Everyone on YouTube right now is telling you to sell Notion templates using Claude and AI, maybe start a Etsy store, or faceless YouTube account, or even like AI drop shipping. I get it. They always make these opportunities look so easy, especially because AI does all the work. But if it were that simple, and anybody can get into this with just a $20 Claude subscription, I don't know about you, but that doesn't really seem like a sustainable business to me.

Now, for me personally, I've actually sold 190,000 digital products on these kind of websites, and I can tell you firsthand in 2026, there are much better ways to make money using AI. So, in this video, I want to share with you why it's actually very difficult to build a sustainable business with all these random AI side hustles, and alternatively, how you can actually use AI to build a business using your skills, knowledge, and experience, something you can actually build for the long run.

These are the exact strategies I personally used to quit my six-figure tech sales job in Silicon Valley to build my life and business here in Vietnam. And it's also what I've taught to my clients who are just regular everyday people with nine-to-five jobs, but they were able to sign their first clients within 30 days of working with me while having that full-time job. And while everybody else on YouTube is making Claude and AI extremely complicated, I'm going to show you how to build your business all inside of Claude, even if you don't have any technical experience or never even use AI to begin with.

So, let's start by going over why people waste months of their life chasing after the wrong AI side hustles. So, I've been around in the internet game for quite a number of years now, right? I started this YouTube channel about five or six years ago. I've had other YouTube channels, and I've used to sell a lot of online courses on different platforms. So, I've seen the cycles come and go, and I want to share with you what happened in the past because history tends to rhyme.

So, back in the day when I started, Udemy was very popular, and everyone was selling these cheap courses for 10s, 20 bucks. So, that's when I got my first start, and I started making these courses. Every month I would put out a course, you know, creating these courses actually exceeded my full-time income um when I used to be a sales rep in Silicon Valley making six figures. I sold over 190,000 students, seven figures in revenue just from these courses alone.

I can tell you that there's a lot of challenges with this. Number one, it's not that easy to get that much volume to get people to buy. Like you have to actually have to be pretty good at what you do. Number two, you're relying on a platform. So, the biggest issue of why I didn't continue to keep building on these kind of platforms was because I didn't own my own brand, right? It's like they would just bring the customers, I would get the sale, and then they would take a big percentage of it.

So, that's why I started doing YouTube to control my own brand, right? So, if you're doing like an Etsy store or whatever, you don't really have a brand if it's easily copyable, right? And so, eventually the opportunity on Udemy is not as strong as it was anymore. I wouldn't even like recommend people doing these cheap courses. I also went into NFTs. I actually used to be one of the top NFT creators. So, I think like AI is actually like the new NFTs and crypto, right?

It's like so hyped, so hot, not many people understand it. And so, I was one of the top guys in this space for a long time uh during the last bull run, and I would charge companies 25K to $90,000 in US dollars to consult them because I had a big brand. The problem with these hype things is people come and go, you know, trends are hot, then it's not, and only the strong survive, right? And a lot of the crypto NFT people actually moved over to AI cuz, you know, it's the new opportunity.

So, a lot of people didn't have long-term brands. Now, in the era of AI, it's it's very similar where you're going to have all these opportunities which I'll talk about in a second, where yeah, there are some people making money from it, but it's actually a very small percentage. And a lot of these uh products that you see or the sales that you see, they're not like going to be there forever. It may be hot today, but once everyone copies it and it gets super saturated, it's essentially a race to the bottom.

And if you don't have a brand, how can you expect to make a long-term income? So, I did my research and I've seen a lot of the popular YouTube videos where they're like, "Oh, like you can do these side hustles with AI and it's going to do all the work, right?" So, let's go through them one by one. So, some people say you should do like an Etsy store, Notion templates, some kind of like these cheap digital products on these marketplaces.

Problem with that is like you don't really have a brand. You're literally just copying other people, trying to make it better, getting AI to do all the work. But if everyone can just copy you, why would they buy your product versus another? It's literally a a race to the bottom, right? Now, if you do, let's say any AI e-commerce like drop shipping or Amazon. First of all, it's a whole different skill set to learn how to run ads, get traffic to your store.

