Service Businesses Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-05-22 · 7 min read

The $231k credit card rewards consulting side hustle: a reality check

Verdict: Half-true — works only if you do the unspoken work. The income is real and documented. The “anyone can do this after a weekend with Claude” framing leaves out the part that actually pays.

Chris Koerner’s podcast recently dropped an interview titled “The Credit Card Side Hustle No One Talks About.” The guest, 26-year-old Colin Strad, says he grossed $231,000 in his first full year running Go Somewhere, a one-man practice that helps small-business owners get more points out of the cards they’re already spending on. The number is real. The framing — that any internet-literate person could replicate it after a weekend of reading blogs — is the part that needs a second look.

This article is about the gap between those two things.

What the video actually claims

Strad lays out a tidy two-product business. He charges a flat $875 for a 75-minute consultation that maps a business owner’s personal and business spending onto an optimized credit-card-points strategy, plus one trip booking with the points they go on to earn. A separate trip-research service runs roughly $300 to $600 per booking and is now mostly handled by two contractors. He hit $1,000 in revenue in March 2024, $13,000 in November 2024 (the month he quit his insurance job), and $231,000 across 2025 — his first full year solo. Costs ran around $40,000, mostly contractor labor and software. He says he does no outbound sales. Clients show up in his LinkedIn inbox.

The pitch to viewers is simpler still. Spend a weekend with the major points blogs — The Points Guy, Frequent Miler, One Mile at a Time, The Daily Drop — and Claude, Strad argues, and you’ll know more about credit-card points than 99% of the public. Find a small-business owner running $40,000 a month on a 1% cashback card. Charge them a few hundred dollars to switch them onto a stack earning two or three times more. Repeat.

He’s also candid that credit-card affiliate commissions are “extremely lucrative” — “you can easily make $400 per card,” he tells Koerner — and have become a meaningful slice of his revenue through his newsletter and social posts.

What the method actually requires

Start with the channel Strad says delivered every paying client he’s ever had: LinkedIn. He posts one to two times a day, six days a week. That’s roughly 600 to 700 posts a year. The algorithm is famously kind to consistent personal-profile posters and brutal to sporadic ones, and the lag from first post to first inbound lead is typically three to six months. He also mentions, almost in passing, that one early viral post — a Turkish Airlines redemption to Hawaii that he researched but never booked — “sustained” his momentum for months while he was still earning a few hundred dollars on the side. Going viral on LinkedIn at least once is the load-bearing assumption underneath the “anyone can do this” pitch. It is not a step in the recipe.

Then there’s the affiliate question. Strad mentions that credit-card affiliate links pay around $400 per approved card and that he shares them with clients and in his newsletter. Public payout tables from major networks like Bankrate and CardRatings tend to put credit-card affiliate commissions in the $50–$200 range per approved application, with premium business cards paying more — Strad’s $400 figure is plausible for a top-tier card but well above the network average. More importantly for anyone copying him, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides require any “material connection” between an endorser and the card issuer to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously, right next to the recommendation — not in a footer, not on an About page. The FTC sent warning letters over undisclosed affiliate links in late 2023 and finalized a rule against fake reviews in August 2024, with per-violation penalties that now exceed $50,000 for U.S. readers. U.K. readers should look at the Advertising Standards Authority’s #ad guidance; Australian readers, the ACCC.

None of this means Strad is breaking any rules. It means anyone replicating his playbook needs to take disclosure seriously, because a card recommendation that earns the consultant $400 looks different to a client once they know.

Strad is also operating in a regulated corner of personal finance even if it doesn’t feel like one. The U.S. Credit Repair Organizations Act (CROA), enforced jointly by the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, governs companies offering to improve a consumer’s credit record for compensation. Rewards consulting isn’t credit repair, so most of CROA doesn’t apply — but the line gets thinner if a consultant starts advising on credit utilization, score management, or balance transfers, especially across state lines. Match the regulator to your country before scaling.

Hours matter, too. Strad says each $875 client absorbs roughly 45 minutes of prep, 75 minutes on the live call, 30 minutes of follow-up email, and anywhere from 20 minutes to four hours of trip-planning work that may arrive months later. That’s three to seven hours per consult, before counting the LinkedIn content that produced the lead in the first place. At his volume of roughly 20 clients in his strongest months, the consulting alone is a part-time job.

Who actually wins this game?

The “anyone can do this” framing collapses once you look at who’s printing money in the niche. Strad copied a single LinkedIn creator he was watching from his insurance day job. That creator was earlier still. Both are personal-brand operators in a thin slice of LinkedIn — credit-card rewards for small-business owners spending $20,000-plus a month — where there are maybe a few thousand realistic prospects and a handful of consultants competing for them. Early-mover advantage is real here, and it compounds with every viral post that puts a free case study in front of the same audience next month.

The people who succeed at Strad’s playbook tend to look like Strad. Comfortable writing in public daily. Willing to share concrete redemption case studies, even mocked-up ones. Patient enough to wait the three-to-six-month lag from first post to first paying client. Genuinely interested in the technical grain of transferable points — Chase Ultimate Rewards versus American Express Membership Rewards, transfer ratios, sweet spots on Avios or Flying Blue. None of that is hard to learn. All of it takes more than a weekend.

What you’d realistically earn

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median annual wage of $48,450 for travel agents as of May 2024, and that figure excludes self-employed advisors — who, per industry data, average closer to $79,000 a year when independently accredited. Strad’s $231,000 is well above that band and well above what most LinkedIn-built service businesses generate in a first year.

A realistic range for a beginner copying his model? Probably zero in months one to three while LinkedIn audience-building catches up. Five hundred to two thousand dollars a month from months six through twelve, assuming consistent posting and at least one piece of content that lands. Forty to eighty thousand a year in a strong second year. Six-figure year-one outcomes generally require an existing audience, a paid-traffic budget, or an unusual viral moment of the kind Strad himself describes as the spark for his business.

The points side of the math isn’t passive either. NerdWallet’s 2026 valuations put domestic airline miles between 1.2 and 1.4 cents each, with hotel currencies ranging from Hilton Honors at the low end to World of Hyatt at about 1.8 cents — but several major programs devalued in 2025, including Citi ThankYou and American Express transfers to Emirates Skywards shifting from 1:1 to 5:4 ratios. Strad’s own advice to clients — earn and burn — applies to anyone counting on points as savings.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This makes sense if you’re already comfortable on LinkedIn, can commit to posting most days for at least a year, and find the granular detail of award charts and transfer partners genuinely interesting. It works better if you have a day job or runway to fund the slow first six months while inbound builds. It does not work if you expect clients in week three, treat the affiliate kickbacks as the main game (they’re a tail, not a head), or believe Claude can replace the time you’ll spend writing publicly in your own voice. Is “anyone” the right word for that profile? Probably not — but the profile is more common than the “expert with 20 years of experience” framing other consulting pitches imply.

Compare the model against more product-driven solo paths like the most profitable solo business you’ve never heard of and lower-effort AI plays like the laziest way to make money with Claude, and you can see why high-margin one-call services keep showing up in the side-hustle conversation: they trade scale for margin, and they’re harder to copy than they look.

What to remember

Strad’s $231,000 is real and well-documented in the interview. The framing — that a weekend with Claude makes anyone an expert who can charge $875 a call — is where the half-truth lives. Swap that for “a year of daily LinkedIn posts, an early-mover niche, transparent affiliate disclosures, and a service worth $875 to a busy business owner,” and the math holds. The side hustle just isn’t effortless.