Make $500-$5K/mo with ChatGPT—Steal my Side-Gig System and Build Your Hustle with AI!

Okay, this is my video on how to build a side gig in the age of AI. So many of the guides out there are generic. They're not actually practical.

We're going to get super practical and I'm going to explain to you why this moment matters and then how you actually go about building a side gig in the age of AI. So buckle in. Number one, this is a unique moment and it won't last forever.

We have an opening and I want to explain why it works in the market right now. LMS are making it very very easy to go from natural language to code. You just talk and you can get what you want.

One of the tools I'll mention later in this video is lovable. dev. It's super easy just to type in what you want and get a working web page.

That is something that as much as you may already know about it because you're an AI enthusiast listening to this video, most people don't yet. That is going to change. And during this moment, you have a chance to build software that would not be possible to build two years ago, one year ago.

And what I mean by that is that software has been a hammer instead of a scalpel for a long, long time. It cost a lot of money. It cost teams and teams of developers.

You had to go to Silicon Valley and you had to raise money to build any kind of software for most of my career. That is no longer true. You don't have to do that.

You can build software in nights and weekends even if you've never coded before. And that means that you can build custom software for a specific tiny audience. If your audience loves to take notes and they have a particular way of taking notes and you've always had a note-taking system and you wanted to share it with the world, well, you can do that now.

If you wanted to build a fantasy football software that you have never been able to find before, you can do that now. If you wanted to build some kind of special event planning software that you would never have been able to get in the market, well, you can do that now. You get the idea.

These micro markets exist, but no one has been building software for them because software is such a blunt instrument because it was so expensive. By moving from natural language to code, we now have the ability to treat software like a scalpel. And so we can carve out these micro niches and build really sustainable side businesses where we are the authority on that particular tiny corner of the universe for that particular kind of customized software.

It has never been possible before and it won't last forever. It won't last forever because this moment is a moment when the technology is ahead of the adoption curve. And so you listening to this video, you're an early adopter.

you have the chance to go out there and look at a niche that you know well and go after it. And my goal with this video is not just to sort of inspire you and give you generic ideas is to give you war stories from my experience as an entrepreneur and also to give you a sense of how it actually works out there through my conversation with founders and others. So if you're starting a business in 2025, let's assume you get it, you get the leverage, this is the moment, etc.

What are your tool sets, right? What do you have to work with that you didn't have before? Well, I'm going to name five tools for you, and I think that you're going to find them incredibly easy to work with in combination, and I want to list what each of them does.

This is the absolute simplest tool set I've been able to come up with, and I want to explain what each does and explain why they're in the stack. Each one earns its keep. Number one, I mentioned it already, lovable.

dev. It's no code, it's low code. I want to give you the straight reason why I picked this one.

this team ships. There are lots and lots and lots of vibe coding pieces of software. I could have recommended Bolt.

I could have recommended Replet. There are lots of other choices to choose from. I picked lovable.

dev because the team ships fast and because they are dedicated to making the product meaningfully better in a in a cadence of weeks. Like in two weeks, the product will be better than it is today. And that's been true for months and months and months and months.

you can bet on that trajectory. And so, Lovable. dev offers you a chance to actually build a functioning site.

They recently launched Stripe integrations. They have a back-end integration that works. You can publish to a custom URL.

It is kind of like a web presence in a box. It's really, really easy. There are a few other tools though that you may find useful along the journey.

Number two is uh Outa. Why do I recommend them? They're not very wellnown actually.

I recommend them because there is one stack there for everything you need from a back-end office perspective. So you can get user authentication that way. You can get subscription payments that way.

You can get a basic CRM or contact relationship management database that way. You can get basic email that way. It's all under one umbrella which makes it really really easy if you're starting out.

And it integrates with Love and you can pull stuff into lovable that way. So they kind of work together. Now, if you're getting to a point where you need to deploy and you don't want to deploy with Lovable, this is optional, by the way, because if you're just getting started, you can kind of just start with Lovable.

But if you want to go a little farther, you can do continuous builds of your software system and easy hosting with a tool called Versel, which is used all over the world by developers. It's very, very famous. It's easy to use as long as you're willing to work with Chat GPT a little bit on the documentation side.

I want to mention two other tools here. Again, both of them are optional. In my view, the only absolutely required tool if you really want to strip it down is lovable.

dev. And then out is like the second one if you really want to add some backend office. And then everything else is depending on what you want to build.

And if you want to build something more technical, you add more technical tooling and so on. Two other tools to be aware of. Framer offers drag and drop landing pages and Gemini offers instant AI analysis for free.

That's right. You can make calls to the Gemini API for free up to a reasonable weight rate limit for a tiny business to get AI analysis and generation. So you can actually incorporate a free LLM into your product, which is kind of handy.

