Side Hustles You Can Start for Under $500 (And How to Use AI to Scale Them)

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Showing people how they can use and leverage AI in their business is a big deal. Because to be honest with you, they're not going to be able to compete with other companies that actually are figuring out how to use AI effectively in their business. You can't humanly, you can't beat it. I'm just being honest. You can have the best whatever. It doesn't matter. You cannot compete against a machine because a machine is going to work when you're asleep. It doesn't get tired. Yeah, you can't compete with that. It doesn't need breaks. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

This is your boy, Daniel Hardy, and I am your gracious host of Financial State of Minds. And I'm joined by co-host Marie Chavez. And this is the show where we help you get to that bag, manage that bag, and grow that bag as best as possible as we discuss financial literacy, business literacy, and anything and everything you do with the power of the dollar. And you are tapped in tuned into KGPC 96.9 FM, streaming right now on KGPC969.org and available on all streaming platforms of choice. And what are we talking about today? Today, we are talking about how to start a business while leveraging the power of AI. So, yeah, another episode. So on the show, I'm always talking about Shabazz is always talking about entrepreneurship. This is a show that really helps people get out of debt. And the number one reason why people are usually in debt other than mismanaging money is they don't make enough money. So this is going to be another episode where we talk about how to start up your own business, how to start up your own side hustle. And the goal always is to have a low overhead. So you're not coming out of pocket. So for this episode, we're going to try to keep all monthly costs under$500 a month. Now you're going to have to pay a little bit of startup stuff. So that might be in the hundreds of thousands. But after that, you're paying$500 a month or less. So if you guys don't know, I have made two episodes about this way back in the day. I think they were released like two years ago now. So they're like in the 30s, I would say. They're in the 20s or in the 30s. And they talk about side hustles. And those are more of your standard traditional. So just for a quick recap, we talked about pet sitting, we talked about content creation. We talked about tutoring and consulting on the side. Some simple basic businesses that you can do on the side. But those episodes are recorded before AI really exploded. So this is kind of the AI edition of that episode. So some of these suggestions you may have heard in previous episodes, but it's going to be with the twist of how you can leverage AI. So Shabazz is the accomplished business guy between us two, helps people with businesses all the time. So I'm Shabazz, I'm going to let you start off. Shabazz, I want to start a business. I need some more money. Give me something to work with. What would you tell me?

SPEAKER_03 3:35

So one of the things that I would probably do is what are you good at? What have you mastered? What do you have a lot of knowledge in? Because a lot of people, when it comes to artificial intelligence, they believe that I could just tell it to do this and it's going to do everything for me. Really, a wise person told me a long time ago, this is way before AI, that a computer is a great tool, but it's only as good as the person that's using it. Right? So it needs human input, right? So what I would say is like something that you're passionate about, something that you're good at, something that you know in great detail, because what you can do is you could create, let's say it's an ebook, for example. Let's say you create a digital product, something like an ebook or even a course. And it'll be yours. It's not something because that's the thing. Like, if it if you're putting that amount of human input in there, nobody can't replicate it because it's your human input. But if you just tell it to give you something vague, then yeah, anybody can make something vague with AI and just say, oh, I have this kind of digital product. But what's going to make you stand out is the amount of detail and expertise you in that area.