Second of all, you're not again, you're not really building a real brand unless you're going to like buy all the inventory and and really properly brand it. But then that's just the e-commerce store. It's not even about AI, right? So like those kind of things the difficulty on that is actually very high when everyone has the same tools. Now, how about AI apps? Cuz you can vibe code different things. Well, yeah, sure.

There are people that make money, but if you really look at the stats and you can research this yourself, 99% of the apps fail. 99% of AI startups also fail. So all these guys are spending so much money and time to build something and they can't even make $100. That's just the truth. I know on Twitter and X and, you know, on YouTube you might see like, "Oh, I made $10,000 with my app." But for every $10,000 app, there's there's a million vibe coded apps that have zero users.

I'm not saying like these opportunities don't make any money. They do. There are people who are successful. But for a lot of people, they're just not that realistic to make a full-time income off of it, especially if you're trying to quit your 9-to-5 job. All right, so if you are looking to build your side hustle and you're trying to figure out exactly what your business idea should be, I have a free gift for you. I put a link in the description to a custom Claude skill that's going to help you find your business idea.

All you have to do is install it, which takes 30 seconds. It's going to prompt you and ask you questions on what you like, what you're interested in, and what kind of opportunities you want to pursue. And then end of this questionnaire, it's going to give you a full-on business plan on exactly what kind of business you can potentially start using your skills, knowledge, experience, and passions to actually monetize that and find clients.

So if you want that free Claude skill, check the link in the description for that free download. So, if your goal is to use AI to make you a side income, to make it your main income, what is the solution? So, I'm going to show you how to actually build a sustainable online business with AI. And this is what I've done for myself, and I also done it for my clients. So, you can see one of my clients here. You know, he's someone that I work with one-on-one.

And, you know, he finally got his first client. It was, you know, someone paying him thousands of dollars for AI automations. This is someone who has a full-time job, not much sales experience, and he was still able to get that client while working that night and a five, right? You know, so, how do you actually do it for yourself, right? Well, when you think about what skills you should be developing in the era of AI, there's really three main things I identified for you.

Number one is like human-to-human sales will always be around, right? You can argue like, "Oh, AI is going to sell for you." But, at the end of the day, when you're trying to sell to a company, they want to talk to a person, especially if you can meet them in person, right? So, I don't think that's going to go away. People who are on the cutting edge of AI, so watching videos like this or others on YouTube to know like the new thing coming up, that's always going to be in demand because if AI is going to replace all the jobs, the person that understands AI and uses it are the ones that going to capture that value, right?

And having deep knowledge or expertise in your field, like being an expert in finance, marketing, even Pokémon cards, design, it doesn't matter what it is as long as there's money in it, you know, that deep expertise combined with AI, that that's where you want to play. Understand these are the ingredients that we're working with, right? That's why I was mentioning all the other side hustles, they don't have all these elements put together, that's why it's not a long-term thing, in my opinion.

So, the conclusion I've came to, and this is what I've helped all many of my clients do to get their first clients, is really just sell an AI-powered service. So, an AI-powered service is essentially when you sell a service or some kind of outcome to a business or an individual, and you're basically just selling us like literally a skill, like a service, right? But, you're using AI to do majority of the work. So, let's break this down.

So, let's say you start with a skill, okay? So, you use your skills, knowledge, experience to uncover, you know, what is your domain of expertise that people find value in. So, you might be a sales rep, a marketer, a designer, a Pokémon card expert, right? Maybe you're good at trading or productivity. It doesn't really matter what that expertise or skills is as long as it's something people find valuable. So, when you have this skill, let's say you're working a 9-5 job and you're working in sales, right?

You have to think about how do you apply that skill and sell it to a business and have AI do 90% of the work, okay? So, that's just finding creative ways to deliver on the skill using AI. And it's all about delivering results, not about creating these complicated, you know, AI setups. And then nobody wants to see that, right? They just want it as simple as possible. So, some examples of delivery, things that you output to the client, right?

