally fine. But that's why I'm running a free live workshop this week. And if you show up live, you walk away with the exact niche validated that I use with my own clients for no charge whatsoever. And I'll show you exactly how to get started on YouTube step-by-step as a beginner. So click that first link in the description in the pinned comment below to register. Then make sure you put it on your calendar and actually show up. And if you're one of the small number of people who'd rather have this built for you, if you want a hand-holding experience, a one-on-one mentorship experience, We are opening a handful of spots to work directly with myself and my team this week, and you can click the second link in the description in the pinned comment below to apply for one of those. But only apply if you are very serious about growing and making money on YouTube, as working with us directly is very expensive. And that's because it takes a massive amount of our time, effort, and money to do it. Now one more thing before you go. If you want to see this whole thing play out on a real channel and a real niche that people would call boring, watch this video right here. We took someone out of a corporate career track and got him to seven figures showing you exactly what I just showed you. See you there.