AI Side Hustles Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-10-27 · 7 min read

Joshua Mayo’s 7 AI side hustles: what the $63,000 screenshots leave out

Verdict: Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work. The AI builds the product in minutes; the money lives in the client-finding and marketing the video rushes past.

Joshua Mayo’s video “7 Ways To Make Money With Claude AI (and ChatGPT)” has drawn more than 58,000 views by showing how fast modern AI can produce something sellable — a 50-page word search book, a full brand kit, a jigsaw design, a staged living room, a printable planner. The pitch is that these are “real ways to build income using AI that honestly most people aren’t even aware of,” started with little or no money. Is that true? Mostly, at the production step. The question is what happens after you hit “generate.”

What the video actually claims

Mayo runs through seven methods, counting down. Activity books on Amazon KDP (word searches, mazes). AI logos and brand kits sold on Fiverr. Print-on-demand jigsaw puzzles through Printify. Virtual staging of empty real-estate photos. Printable digital products on Etsy made with Claude’s design feature. AI-influencer affiliate videos on TikTok Shop. And building small-business websites in an afternoon with Claude Code.

To his credit, he rates each idea on cost, effort, and potential — and he doesn’t pretend they’re all easy. Virtual staging and website-building both get an honest “effort: high,” with the hard part named plainly: finding clients. He even says up front this “is not a get-rich-quick scheme.”

The numbers on screen tell a louder story, though. A Fiverr brand-kit seller with 95 orders in the queue becomes “$27,000 in sales… $21,660 even after Fiverr’s 20% cut.” A single jigsaw listing “pushing over 3,000 sales a month” at $21 becomes “over $63,000 in sales from just one listing.” Ten website clients on a $100 retainer becomes “$1,000 a month coming in every single month.” Those figures are real screenshots of real top performers. They’re also where the gap between the pitch and the median opens up.

What the method actually requires

Start with the tooling, because that part is cheap and the video is right about it. ChatGPT and Canva are free to start; Claude Pro runs about $20 a month. Amazon KDP takes no money to publish, and Amazon prints and ships each paperback on demand, subtracting the printing cost from your royalty. On a $9.99-or-higher paperback you earn the 60% rate; KDP’s own example is a $15 book that nets $4.00 after a $5.00 print cost. A $7.99 large-type word search book nets closer to $2 a copy. So a title selling ten copies a month earns you roughly $20 a month. To reach a few hundred dollars, you need a shelf of titles and enough category ranking that shoppers actually find them — and “Bible word search” is a category with listings carrying thousands of reviews already. AI writes the puzzles. It does not write your Amazon rank.

The puzzle math works the same way. Selling on Amazon under the toys-and-games tree, as Mayo notes, requires the Professional selling plan at $39.99 a month to connect Printify — plus Printify’s base cost per puzzle, which eats into that $21 retail price long before you clear $63,000. That headline belongs to one breakout listing, not a starter catalog.

Etsy is the clearest example of a fee structure the video skips. Listings cost $0.20 each and expire every four months, and Etsy takes a 6.5% transaction fee plus payment processing on every sale. Those fees are small. The thing they don’t buy you is traffic. A printable planner that nobody searches for sells zero copies, and Etsy’s search algorithm rewards tags, volume, and reviews built over months.

Who actually wins this game?

Look closely at every “proof” screenshot and you’ll notice the same thing: the sellers shown are established. The Fiverr brand-kit seller with 95 orders has the review history that pushes them to the top of search. The virtual-staging listing Mayo points to “has over 9,000 reviews.” The jigsaw doing 3,000 units a month is a ranked, reviewed listing competing in a crowded category. None of them got there on day one.

The people who win these methods tend to be one of four types — someone who already has an audience to sell into, someone with a paid-traffic budget, someone with prior domain skill (Mayo himself “built websites for a living” before YouTube), or an early mover who ranked before the niche filled up. AI lowers the cost of making the product. It doesn’t hand you the distribution advantage the top sellers spent years building.

What you’d realistically earn

Here’s the honest range the screenshots don’t show you. A beginner publishing a handful of KDP activity books should expect something like $0 to a few hundred dollars a month for the first six to twelve months, growing only as the catalog and ranking grow. On Etsy, digital-product shops do better than most categories once listings rank — but “once they rank” is doing heavy lifting, and the median Etsy seller sits in the low hundreds per month, not the thousands.

The service hustles — brand kits, virtual staging, websites — can pay faster and more, precisely because they aren’t passive. Charge $200 for a staged listing or $100 a month to maintain a site and the income is real, but it’s income from sales and outreach, not from AI. Mayo’s own “effort: high” ratings on those two are the truest thing in the video. The AI-influencer affiliate route he rates “cost: high” himself, because realistic AI-avatar video tools aren’t free, and it depends on a video going viral — a lottery, not a plan.

None of this is passive in year one.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

If you’ve got 8–10 hours a week, a little patience, and the willingness to treat client outreach or SEO as the actual job, the service methods (websites, staging, brand kits) can earn money within weeks, and the product methods (KDP, Etsy, puzzles) can compound quietly over a year. You need almost no capital beyond a $20 Claude plan and, for Amazon puzzles, the $39.99 seller fee. This is a poor fit if you’re expecting the on-screen numbers to arrive on autopilot, if you won’t do cold outreach or keyword research, or if you need income this month to cover rent. The tools are a genuine head start. They are not the finish line.

What to remember

Mayo is more careful than most creators in this genre — he names the hard parts and avoids guaranteeing riches. The distortion is subtler: peak screenshots standing in for typical outcomes. U.S. readers should know regulators are watching the louder end of this space. In its 2024 Operation AI Comply, the FTC charged several “AI-powered passive income” operations — Ascend Ecom, Ecommerce Empire Builders, FBA Machine — noting that promised five- and six-figure earnings “rarely, if ever” materialized. This video isn’t selling a $35,000 course, which puts it in a different class. But the same lesson applies: the AI does the making, and you do the selling. For more in this vein, see our looks at Claude AI side hustles that claim a full-time income and the AI digital products supposedly making people rich.