The AI Side Hustle Nobody Talks About Made Me $14,800 in January — No Following, No Ads, No Product

📖 2 min read

I Stumbled Into This By Accident

I wasn’t trying to make money. I was automating my own boring tasks when I realized: other businesses would PAY me to do this for them.

The Service: AI Automation Consulting

Here’s what I sell: I spend 2-3 hours setting up AI workflows for small businesses. They pay me $500-$2,000 per setup. Then $200/month to maintain it.

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What I Actually Build For Clients

Auto-responding to leads — AI reads inquiries, drafts personalized responses, sends within 5 minutes. Client close rate jumped 40%.
Content pipelines — One click generates a week of social posts, blog articles, and email newsletters.
Invoice processing — AI reads invoices from email, enters them into accounting software, flags anomalies.
Customer support bots — Not the terrible ones from 2023. These actually understand context and solve problems.

My Exact Revenue Breakdown (January 2026)

7 new client setups: $8,400
23 monthly retainers: $4,600
2 custom projects: $1,800
Total: $14,800

The Stack I Use (Total Cost: $0-$79/month)

n8n (self-hosted) — Free. This is the backbone of everything.
OpenAI API — Pay per use. Usually $30-50/month for all clients combined.
Airtable Free Tier — For client dashboards
Make.com — Backup for clients who want managed hosting

How I Find Clients (Zero Ad Spend)

LinkedIn posts showing before/after automation results. That’s it. Every post gets 5-10 DMs. I close about 30% of those.

The secret: small business owners don’t know this stuff exists. When you show them you can save 20 hours/week with a $500 setup, they throw money at you.

Why This Works in 2026

AI tools got good enough that non-technical people can’t set them up themselves, but technical people can do it in hours. That gap is where the money lives.