SPEAKER_02 5:24

Absolutely. So ebooks, definitely a way. I'm not sure if I mentioned ebooks directly in my previous episodes, but ebooks, books in general, whether it's ebook, audio book, or physical book, definitely a good old way of making money. And what the power of AI, we can give Chat GPT credit on this one. You can write those bad boys up real quick. Real quick. So not only is writing it easier, and you have not only an AI tool that can assist you in writing or just flat out write it for you, it can allow you to write them much faster. So you can put out a series of ebooks. Maybe you put out one ebook every three months, four months, and then at the end of the year or the top of the next year, you can re-release them all as a compilation. Something like that. So now you have four to five items that you now can sell. And because you use AI and AI, ChatGPT is free, Gemini is free, and Meta AI is free. There are subscriptions that are optional, but they're free. You have your phone. So by the way, I don't include phones in startup costs. Everybody has a phone. Everyone has phone, everyone has internet. So I'm not ever going to include those in the startups costs for these episodes. So you have your phone, you have your internet, you have Chat GPT, all those are free here already paid for. There you go. That's it. That's it. End of the episode. That's it. Everyone's going to be selling books and buying books. I should be hearing that. Thank you guys, people, give me 10%, please. I gave you guys the games. Or Shabazz, give Shabazz 10%. He gave you guys the game. So now here's my 10% idea. So Shabazz is absolutely right. And to build on what he just said, let's go back to a topic that I talked about is consulting. So going back to what Shabazz said earlier, if you're the expert or something, or what I always tell people who ask me the question, hey Darren, I want to make some more money. Hey, Darren, I want to start a side business. That's it. And they just tell Darren, go go. What I say is, okay, what are you currently doing in your career? Can you do that on the side? That's the easiest thing to do. You can do that, you can generally do almost anything that is a career. Do that on the side as a consultant, as a hired contractor. And just market yourself. Just let people know. Let your target audience know. Your target audience can be an everyday person, your target audience can be a company. And you just let people know that you do it. You already have the experience, you already have the knowledge base, you already have the testimonies because you've been doing it. So for me, what I could do, obviously, I said I could be in finance and sell that as a consulting. Oh, wait, I do that. So that's one. But even what I did previously, sales. I did sales for almost 10 years. So I could be a sales consultant. I can essentially be a contracted sales rep. I can be somebody who trains people on how to sell. I can be a coach. And then how does AI work? Well, I'm using AI to market all of this by building social media, by building websites, by building ebooks, by building training guides, by building online courses. And then I am putting it out there. And then, of course, what me and Jabaz will probably agree on is it's best to again find that target audience. And the target audience should be niche. So there's 101 sales consultants out there, but is there a cell consultant for the world of law? Is there a cell consultant for disabled people? Is there a cell consultant for African Americans? I know somebody who's on my board who specializes in teaching people how to market towards African Americans. Everybody markets, but does everybody market exclusively for African Americans? That can be your niche. So, anyways, consulting. And again, it can be anything. If you're a nurse, you can do that on the side. If you're data entry, you can do that on the side. If you're a call receptionist, you can do that on the side. Heck, you can get the AI, and the AI will do, like Shabazz said, 80, 90% of the work. And because you're the expert, you could be that final 10% and charge whatever the market will allow you to charge. So, consultant, that's my business idea. Shabazz, you're up next. What's another business idea that people can do for low cost and leverage AI to be successful?