So that's my basic tool set. It's super flexible. It's like a Swiss Army knife.

You can do almost anything with it. And I want to spend some time talking about the philosophy of picking a problem now because in my view everyone is asking me for the tools. So I gave you the tools.

But the really interesting thing is why you pick the problem you pick and how you build on that problem to solve a customer painoint. This is where sort of entrepreneur Nate puts on his hat. The craft of entrepreneurship actually has changed in important ways in the age of AI.

And so we talk about the strategic moment. We talk about the tool set. The tool set that we have as entrepreneurs, our skill set, the things that this moment demands from us, that's also different.

First, we need to think about distribution much much more as builders than we used to. So before you would put the product first and you would make sure the product really solved the customer problem and then you would work through established distribution channels. So if you were in the consumer space, you would figure out how to get into stores and so on.

Well, not anymore. Now you have to assume that someone around you is building something that is sort of like what you have and your goal is to get distribution with the micro niche that you already know well. And that is why at the top of this video I recommended that you use a micro niche that you know well because if you're already a member of that community, connecting with them, talking with them is going to feel natural.

You're going to understand their needs. You're going to understand their pain points. You're going to be able to solve their problems.

And you are also going to have a sense of where they hang out and how you can reach them. And that's called distribution. That's distribution knowhow.

And that is an edge. That is an edge that no major model maker has. And so part of how you know you can compete with the likes of open AI and anthropic is because you have that distribution knowledge.

So the first principle, the first skill set you need to think about if you're in the age of AI and you're building something, you want to build a side gig, think about your distribution first. What is your distribution advantage? What do you know that other people don't know about your market and where they hang out and what they like and what they don't like and what their pain points are?

And are you a member of that community in such a way that they trust you and you're respected and you won't look like you're just scamming people if you talk about a product that you built? That is really, really important. In fact, it's so important that people building side gigs now pick the product after they pick the distribution channel.

And that is completely the reverse of what I was taught when I got started building and building companies, building product, etc. That's that's really different. Second thing that's different in the age of AI, the second principle of entre entrepreneurship that has changed, we need to have the skill to know when to stop building the product.

And that is new because AI will tell you over and over and over and over again, you can build more. You can add a database. You can add a customer relationship management.

You can add a new product. Expand. Expand.

Expand. Expand. You need to be able to say no.

Before, because software was so expensive, you had to cut just to sort of find a way to make it work. Now software is so cheap. It's very tempting to add an ad and add an and add.

You are the one that has to develop the skill to say no. You have to say this is a night and weekend project. This is the only thing I need to build to show that I can solve the problem.

That discipline is something that was imposed by external cost controls before, not anymore. Now it's on you now. It's a skill you have to have.

Know when to say no. That is really, really important. The third major skill that entrepreneurs bring to the table or must bring to the table now that they didn't have to bring before.

You need to know in a very fine grained way where value lies in your product. You know how I said software was a blunt hammer before? Like when you buy Salesforce, Salesforce might be really crappy in a lot of different spots, but because it has existing distribution relationships with a lot of big companies, the buyer doesn't really care and so it doesn't get better.

It's different in the micro niches I'm talking about for side gig Builders. Your people are not loyal to you. They will not necessarily buy your product unless it's good and it really solves the problem.

And so you have to develop an extraordinary eye for how monetization and price points and what people will pay tracks to specific features in the product. For entrepreneurs before they could build the whole product and they might not know which thing really worked because the distribution advantage was so blunt like you you send it off to Target and like we'll see and like I guess it works. It sold.

Well, now you can tell where on the page people abandoned and also you hear from people in Reddit and Discord chats exactly what they'd like or dislike about your product and they're very very specific and you can see the impact as soon as you change a feature because suddenly the conversion rate changes. Now, in theory, that was all possible before as long as you were building in software and digital funnels. But now, it matters more because people are less loyal and the market is more fragmented and more people are building.

And so, people are like very very disloyal when it comes to customer purchases and what they are willing to buy and what they're willing to invest in. Which means you have to be extremely good at explaining exactly how your product solves their problem to earn their trust and loyalty. Now the good news is if you can do that, if you can explain why you are passionate about that micro niche, how your product really solves a problem they care about, why the monetization feels fair, like a square deal to them, you will eventually earn their trust, and that's where the distribution advantage starts to become rock solid in your favor.

and it feels like a tailwind pushing you forward. You'd love that. You earn that by building into that distribution wedge with your micro community and actually delivering a product that really solves a problem.

And that brings me to the fourth skill. One of the hardest skills in the age of AI is finding a problem that you can be confident AI is not going to make obsolete. And I want to spend some time talking about this because this one is a little bit scary for people.