That's what they're buying. Is you maybe you're going to say, "I'm going to produce you four YouTube scripts every month. Maybe it's I'm going to book you qualified meetings. I'm going to create your LinkedIn post. I'm going to do your whole webinar setup and email funnels. I'm going to create AI UGC ads for you." Right? These are actual tangible deliverables that you can get AI to do most of the work for you, right?

And the last piece of the puzzle, once you understand what you want to sell, is having a personal brand. Because in an era where AI is commoditizing everybody, it's stealing everyone's jobs, what is the thing that it cannot really replace? That's the human connection. Now, there are going to be AI influencers, but think about it right now. How many AI influencers do you genuinely watch their YouTube channel and you want to take their advice?

For me, it's zero. I don't want to watch AI influencer personally. And it's probably the same for you, right? So, I think there's going to be a premium for being a real genuine person. When you have a personal brand, even if you are selling something commoditized like YouTube scripts, people buy from people. So, if they like you as a person, they trust you and they think you're competent, they would rather buy from you versus anybody else.

Because why? You have a brand. And you might think, "Oh, if I'm just selling a service like writing YouTube scripts, isn't that putting me in another job?" I don't think so, because Sequoia Capital, one of the most prestigious VC firms on the planet, okay? They had an article that came out called "Services, the New Software." And the main thing is that the next one trillion company will be a software company masquerading as a service firm.

I'll give you the 80/20 of what this article is about. We're not going to go through the whole thing, but essentially, for every $1 a company spends, like a business spends on software, they're spending $6 on human labor. So, when you're selling something like an AI-powered service, you're essentially capturing that human labor. So, if someone was paying, I don't know, $6,000 a month for a human copywriter, if you took their job, replaced it with AI, and you just facilitated the whole thing, and, you know, manage your AI agents, you are going to capture that demand, because AI can do it better, faster, and cheaper.

So, that's why, yeah, all these jobs are going to be replaced because of AI, but you need to be on the winning side and understand AI so you control all the agents and sell it to businesses. Right? This is where the future's going. It's a much more reasonable way to make money cash flow-wise, because you don't have to make anything before you sell it. It's not like you have to spend 3 months to make a product and see if people want it.

You literally sell it first. If they say yes, then you go build it. This is exactly how one of my clients, Sandy, she was a sales manager at an insurance company, and she sold her first week of doing outbound, so reaching out to companies, and she signed the first deal for like $3,000 a month, you know, just writing blog posts for them. And AI is doing majority of the work, right? Like, she sold it first, built it later, delivered on the results, customers are happy, she increased her price to 5,500.

That's the game. By the way, if you are serious about building a side hustle, and you want to turn it into your full-time main hustle, make Make to check out my free training where I show you exactly how to find your profitable business idea, how to build a personal brand that attracts clients, and how to actually close clients for thousands of dollars per month selling your AI-powered skills. This is the exact process I've taken Sandy, Tyler, Ethan, Brandon, all these guys and girls to go from 9-5 employee to signing high-ticket clients in a matter of months.

So, I put a link in the description for you to sign up for that free training and I will see you there. So, at this point you might be wondering, "Okay, makes sense, Patrick, but what is your business idea?" Right? Because, yeah, I have clients that succeeded, you know, selling their particular thing, but what about you? So, next I'm going to show you how to find your AI-powered business idea. So, when you're selling an AI-powered skill or service, essentially, this is the fundamentals.

It doesn't matter what you sell, it doesn't matter what industry, it's all the same. You first identify a pain for a certain type of customer you want to work with. Maybe it's startups, maybe it's software companies, maybe it's energy companies, construction companies, you know, and all these companies need some kind of AI-powered service, right? So, you look for the problem that they have, and then you think about what is their desired outcome, what is the solution that they want, and how can you come in and provide an AI-powered skill or service that gets them from pain to solution or desired outcome.