SPEAKER_03 9:54

Believe it or not, man, now because you have different forms of artificial intelligence, right? Or different levels, I probably would say. You have generative AI, you have agentic AI, and I'm sorry, let me explain. You got conversational AI where basically will just react and just flow to a conversation that you're having with it, right? And then which is pretty much at the novice level, right? And then you have agentic AI where it will actually deploy a task with little human interaction, right? And then you have AI agents that basically don't need any human interaction, they just execute, right? So what happens is, and this whole scenario is that if you wanted to create something where like an app, something that solves a problem, what would happen is that before, prior to AI, you would need developers, people who knew how to code, make that code work, make integrate and automate softwares to where they talk and communicate with one another. You would need an expert to do that, and that cost it thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. I've seen people create apps where they were in the hundreds of thousands, just in development. I don't think people even understand. You're in such a good point in time. It's a great time to be alive. Because guess what? You don't need a whole team of coders. You don't need a whole development team to execute this. You could use, they got apps like Lovable, they got apps like Bolt, 10 Web that could basically deploy and create you an app to do exactly what you want it to do and solve and fix whatever problem seamlessly, right? What lovable is what, 25 bucks a month? I mean, if you get their top plan, I think it's like a hundred bucks a month, you know, depending on how many credits and stuff that I guess the more sophisticated you get with it, the more credits you're gonna need because it's gonna have to do more. But just think about that though. This is definitely a time where you should be educating yourself about artificial intelligence. You should be in a position where you're looking to mastering this because you could actually learn AI. You don't have to go to a four-year college to learn AI. You don't have to get in thousands of dollars in student loan debt to learn AI. And you can master it, and you can create, man, it's so much you can do with you could change, you can really do something to help the world. I mean, seriously, you know. So I tell people, figure out what it is that you're good at, figure out what it is that you have mastered, and start putting that stuff. If you don't want to write it down, you don't even have to write it down now. You could go to Notebook LM, you could, which is a free product with Google, and you could just talk to it and tell it everything. And guess what? Now it's in your notes. Now you can take that and you can send that wherever you want to send it. So you don't even have to write no more. So, like I said, this is all the time that it took to do these things. Like you had to write out a plan, you had to create spreadsheets, you had to do all these different things to now you gotta hire people because you're not an expert in everything. You don't have to do all that no more. So you could create something that actually is gonna fix a problem, and guess what? You charge a subscription model, right? You know, you don't have to charge that much. That's the thing. You don't have to even charge a ton of money. You get it's a numbers game. If you charge$20 or$30, you could sit back and think, like, okay, how many people do I need to have me paying a subscription model for me to make$50,000? Guess what? It's not a lot. That number is not high at all. You know, if you get a hundred people paying a subscription model, man, that's a pretty good side hustle, right? So it's not really that hard to do. I just think that people ain't really sat down and really thought about it. But yeah, you could create, like with these uh these apps that I just mentioned, you could create an app that could pretty much solve a problem or it could do a task that a lot of people probably don't want to do. I mean, that's solving the problem too. But the main thing is things that people will use and they need to use and that will make their life easier.

SPEAKER_02 14:48

Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely. And like I said, you nailed it, AI. It saves a lot of time ultimately. It saves a lot of time and therefore a lot of money. So it was already possible to start businesses under$500, but the main thing was you have to add a lot of time. You have to have a lot of time to spend to develop it and build it, and you still do, you still need time, but it's significantly less. It's significantly less with the power of AI and leveraging it properly, it can save you a lot of time and therefore money, which is why I again wanted to make this update episode. So, my turn again. Um, and I'm gonna stay in content creation because that's kind of what I do. I would say any content creation, so podcasting, music, videos, social media, commentator, reactor, whatever, wherever you're making content, obviously is a way you can start a side hustle. So again, you can do what I said earlier, which is you can just talk about what you already know. So maybe you're a nurse and you've been in medical for 10 years, or maybe you're a pharmacy tech and you've been doing that for five, 10 years. You can just talk about what you know in that field or what relates to that field. And there you go, you're the expert. People may want to follow you if you make a good enough content and you have a good enough personality. Or obviously, people want to be entertained, so you can go into more entertainment-like topics, but of course you can stay educational like what we have done here with this podcast. So you can do that, and before, you would have to, if you weren't good at it, you would have to outsource the editing, whether that's audio editing, video editing, or both. You would either most likely you would have to learn how to do it yourself because that would have been most cost effective, because it would have cost too much money to outsource it. I remember before AI was readily available, I was talking to a video editor that I knew personally out here in California, and he was charging literally, I think it was like five, six hundred dollars per episode, per episode to video edit and audio edit it. Nowadays, you can easily descript AI, which is what I use to edit these episodes, the video and the audio. Descript AI starts at$30 a month. There's your editing software, and it does so much of your work already for you. You take some classes, like Shabazz says, about dispute AI or any video editing software of your choice, and there you go. You can make music videos, you can make any any type of video, any type of video. And you combine that with generative AI, whether it's 11 Labs or any of these multiple AI softwares that just flat out create the music. I mean, they're I mean, frick, honestly, you can use NVIDIA creates the whole video for you, like with minor editing and stuff like that. So these are all ideas, again, that you could have done before, but with the power of AI, the entry level is pretty much at the lowest it's ever been. Definitely in my lifetime and probably in human history. The entry level is so low to start a podcast. You want to be a musician, you can start that. You want to be a video content creator or editor, you can do the other way around. You can just take what I said. And again, people, even though AI is out, they're still willing to pay. If you do a good enough job, they're not going to care if you use AI tools. They're not going to go, oh, because you use the script AI, you need to charge me 90% less. Nah, you can still charge whatever price, whatever the price bears in the market. And if you happen to use AI, then now you're the editor. So you can do both. You can be the podcaster in my example, and you can have a whole different business editing the podcast for other people with AI, because it's it happens. You can do it so quickly, especially audio-only podcasts. Man, these softwares do literally 90% of the editing. 90% of the editing. You just got to make sure it's correct. So there's more ideas. You can be a content creator or you can be in a business that supports content creators. And again, support can be editing, it can be graphic designing, it can be web development, all these things that support really any business, but especially content creation. You can do that as a side hustle and with minimal effort, however hours and many you want you want to do, 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week, 40 hours a week, whatever you can afford to do at that time. You can give that time to the bit the topics we've talked about so far and potentially make some income. So I'll pass the rock right back to Shabazz. Shabazz, what's another business idea people could think could do?

