Other Income Ideas Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-09-04 · 7 min read

Gadzhi and Brunson’s side hustle ‘secrets’: the framework is real, the math is missing

Verdict: Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work. The four principles are legitimate; the video is also a funnel to a paid event, and it never tells you how little a typical side hustle actually earns.

In “Asking My Billion Dollar Mentor How To Start a Side Hustle In 2026,” Iman Gadzhi flies to Boise to interview Russell Brunson, the co-founder of ClickFunnels. Brunson pulls up a whiteboard and lays out four “secrets” for starting a side hustle. There’s no single income promise in the video itself — no “$10,000 in 30 days” number on screen. Instead the whole thing points to a five-day “Side Hustle Summit” the two are co-hosting from Dubai. So the real question isn’t whether the advice is wrong. It’s what the advice quietly leaves out.

What the video actually claims

Brunson’s four points are framed as things “working today in the market.” Number one is what author Napoleon Hill called definiteness of purpose — pick a specific goal and commit, because (quoting Tony Robbins) “success is 90% psychology.” Number two is infinite at-bats: choose a business model cheap enough that you can fail ten times and keep going, the way Brunson says one ClickFunnels user, “Trey,” failed ten launches before his eleventh became a $36 million business.

Number three is OPA — other people’s audiences. Rather than spend, in Gadzhi’s words, “11 years on YouTube” building your own following, you partner with a creator who already has 10,000 to 30,000 followers but “doesn’t know anything about business or marketing.” Number four is the unfair advantage of AI. Brunson says he laid off four or five copywriters he was paying a combined “$650,000 a year” about three months ago because AI now writes “more copy and better copy” in under an hour a week.

Both men are careful to say they’re not handing over the full playbook. Gadzhi tells Brunson to “bring it all the way down” so as not to “scare people,” then pitches the Side Hustle Summit — September 6, streamed from Dubai — as where you’ll get “the full playbook.” That’s the actual product here.

What the method actually requires

None of the four principles is nonsense. Commitment matters. Cheap, repeatable business models really do beat expensive one-shot bets. Borrowing an existing audience is genuinely faster than building one. And AI genuinely collapses the cost of copy, design, and landing pages.

But notice what a whiteboard of principles is not: a business. “Partner with a creator who has 30,000 followers” sounds simple until you try it. You have to find that creator, convince them to hand a stranger access to their audience, agree on a revenue split, build the actual offer, and deliver it well enough that the creator’s followers don’t feel burned. Gadzhi even concedes the gap himself — he notes people with “3 million followers that still don’t have a successful business.” Distribution is real leverage; getting someone to lend it to you is sales work the video treats as a footnote.

The AI point has the same shape. Yes, a tool can draft your emails. It can’t tell you what to sell, to whom, or why they’d pay. Brunson’s copywriters were writing copy for an already-massive, already-monetized ClickFunnels machine with paid traffic and a proven offer. Swapping them for AI is an efficiency win for an existing eight-figure business. It is not the same as an AI writing a beginner into a first sale from a standing start.

And the money question the video skips entirely: what does a side hustle typically pay? Here’s the number Brunson’s whiteboard doesn’t have. According to Bankrate survey data reported by CNBC, the median U.S. side hustle brings in about $250 a month — with roughly 71% of side hustlers earning $500 or less. The widely-quoted “$891 average” is dragged up by a small number of high earners; the median is where most people actually land. Side hustle participation is also cooling, not booming: CNBC reports it fell to 27% of U.S. adults in 2025, the lowest since 2017.

Who actually wins this game?

Look closely at every success story in the video and a pattern emerges: the winners already had something. Brunson’s breakout came after he’d spent years learning copywriting and building an email list. “Trey” got eleven at-bats because he was inside the ClickFunnels ecosystem, with its templates, community, and traffic playbook. Brunson’s own father made his money after attending his son’s events for years. The “OPA” strategy, by definition, requires access to someone else’s decade of audience-building.

That’s not a knock — it’s just the actual mechanism. The people who win with these frameworks tend to be operators with a prior skill (sales, a niche expertise, an existing relationship with a creator), a small budget to test offers, or the patience to run those “infinite at-bats” over many months. The absolute beginner with no skill, no network, and no capital is the person the four secrets help least, even though the video is aimed squarely at them.

What you’d realistically earn

Be honest with yourself about the timeline. For most people starting from zero, the first several months of any of these models produce something close to the median — $0 to a few hundred dollars a month — while you learn what sells. A committed beginner who picks one model, keeps testing, and lands a genuine audience partnership might reach a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars a month after a year of consistent work. Those outcomes exist. They are not typical, and they are not passive.

Compare that to the summit’s own marketing, which promotes building “a $373/day AI-powered side hustle” — roughly $11,000 a month, “no experience, no audience, no startup capital.” That figure isn’t in the interview, but it’s the number the funnel leads to, and it sits far outside the median reality. In the U.S., the FTC has spent the past year tightening the rules on exactly this kind of pitch: its January 2025 proposed Business Opportunity Rule changes would extend earnings-claim scrutiny to “business coaching opportunities” and require written substantiation for any income figure a seller advertises. The agency’s director put it plainly: “phony claims about likely earnings lure people looking for honest income into spending thousands.”

One more claim worth flagging. Brunson says “the very first ever billion-dollar company with one person happened earlier this year.” As of this writing there’s no verified single-person billion-dollar company; AI has minted new billionaires fast, but those are venture-backed teams, not solo operators. It’s an inspiring line, not a documented fact.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

If you already have a marketable skill, a few hours a week, and the temperament to test offers that flop before one works, the framework is a reasonable mental model — and the summit is free to attend, so the principles cost you nothing but time. Just go in knowing the upsells come later (reviewers peg the paid tier around $1,995). If you’re broke, brand-new, and hoping four whiteboard secrets substitute for learning a skill or doing sales outreach, this will feel motivating and then leave you exactly where you started. Motivation isn’t a business model. For a grounded look at where AI genuinely helps beginners, see our takes on proven ways to make money with AI and one-person businesses with more demand than competition.

What to remember

The four secrets are real advice from someone who genuinely built a large company. What the video omits is the median: most side hustles clear a few hundred dollars a month, the “OPA” and AI shortcuts still require sales work and a skill, and the whole interview is the top of a funnel toward a Dubai summit and its paid tiers. Take the principles. Skip the assumption that they add up to $373 a day.