That's all it is at the end of the day. So, if you're selling to a business owner, you just have to think, "Okay, what's your problem? What do you want to happen? I can make that happen with my AI-powered skill." That's it. It's that simple to sell. I'll give you some examples so that you can think about how you can actually do this for yourself. And also, make sure to download the free business idea generator that I created for you as a Claude skill so that you can install it into your Claude and it will help you come up with ideas if you just follow the prompt.

So, the first one I'm going to share with you is And these are examples that I identified that I think are valuable right now in the market, okay? So, first one, speed-to-lead AI sales rep, right? So, what's the problem? A business gets a lot of web traffic to their website every day from multiple sources, whether it's organic, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, you know, SEO, could be running ads, right? And when someone goes on their website, not everyone signs up for the product, not everyone gives an email for a lead magnet, so you get visitors and they disappear.

A solution you can sell, legitimately sell to a business, is you can say, "Hey, I'm going to come in and I'm going to install this system into your website where we're going to identify a percentage of the people that come on, but they don't give you any information. And with AI, and there's so many different software that allow you to do this, you can actually find that individual. You can find their LinkedIn, you can find their email, you can find their phone number, even though they didn't give you any any information, right?

That's how strong That's how crazy this AI tracking is nowadays, right? And then you can say, "Okay, we will identify them, we will find their email, and then I'm going to write an email specifically to that person to try to book a call with them for your sales team, so you can close them and make money." And the appeal here is if you can identify an anonymous visitor, send an email, book a call, and the salesperson closes them, that business is making money they wouldn't have made without you.

So, what are the results? They're going to get more calls for the business that were previously impossible to get. Like, a business owner had never even thought like you can do this, right? It's like magic. So, essentially, the business makes free money for your services. Now, if you want to take it to the next level and you want to, you know, add some AI automation sauce, you can take all the sales transcripts, you know, and even all the call the client calls that they have with their clients and customers, and you organize them into a database, and then that database can pull all the pain points and all the desires to write stronger email copy when you send out these outbound messages to these anonymous people, right?

So, this is the AI automation that you're selling. Cuz they don't Like, most businesses don't understand this is even possible. They don't want to organize a database, they don't want to put in the folders, they just want clients. And actually, it's not that hard because you can literally just organize the folders and then use like Claude to do majority of the work, right? Realistically. And how do you charge for this?

Well, just charge them a fixed fee to build the whole thing and a monthly retainer. And then, you know, every month you just, you know, keep it going for them, right? Update the database, all that. If you're really good, you can just ask for a percentage of revenue based on how many clients you close from the leads you generated that they wouldn't have got without you, right? So, if you took like 5% of everything they closed and you just kept it running with a fixed fee, it's not bad.

I give you another example, LinkedIn ghostwriter, right? So, let's say, you know, you see all these YouTubers who are growing really fast, doing really well, but they suck at LinkedIn, right? They just don't spend time on it. And maybe they just want someone to write in their voice and grow their socials without being cheesy. Your solution might be, "Hey, I'm going to go on your YouTube, take all your transcripts, and create the best LinkedIn content for you.

The posts, the carousels, infographics, lead magnets, whatever it takes to grow your following, right? Like you yourself delivering the service, you don't even have to come up with any new ideas. Take their YouTube videos, take their transcripts. You still have to understand what good LinkedIn content is, but you're just ghostwriting it for them. And I know a lot of agencies charging $3 to $5,000 just to do this, okay?

And so, what's the result? You get more followers on LinkedIn, you're going to get more leads, and you're going to sign more deals. And these deals would have never came unless, you know, you came into their life and created the content for them to get that exposure. How do you next level this? Again, build a database of all the top-performing content, all their sales calls, all their client calls, organize it so that it gives them better data and ideas on how to make better YouTube content and better LinkedIn content, right?

Like just organizing things in a database is extremely valuable for a lot of people. How much do you charge? You can do a monthly fixed fee, you write your retainer, you can charge a percentage of revenue based on new leads that you brought in and how much they close for. Really depends on your negotiation ability. I've seen both work. Um but the really good ones are the ones I can charge percentages. So, for these ideas I'm sharing with you, right?