SPEAKER_03 19:27

So with the artificial intelligence. So we have we talked about ebooks. We talked about courses, right? Well, we talked a little bit about courses, but I want to kind of expound on the Yeah, I just mentioned it. Go for it. Yeah. So course creation, right? Mm-hmm. So this goes back to something similar with the ebooks. And just to touch on the ebooks, just really quick, those ebooks that you create, you don't even have to just do an ebook. You can actually even write a book. You can put that on Amazon, you could create that and put that and make it an audiobook. So that's another way. But let's talk about courses. So whatever you have a good amount of knowledge in or you have mastered, you put that into a course, right? And something that's gonna solve a problem, something that maybe could even create somebody else some more income, you put that into a course, and then guess what? You sell that course for$27. Let's say that's your entry level. But and then you have all these upsells. Okay, you're gonna get the this basic course, but now, and you can even do it like this. Hey, the ebook, right?$27. Now the upsell is, oh, you want a whole course on it? Okay, I'll give you the whole course and show you, and you can learn everything to do. And then you could bump that up to anywhere from$50 to$100, right? That's the upsell, right? And then do you want a software that actually does everything for you? And you don't even have to think about it. Okay, now they done paid$27. Now they didn't pay$97. Now you want the app that I created that does everything. You don't even have to figure all this stuff out on your own after you take the course because you still got to figure out how to put everything together, right? You still gotta do everything. That's$297. So now you done got them to pay$400 and something bucks basically by just getting them. You just you had to bait, which was the ebook. Oh,$27, I got that. You know, 19 bucks, I got that. And then you upsell them to a course, and now you upsell them to the app. So that's an easy way, and that's just one person. You done made four hundred some some dollars off one person, right? And you say you give that to them for a lifetime, or you could even have it on the subscription model, who knows? But not telling you how to price things, but I'm just giving you a scenario. This is what people are doing, and it's making people millions, thousands to millions of dollars. And it's all about figuring out these things, it's all about creating these things, which is very minimal. I think the biggest part of it is pouring your knowledge, expertise, and those details into it and organizing it in a way. I think that's probably gonna be your biggest part of it. You know, the computer is only as smart as the person. So that's one thing you got to think about. So, yes, artificial intelligence, but you pouring your intelligence in it, it's a part of it too.