People often ask, well, yeah, it's easy to vibe code now, but why would I build because OpenAI is just going to take all of the ideas? I don't think they will. If you think about it, their strategy very clearly is to drive a consumer stack.

They want you to spend time as a consumer in OpenAI thinking and doing your day, but they're not the best in the world at some of these peripheral things. Like, they launched a a meeting noteaker. It's okay.

The meeting note-taker is not going to compete with the dedicated meeting notetakers. It never is. That's not where their focus is.

Claude is trying to eat a lot of the work primitives. They're trying to eat Excel. They're trying to eat, you know, claude code.

They're trying to go after PowerPoint. They want you to spend their day there. Microsoft should be a little bit worried about value disintermediation, but as a as a small builder, you're not that worried about it.

They provide intelligence for you. That's fine. And so, you should instead be thinking about the kinds of pain points that persist regardless of the intelligence of the model.

What are the things that people struggle with where a smarter model wouldn't fix it? So, as an example, if you are solving a painoint for someone and it's a coordination problem between multiple strands of software or multiple parts of their day or physical and digital, that is not something that more intelligence necessarily makes go away. Another example, if you are solving a painoint for someone and it bridges the uh physical world and the digital world.

So you're providing a physical service mediated digitally or ordered digitally. That's not necessarily something that more intelligence makes goes it doesn't more intelligence doesn't fix that. Another example, if you are focused on providing a digital service, but the digital service is predicated on your user feeling like they got stuck in a way that isn't tied to immediate answers.

That is a very powerful place to solve for. An example of that, let's say you have to complete a workflow and you're trying to go through and get all the steps in your workflow done at work and maybe it's a a building a product requirements document. You have to go through each of those stages and build it out.

You have to get approvals and then you have to go back and talk to engineers. That is something that is not really changing. Now you may have AI help you do it faster, but the workflow itself is pretty stable.

I want to suggest to you that one of the things that is a key for an entrepreneur is to look at the world in those kinds of terms. Look at the parts that swap out when you add more intelligence and look at the parts that stay steady. In this case, the workflow stays kind of steady.

You're still going to have senior PMs wrestling with requirements, wrestling with engineering on technical requirements, wrestling with business stakeholders and trying to figure it out and trying to make the workflow go together. I know this because I've lived it. Well, in that world, the workflow is a painoint that additional intelligence doesn't actually solve.

In fact, it's a it's a mega painoint. It yields a bunch of downstream pain points. Whole companies are built around that painoint.

find those kinds of pain points, the workflow pain points, the physical digital pain points, the pain points that are not solved by just adding more intelligence. That requires some real thinking on your part, right? You have to you have to use your brain a little bit and that's okay.

You actually, well, one of the things that's never been easier is to stretch your brain because you have a thinking partner in AI. I'm not suggesting that you do this by throwing pencils at the wall the oldfashioned way, the way I used to. I'm suggesting you use AI as a partner.

And that's why I did a whole writeup with all of the prompts because I want you to be able to understand how to use AI as a thinking partner in this exercise. And I want you to feel like the tools that you have, the prompts that you have can be combined with a philosophy of entrepreneurship in the AI age that actually sticks. And so just to just to recap so you don't forget if you're starting, one, this is a unique moment.

Code is easier to create than ever. It won't last forever. Micro niches are a big part of that.

Software was a blunt hammer before. Three, please, please remember to go for distribution. Make sure that you put distribution at the heart of your strategy or else you're going to regret it.

Now, when it comes to the skills that entrepreneurs need to have, you need to remember, think in terms of problem spaces that more intelligence won't solve. You remember, you need to remember to think in terms of your own niche expertise and what is authentic to you. You need to remember to think in terms of a fair and square deal on monetization.

So you understand the exact levers that your product offers and how monetization feels like a square deal and feels honest and that's how you build those trusted relationships over time. You need to think in terms of bets. Think in terms of a simple MVP product where you had the discipline to cut it down to the bones.

you can see that it solves a problem and you're able to launch it in good time and see if it works. This micro niche window is not going to last forever. Your next weekend project can get something out the door that actually earns you money.

And I'm not going to pretend that your next weekend project is going to earn you a billion dollars, but I think it's fair if you actually discipline yourself and start building on nights and weekends to get to a point where you can build a little piece of software that gets you into the hundreds and thousands of dollars a month. That is totally doable. I know lots of people who have done that.

I know people who have scaled past that into five figures a month. You can do it. You just have to make sure that you understand how entrepreneurship actually works today, what the principles are, where the opportunities are, and what the toolkit actually looks like.

I hope that this has been helpful. The full write up with all the links is on the Substack. And yeah, I hope you have a good time.

I love building. It has never been a better time to build. And good luck out there.

Good luck building. I hope you come back and let me know what you are working on.