Like you're delivering on results, it's not super technical. Like you don't really need to build much, to be honest, and you can do all of this inside Claude, Cohort, and using Claude skills. Now, if you do use the Claude skill that I included the free download in the link in the description, what's going to happen is when you put it into Claude, you type in the PD business generator, and then what's going to happen is going to it's going to prompt you, right?

This is so for you to create your own business idea using the framework that I gave you. Okay, so I'm going to just do a sample, right? So, I'm going to say I want to come up with a business idea using my skills. This is demo for my client, just so my Claude knows, right? So, it's like, okay, let's find you your business idea. So, this is how it will look on your computer. And then you just go through and answer the questions.

Once you fill out the whole thing, what's going to happen at the end is it's going to give you a full-on business plan for you on what you can do. So, I basically just made up a person to fill it out for this example, right? So, it's like you fill it out with your information. What are your core strengths? Then it's like, okay, let's say you want to do, you know, AI LinkedIn ghost writing based on your background. So, it comes up with your ideal client, where to find them, how many clients you need to get to that 10K per month, and then all the like the pain and solution that I talked about, right?

And then it even comes up with like different pricing models that you can do realistic to what people are currently charging in the market. So, this is the power of using Claude skills. It will literally search, you know, Reddit, X, like all the forums and stuff to see what people are actually talking about and charging. They don't give you like the market validation of do people even want this? Cuz a lot of the mistakes people make is they try to sell something nobody wants, but if it's validated using this Claude skill and it researched the whole internet, then it's likely people are making money with it, right?

And then it even goes into like the next level thing of like once you get your first few clients, like what can you do to take it to the next level? So, I highly encourage you to go through that exercise and try to find your business idea. You know, it's not going to be perfect on the first go, but it's definitely a start, okay? So, now that you understand the different type of business models you can potentially do, let's talk about how to actually sign clients using this model.

I've worked with a lot of clients, you know, in the past year. A lot of them are in AI. And this is what I found to be the simplest, easiest way to sign clients if your timeline is like 30 to 60 days, okay? It's not guaranteed, but a lot of my clients have been able to do this. So, step one, you just use LinkedIn, okay? Optimize your profile to make sure that it's optimized for your ideal client and selling AI-powered services, okay?

So, that means your profile picture, headline, and your about section is going to be the most important. Step two, you got to build a personal brand, right? So, the key here is you don't need a lot of followers, actually. You just need to have something. I mean, the things to talk about if you're trying to sell AI-powered services like talking about the, you know, advancements in AI in your niche, pain points of your ICP, and your personal stories.

If you just do that, uh that and then that's it, dude. Like, you you will actually probably get like five to 10 likes a post. It's better than zero, and then it makes the next step so much more easier. So, minimum, you got to post five times a week. It's not that hard. Use Claude to do it. Um just don't make it sound like AI. Step three is you want to connect with 200 people per week. That's pretty much the baseline maximum for most people.

So, when you connect with people, you're probably going to get a 30 to 40 50% connection acceptance, right? So, on LinkedIn, when you connect with someone, it's going to look like this, and then there's pretty much like a 30 to 50% chance they're going to accept. So, when I'm doing outbound selling to B2B, I get around 40 to 50%, but my profile's a little optimized and I have a personal brand. If you're kind of starting from zero, maybe it's going to be like 33% or something like that, right?

It could be higher depending on how you look, how you present yourself, what your headline's going to be, right? So, optimize it for your ideal customer. And then, all you do is just send them a basic message and agitate the pain, um talk a little bit in the DMs and book them on a call. Sometimes for me, I'll even talk a little bit, and then I'll make a whole Loom video explaining their problem and how I can solve it.

And after that, they will book a call, right? So, Loom videos for me, custom Loom video to like agitate their pain, works really well. It's not always 100% necessary. So, one of my clients, I'm going to keep her anonymous because she has a strategy that is working really well. Obviously, I don't want to give it away, but I just want to share that hey, this actually works, right? So, this client, let's just call her Luna for this video.