SPEAKER_02 22:50

Right. Right, right. And the balls back in my court. Okay, another thing. So a lot of these things you we've talked about, by the way, you can combine them, right? So you can combine content creation with consulting, with you know, outsourcing, and you have some other businesses. You can literally combine all these. That's kind of what Shabaj just explained. You can be a consultant and start a podcast, as podcast blows up, now you're selling ebooks. Okay, the ebooks sold well. Now you're selling online courses, those sold well, now you're selling software, now you're selling services, now you're selling one-on-one consulting, now you're selling group classes. So you can combine everything we're saying, or you can use these ideas in any pretty much any industry. So I said content creation, but a lot of this can be used in more traditional lines of work. So if you are into fitness and that's your passion, well, you're gonna content create about your fitness. It may not be a YouTube channel, it may just be social media, but you're still gonna create content. People are still gonna want to buy a book from you about how to exercise or how to do the right diet that fits your body type. One thing I'm gonna tang it off a little bit is a lot of these ideas we're gonna give you. I'm not gonna lie and say people aren't doing them. Of course, people aren't doing them. There's competition, and competition has never been so fierce. But a lot of times, or a way you can avoid the competition and also set yourself distinct or being different, is aim your target audience at a crowd that isn't so competitive. So I, again, I just so happen to be disabled and African American. So those are two unique demographics, and I can aim my stuff for them. So, yes, there may be 101 fitness people. There are 101 fitness people, there are thousands of fitness people, but how many of them specialize in working with people who are blind? How many of them are specialized in a way to where they can instruct deaf people? How many of them know how to adjust the body if you have a serious physical impairment or injury? Now it's shrinking. Not every fitness expert or trainer knows how to do that. You can be that person who knows how to do that. And using Shabazz's idea of leveraging AI as research, you can learn. So even if you're not that expert now, this is the easiest time to be an expert in anything. This is the easiest time. Chat GPT can replace a teacher and be your teacher. Is it as good as a teacher? No. But can you do it if you have zero dollars and can you learn what you need to learn to be an expert? Absolutely. Absolutely you can. So combining all these things that we're talking about is definitely a way. And again, I just gave you guys the fitness trainer. So there's Lord knows how many different types of fitness at this point. Apply all what we said. You can do it with fitness, you can do it with yoga, you can do it with Pilates, you can do it with calisthenics. It doesn't matter. You can be an expert there. Because wherever you choose to be an expert in, you just have to think about how you're gonna make yourself stand out because of course there are a lot of people. And AI can help you with that. Again, AI can help you build a website that again is targeting towards African Americans or targeting towards Latino Americans, or God knows how many women focused experts there are. I mean, I just I'm coming out with an episode that's gonna be released soon, or I'm talking to a financial advisor that focuses on women. So you can be that too. So um just thinking about that too is taking a business idea or anything you want to do and just I only do it or I'm the expert for insert demographic. That's another way of doing that. And of course, when you get AI leveraged, AI can do the research. If you don't even know the demographic, they can teach you about women. I've done that. I've done that. Hey, I'm a man. So finances for a man is different than finances for a woman. I had to do my research. The research includes interviewing people, the research includes Chat GPT researching me and finding statistics that are for women. And then now I know how to advise more targeted and geared for women. It's really simple. But these are things you can use and ultimately these are tools that you can use. And again, there's really not many AI subscriptions that you're gonna have to pay more than$100. They're all floating around the$10 to like, I would say,$60 range. At least all the ones we use, Shabazz. All the ones we use for financial state of minds. I can't think of one subscription that I'm that we're paying$50,$60 a month or plus. I think it's just Blaze AI. And Blaze AI can be your ultimate marketing basically team. You can literally use Blaze AI to generate ads for you, and they're posted everywhere on all social media platforms, and they can generate the blogs and stuff like that. So, oh yeah, there's that. You can be a blog writer. Have AI do it. It's basically doing it. You can instead of people struggling to pump out one blog a day, and that's how they would blog, now you can pump out five a day, ten a day, fifteen a day, especially once it gets used to you. You it can definitely pop all of that. And okay, well, Darren, how is bloggers making money in 2026? Well, if your blog is good enough and it gets viral enough or it's good enough as far as the content, and ChatGPT is pulling from it, there's all that traffic. And what can you do? What do all bloggers do, anyways? Go back to the literally the consulting and the stuff Shabazz was just talking about literally 20 minutes ago. That's how you can do use AI to generate blogs and make you some money that way too. And I'm again, I'm really just focusing on the how it can generate stuff for you and help you that way. Shabazz already mentioned it can execute stuff on its own. You can have AI in a way to where it can be your customer service buy, it can be your receptionist. And then again, you can offer all that as a service. So that's just another idea is leveraging your AI to do the work for you. And the AI is technically providing the service. You can either do that for yourself, for your business, or you can have your own business where you're the AI expert in that specific department, and you're selling that or you're teaching people how to set that up for their businesses, for their companies, or for their personal lives, and you can charge them fee. Because I think they said what only at this point, 50% of the business world is using AI. For as much talk as we talk about it on the show, as I talk about it offline, it's only 50% of businesses are using any type of AI. And what they say is the vast majority of businesses actually have not figured out how to use AI to directly profit. It's saving them time, and of course, some time saves some money. But really, most businesses, even if they're using AI, they haven't figured out a way to use it to directly make them a profit. We're literally telling you guys, we're basically making a whole episode on how you can use AI to directly make you positive ROIs in return. So keep that in mind. And then of course, as a reminder, you're listening to Darren Harvey, Marie Shabazz over here on Financial State of Minds, KGPC 96.9 FM. We're talking about side businesses or full-blown businesses you can start in 2026, now leveraging the power of AI. So, balls back in your court, Shabazz. What's another idea or concept you want people to know about starting a business now in 2026?

