People with AI skills now get paid 56% more than people without them, according to a PwC study of close to a billion job ads. That’s not a small gap. But the side hustle side of AI is just as interesting as the job market, and some of it is a complete waste of time. Here’s a rundown of ten ways people are using Claude to earn money, ranked from the ones to avoid to the one that actually works best.
10. AI Slop Content
Churning out dozens of AI-made videos and hoping one goes viral. It sometimes works, but YouTube recently wiped out 35 million subscribers and 4.7 billion views in a purge of AI-generated channels. A few channels, like a sleep-story channel making around $9,100 a month, do add genuine value. Most don’t. If one does work, it gets copied within days because anything made by AI can be copied by AI.
9. Building An App
Claude Code has removed most of the barrier to building software. One founder built and sold 23 small websites for over half a million dollars. The catch: anyone can build an app now, but people only pay for a great one. A rough version built in a weekend won’t sell itself. You still need to market it, which turns this into a full-time job rather than a side one.
8. Selling Digital Products
Books, templates, prompts, courses. One creator made millions through Kindle Direct Publishing. Another sold over $2.1 million in Notion templates in two years. Digital products cost nothing to copy, which is both the appeal and the problem. Low barrier to entry means huge competition, so you need a way to stand out and a way to reach people.
7. Corporate Training
Teaching companies how to actually use the AI tools they’ve already bought. One trainer quit an NYU professorship because the demand was that strong. Workshops typically run from £2,500 to £12,000 a session. The work itself is rewarding and well paid, but bookings are irregular, and people tend to hire trainers they’ve already seen teach.
6. Tedious, Specialist Writing
Grant writing is a good example. Charities and businesses are desperate for funding but hate writing applications. Freelance grant writers can charge around £1,200 per application, and clients come back every year. Claude can draft the bulk of it, but every figure still needs checking by a person before it goes out.
5. Teaching Your Niche Skill
One engineer built a course on specialist CAD software most people have never heard of and made over $12,000 in a couple of months, including a sale to an engineer at Meta. The lesson: the more specific and “boring” your skill, the better it tends to sell, because the people who need it are desperate and few others are teaching it.
4. Helping Businesses Adopt AI
There’s real money here, with some consultants making over $10,000 a month. But the market is full of people who don’t know what they’re doing, so trust is hard to win. This only really works as a side hustle if you pick one industry you understand well and show your work publicly, rather than cold messaging strangers.
3. Putting Claude Inside An Existing Business
This ranks highly because the customers already exist. Every ordinary business has a department full of repetitive reading and writing tasks: resumes, reports, emails. Hand that work to Claude and you can do the work of several people. One recruiter landed a contract worth over $100,000 from a tiny YouTube channel, because she didn’t need viral views, just the right 200 people watching.
2. Specialist Coaching Plus Service
This is a hybrid: you do some of the work for the client and coach them through the parts you can’t do for them, like interviews. It works because teaching something you’ve already lived through puts you ahead of almost everyone else trying to learn it from scratch. Pick a transition you’ve personally made, bundle the coaching and the service together, and charge accordingly.
1. Building A Personal Brand On YouTube
Every other hustle on this list needs one thing: traffic. A channel built around being “the AI person” for your industry solves that. And the brilliant part is, even if the channel itself never makes much money, it still works as proof of your expertise. One cybersecurity creator barely made $1,000 a month from his channel but still landed job offers from major tech companies, purely because he’d built a reputation.
Whichever route you pick, it works better when Claude is set up properly from the start. Claude LaunchPad is the free starting point for getting that foundation right.