Um she basically reached out to certain companies in these industries, these CEOs. There's one where they're doing annual revenue of 39 million, reached out, hey, I'm going to blur it out, but she agitated a problem, said like hey, you know, I have a couple solutions, you want me to send it over. And then they actually got on a call, call went really well, and so now we're in the process of putting a proposal together for a very high ticket price, and I'm helping her do this.

Um and I just want to show you that like this is a regular person, she recently just quit her job to go all in to build her AI business, so she kind of has um some runway, you know, to make this work. And just like one or two months quitting her job, she got these kind of leads. You know, this is really a game changer, and even if it doesn't close like with this skill set, she can find more companies like that anyways, right?

Like I'm telling you like this is someone that probably, you know, gets like five likes, 10 likes a post, right? It's nothing crazy. But you can still get meetings with these eight-figure CEOs just from posting on LinkedIn and DMing them, right? That's crazy. As I'm helping her put the pitch deck together and proposal, how we're doing it it it's really simple, okay? You don't need to overcomplicate it with all these terminals and technical things like a CEO doesn't even understand what that looks like, right?

All they care about is this. I have a problem. I'm a CEO. I'm very busy. My job is I need to allocate capital to make that problem go away. Who are you and how can you help? And then you say, "Okay, I'm Luna. Here's my solution. This is how I'm going to solve all your problems. Here's how we do it in a simple one-two-three kind of way." That's all they care about, okay? They will spend thousands of dollars per month for you to make it simple for them and not explain any of the technical jargon as long as it solves their problem, they are happy.

And so, if you understand how to find your business idea, and you understand how to build a personal brand, even if it's not really big, enough to just get meetings, right? And you also learn how to sell in this particular way that I'm showing you, pain, solution, and show your vehicle of how you're going to solve the problem. Forever in the AI space, once you get your first client, you will get your second, then you get a referral, then you have case studies, and it's going to be so much more easier to outbound.

All the clients I showed you in this video, like Sandy, Luna, and the other guy that I showed you, they all started as 9-5 employees with no social media presence, no social proof, never charged money for these kind of things before, and they are still able to get their clients, right? So, this opportunity is so hot, so new, most businesses don't understand. So, if you're thinking about starting some kind of business related to AI, this is your opportunity.

And if you actually get into personal brand, like Sandy, she got her first client without much of a personal brand, okay? And she's making like $5,500 per month with a AI automation business. And then, she's blowing up on YouTube right now, like like she got to 11K subs, she was at like 500, you know, just like a month and a half ago, tens of thousands of views on all these videos, right? And this is someone who was selling insurance, didn't know anything about AI, learned it from scratch, got her first client, and just started making content.

So, my point is, everyday regular people who are no smarter or talented than you, they are making it work from creating content and getting subscribers to getting clients. So, the opportunity is so hot right now, there's not much competition, so this is your time to build something long-term and build a long-term reputation. Don't be like wasting your time making these like Etsy, you know, templates, because once that opportunity is over, you don't have a brand that can carry over, right?

So, you need to build your brand so that it's something that can last you a lifetime, because you want to have an actual career, not just short-term money. All right, so I've given you the entire road map to start your AI-powered business. Now, there are some of you who are actually serious about this and want to get things going, but you might have some struggles when it comes to figuring out even if your business idea is worth it.

How do you actually position your personal brand in a way that makes you seem like an authority on day one? And also, you might be confused on exactly how you can sign your first client for high-ticket prices. And these are the things I've taught to many of my clients like Sandy, for example, who got to $5,500 per month with her AI automation business while working a full-time job and has grown her YouTube following to over 10,000 subscribers in a couple months.

And so, if you want my guidance and support on exactly how I might be able to help you do the same, feel free to book a time on my calendar where we're going to walk through exactly what the game plan can look like for you. And if it makes sense, we could talk about what it would be like if we did work together. So again, I put a link in the description for you to book a time on my calendar, and I'll talk to you soon.

Now, if you want to watch another video, check out this one where I show you exactly how to build a one-person business using AI.