SPEAKER_03 30:44

I kind of want to expand because I was going to touch on it. But yeah, I'm glad you touched on it. So, one of the other things is that as you mentioned, there is a significant amount of businesses who have not figured out how to use AI in their business. Right. Right. And guess what? You can be that person and you can show people how to use AI, whether it's for sales. I I could tell you a big one. A lot of restaurants have not figured out, a lot of people who are in the food service have not figured out how to use AI with their business. Right. There's in a lot of these restaurants, they're still doing things the the caveman way. I was sitting here talking to a family restaurant chain, and I was like, when somebody comes and gets some food from you, I said, How do you keep track of your customers? Oh, we don't. So you just wait for them to just have a taste for it and they just want to come back? Yeah. Why? I was like, this business has been in business 50 years. Why? Um well, uh, I don't know. So over all the years that you've been in business, right? If let's just say, let's just use a number. Let's say a million people have patronized your business in the last 50 years, right? What if you could use leverage artificial intelligence and you could send all those people an email and a text message saying that, hey, we basically are doing this promotion for whatever kind of meal it is for the day or whatever, or a happy hour, or whatever it is. I said, Do you think that can help your business? And he said, Absolutely. Even if a million people, right? Even if you only get 2% of that is a huge deal, right? So that's the thing, and I just gave you a scenario. There's several other scenarios. I just gave you one. So showing people how they can use and leverage AI in their business is a big deal. Because to be honest with you, they're not going to be able to compete with other companies that actually are figuring out how to use AI effectively in their business. You can't humanly. I'm just being honest. You can have the best whatever. It doesn't matter. You cannot compete against a machine. Because a machine is going to work when you're asleep. It doesn't get tired. So, yeah, you can't compete with that. It doesn't need breaks. Exactly. So helping people figure out how to basically automate a task is a big deal. So if you can be that person and you could create a system or you could create an app that this is going to do this for you, and all you have to do is very minimal. You just have to connect it to this or this, then basically, guess what? You just solved a major problem. And guess what? For them to continue to use what you created, they're going to have to pay you monthly, right? Or unless you license it and say, hey, this is how much you can pay for it for the year, or however you license it. But these things can give you a residual income. And like I said, you give somebody something of value. It's no matter where it can go. I don't know, man, because I've been in business so long, so I've seen it from I remember doing things manually. I remember when I first heard the word automation. And I said, Automation, what is that? And I saw somebody online, they had this whole, they had a screenshot, and it showed how this goes here and then this goes to here, and then it does this, and then it goes here. And I said, damn, I said, that looks pretty cool. I said, but I don't know what it is, right? It's sound automation. It sounds good. And then as I learned more, I'm like, so I can have something do something on autopilot, what it that doesn't require me to do anything. I'm like, oh man, how where do I sign up for that? Right? Because time is your greatest asset. Right? So now you have things that could do it without requiring your time or your effort. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it it takes zero effort to do any of these things. Yeah, you're probably gonna have to take some time and some thought and and some planning to actually create it and get it to deploy the way you want to. You might have to fix some bugs in it. It might not work exactly properly, or it might not flow smooth, it might not be seamless, and you might have to fix some things and work on a few bugs. But once you create it, it's created. And the old saying goes, if you build it, they'll come.

