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

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-06-18 · 7 min read

Codie Sanchez’s AI tool stack: the costs behind that “first order”

Verdict: Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work. The AI builds the store; you still have to pay for the customers.

In “How To ACTUALLY Make Money Using AI,” Codie Sanchez says she reviewed 500-plus AI tools and then uses a handful of them, live, to go from a blank screen to “a real paying customer” in what looks like a single afternoon. The product is a hands-free dog leash. The pitch is that work which “used to take people months and cost tens of thousands of dollars” now happens in one sitting. Is that real? The building part is. The making-money part is the part she runs past in the last 30 seconds.

What the video actually claims

Sanchez walks through a full assembly line. She finds a trending product with Exploding Topics (a hands-free dog leash showing roughly 30,000 monthly sales), filters it through her “Resist, Raise, Technology” test, then builds a customer avatar named Jordan using Perplexity for research, ChatGPT for a first draft, and Claude for the nuanced version. She dictates prompts with WhisperFlow, builds a landing page with Lovable, generates a logo with Google’s Nano Banana Pro, writes ad and page copy with Jasper, and installs a Tidio chatbot to answer buyers at 11 p.m. Somewhere in the middle she also plugs her own marketplace tool, BizScout Radar, at $199 a month, and a 99-cent .online domain.

Then the payoff. “We just got our first order,” she says, over a notification chime. The framing is that AI compressed a months-long, five-figure launch into an afternoon and a near-zero budget.

To her credit, Sanchez is more honest than most creators in this lane. She says outright that “AI is not a replacement for thinking” — it’s “a force multiplier on good thinking,” and that every first output “generally wasn’t great.” That’s a real and useful caveat. But the headline promise (“ACTUALLY make money”) rests entirely on that one order, and one order is not a business.

What the method actually requires

Here’s the gap. Everything Sanchez demonstrates lives on the production side: research, design, branding, copy, a chat widget. AI genuinely has collapsed the cost of all of it. What she never shows is the distribution side — getting strangers to find the store and buy at a profit — and that’s where the money actually lives or dies.

Start with the software. The exact stack she names isn’t free once you’re past the trial credits. Lovable runs roughly $25–$50 a month, Jasper’s entry plan is about $49 a month, Tidio’s paid tiers start around $29–$59, and Exploding Topics and WhisperFlow add more. To actually sell a physical leash you also need a real store: Shopify’s Basic plan is $39 a month and takes 2.9% plus 30 cents on every card transaction (Shopify pricing). Add her own $199/month Radar plug and you’re staring at $150–$400 a month in subscriptions before a single customer arrives.

Now the part the video skips entirely: traffic. A landing page with nobody on it sells nothing. Sanchez even explains “cold traffic versus warm traffic” and shows a Meta ad — but never mentions what running that ad costs. The U.S. Small Business Administration’s own guidance pegs a realistic small-business social-ad budget at around $20 a day, or roughly $600 a month, just to get meaningful reach (SBA). On Meta in 2025, e-commerce advertisers paid roughly $1 per click and saw a median cost per purchase near $38, with a median return on ad spend under 2x. Translation: to acquire a customer you often spend $30–$40 in ads, so a $45 leash with a 20% product margin can lose money on the sale.

And a leash is a physical good. Where does inventory come from? Who ships it, handles returns, and eats the cost when a package is lost? None of that appears in the video. The “first order” notification tells you the checkout button works. It tells you nothing about cost of goods, fulfillment, or whether that buyer was a customer or a colleague.

A quick word on who’s watching this space

U.S. readers should know the Federal Trade Commission has been paying close attention to exactly this genre of claim. In September 2024 the FTC launched “Operation AI Comply,” a sweep against companies promising that AI-powered online storefronts would generate easy passive income. The agency sued Ascend Ecom (alleging it defrauded consumers of at least $25 million) and FBA Machine (over $15 million), and charged Ecommerce Empire Builders for claiming buyers could make millions through AI e-commerce training while “those profits fail to materialize” (FTC).

To be clear, Sanchez isn’t one of those defendants, and this video isn’t selling a guaranteed-income course. But it shares the same rhetorical move — AI plus a storefront equals money — and the FTC’s cases are a useful reminder that the “first order” is the easiest part to manufacture and the least meaningful to prove.

Who actually wins this game

The people who make this stack pay are rarely the people watching the tutorial for the first time. They’re operators who already understand paid acquisition — folks who can read a cost-per-purchase number, kill a losing ad, and scale a winning one before the ad budget bleeds out. They have working capital to fund inventory and absorb the breakeven months. Many have an existing audience or email list, so their first traffic isn’t cold and isn’t expensive.

Sanchez herself is the clearest example. She’s selling tools she partly owns, a $199/month product, and a live event ticket, to an audience of 62,000-plus viewers. Her “business” in this video is the video. That’s a legitimate model — it’s just a fundamentally different one from a beginner trying to sell leashes to strangers on Meta.

What would you realistically earn?

Honest answer: probably $0, and quite possibly negative, for the first several months.

Industry guides put dropshipping gross margins around 15–25%, but net margins after ad spend, fees, and returns frequently sit near breakeven or below while a new store is still testing products. Most beginners cycle through $0–$2,000 a month in revenue (not profit) during that learning phase, and plenty never clear their ad bill.

Set that against the survival data. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that roughly one in five new businesses closes within its first year, and nearly half are gone within five (BLS). AI doesn’t change those odds — it just lowers the cost of getting to the starting line. The video shows a 4-minute launch. It doesn’t show the 12 months of testing, ad spend, and margin math that decide whether the launch was worth it.

Could a sharp, well-capitalized operator turn this exact stack into a profitable store? Yes. Could a beginner with $0 and no ad budget? Almost certainly not — not because the tools failed, but because the tools were never the hard part.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This approach makes sense if you’ve already got $1,000–$2,000 to risk on ads and inventory, a few hours a week to babysit campaigns, and the stomach to lose money while you learn what converts. If you understand that the AI is doing the easy 80% and you’ll be doing the hard, expensive 20% yourself, the stack genuinely saves you time and design money. It is not for someone expecting passive income on a shoestring, someone who can’t fund ad spend, or anyone who hears “first order” and assumes “profitable business.” For that reader, the realistic outcome is a beautiful store nobody visits.

What to remember

The tools are real, the speed is real, and the production savings are real — Sanchez isn’t faking the build. What she leaves out is everything between “store is live” and “store makes money”: the ad budget, the customer-acquisition cost, the product margins, the fulfillment. AI built the funnel in an afternoon. Filling it with paying customers at a profit is still the same slow, capital-hungry work it always was.

If you want more on where AI actually moves the needle for a small operator, see our breakdowns on how to launch a $10k AI business solo with no code or funding and how to use AI in your business in 2026.