SPEAKER_02 35:55

Absolutely, absolutely. So you know that I knew you were gonna talk about that at some point. Systems. You can be the person that builds systems for personal people or personal life or really business, businesses. You can be that person who can build a system. So kind of moving to that similar subject, but in a different way. One business idea that I didn't talk about is um you can be a social media manager, you can be a marketer. What you're gonna find is even with AI and all this push, there is a big resistance towards it. There's a big movement of people who are actively resisting AI. Obviously, if you listen to Financial State of Minds any length of time, you know that we are big proponents of leveraging AI. So we are not a part of that crowd. But what I learned as I do my RD and I talk to people is again, there is a big resistance towards AI, or there's a big, we don't have the time, we don't want to prioritize, whatever the reason, they're not leveraging AI. Like I said earlier, statistically, it's 50% of businesses don't even leverage it yet. That's huge. That's hundreds of thousands of businesses that can be your potential customers or clients. We in Shabazz always say you should do something that is pat you're passionate about, or you should do something that you already have five to ten years plus experience in, or you have that deep knowledge pool of. But especially with AI now, ChatGPT, you don't even got to, kind of like I talked about earlier. You can between the online courses and Chat GPT, Gemini, Meta AI, or any other language, AI model, they can teach you. They can teach you this stuff, and it's probably gonna be right, or it's gonna be 90% right. And you're just gonna have to, like Shabazz said earlier, you're gonna have to tweak it here and there. You build something, and then there you go. So going back to social media and marketing, social media marketing is a model that or a business that's always gonna be there. People are always gonna need it because most people that are in business, they don't want to deal with it. It's simple, but it's tedious. Marketing in general is, in my opinion, simple but tedious. It's a lot of little small things you have to do that build up, and especially in marketing directly, it's a lot of trial and error. It's a lot of figuring out, okay, is this ad gonna work? Is this piece of content gonna work? Oh, it does work, okay, why didn't it work? Oh, it doesn't work, why didn't it not work? Rinse and repeat. And a lot of people, they don't know. They know a lot of companies know what they need, but a lot of times they don't know how to go about it. So you can be that person who is a marketing expert again, especially if you niche, if you niche in an industry, if you niche in a certain demographic, you can nick and be like, hey, you're an African-American business owner trying to get African-American clients. Well, I've been marketing for a year or two to only African Americans. I can help you with this. This is my strength. And a person's gonna be way more interested in that because there's 101 marketers, but again, then again, like I said, how many people are African American marketers that market to African Americans who can teach the African American business owner or the Latino business owner how to brand themselves, how to market themselves. You can be that expert there. You can be the expert and you can be the service provider. And that's kind of what you want to do now, especially now with AI being so readily available. You can't just only give the information. Unless you're really successful and really accomplished, you cannot just give only the information and that's how you're gonna make your money, unless it's entertaining, which goes back to podcasting and videos and stuff like that. But you generally won't make your money just that way. You're gonna have to provide a service, and a service should always, like Shabazz keeps saying, a service or a product should be solving a problem. It should be solving a problem. And everyone knows everybody has problems. Money doesn't change that. Doesn't matter how much money you have, how little money you have, there are problems. And that means people need those problems solved. And what you'll find with business people is they don't have the time to figure it out how to solve them. But a lot of them do have the capital, they do have the money, so they'll pay somebody, and that's where you can come in. And again, with AI, it only costs$100 a month,$200 a month,$300 a month. At this point, you don't need a laptop, you don't even need a desktop computer. A lot of people are doing revenuing thousands of dollars a month, tens of thousands of dollars a month off their cell phones. Off their cell phones that you're already paying for, listener. And it don't got to be the new iPhone 17. It could be a 16, it could be a 15, heck, it could be an 11. All those are still getting updated with the current iOS. So there's very little excuse when it comes to startup costs. And if you really want to start a business where you need money, me and Kabaz have already made several episodes talking about how to fix your credit and how to leverage business credit. So you really want to know, hey Darren, I need thousands of dollars for my business idea because I'm so dead set on it. Please go back and listen to those episodes. They're somewhere in the 50s, I believe, where we 50s or 60s, where we talk about business credit, how to get business credit, how to get business lending. And generally that comes down to you need good personal credit and stuff like that. So we're not going to talk any further about that. But again, all of these under$500, I don't even think we've approached three, four hundred dollars with some of these business ideas a month that we um that we talked about so far. But anyways, marketing, social media, marketing, social media manager, analyzer, content manager, all that stuff, you can do that as a business. So again, Shabazz, I'm gonna pass the ball back to you. What's another business idea?

SPEAKER_03 41:52

I know quite a few people, man, that's done this effectively. So faceless YouTube channels. Oh yeah. Faceless Instagram channels, TikTok. So you can pretty much and some people aren't even going faceless, some people have basically cloned themselves and they're creating content. So some people aren't necessarily don't think they're using their likeness to do this as well. But if you one of them people that don't like to get on camera shy, then faceless content is the way to go. You could create a channel where you're just talking about you know, health and wellness, just holistic health and wellness, or you can have something that's talking about a topic, and even you can ask, hey, hey, what are some of the top topics that are really generating a lot of traffic when it comes to social media? I probably would even segment it and say, hey, because different platforms, every platform is different. What is it on Instagram? What are the top ones on YouTube? What are the top ones on TikTok? And figure out and pick a niche and basically use AI to create all the video content, the reels, and you constantly just post that type of stuff. And if you consistently do it, plus you got AI that that help you post it consistently, but if you did that for the course of a year, you will be monetized for sure. You'll be monetized on Facebook, you'll be monetized on YouTube, you'll be you'll be monetized on Instagram, because Facebook and Instagram, they both have their own monetization. Some people get checks only from Facebook, some don't make any money from Instagram. But you can pretty much monetize all these platforms by basically making faceless content. And I've seen some people that are very, very clever at doing it. Like I said, it goes back to what I said before that humanity. Human input. Because AI is just not going to just say, hey, I'm going to give you great viral content just en masse just because you said so, right? You're going to have to pit that human input so it can create that kind of content. Right? So faceless content. There's faceless pages that are making uh thousands of dollars each month. So that's an easy way where you don't have to get in front of the camera and you can actually create a nice side hustle. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 44:32

And Shabazz, we already had we're already done. We're already done. So as you guys can tell, we can rattle this off all day. So we're probably gonna have to make another episode where we get more ideas and stuff like that. Maybe we'll do an idea, Shabazz, where we just literally take one idea and we flesh it out. Just like 100% flesh it out, like almost business plan it. Like this. I might do that on our following episode. That'd be fun. Someone can literally just take it. You guys can have it free, business plan, fleshed out, uh full business. We'll make it so that the overhead will be under$500. Yeah, that'd be a good episode. That'd be a fun episode. May not be the next episode, but watch out for that episode. So I'll go ahead and wrap this up. You guys have heard now. Again, there's so many ways you can start your own business leveraging AI with very minimal money up front. Pretty much everything we said can be done on your phone. You don't even need a desktop or a laptop. And again, please go back. I wish I could remember the episodes, but I'll link them in the show notes. Please go listen to my previous episodes where I talked about side hustle ideas and then just do your homework and research on how AI can leverage it. And you'll have, I think we're probably have done total on this show, at least 15 to 20 different business ideas that you can take minimal capital to start. And if you need capital, go listen to our episodes where we talk about how you can get business capital. So a lot of homework you guys can do. No excuses in 2026 on why you can't have a second stream of income from a side hustle or a business. If Blindy McFly over here can do it, you can do it too. It's not impossible. Not easy. I want to make this clear. What me and Shabazz are saying is this is not easy even with AI. It's still a lot of work, but with AI, you can have the AI do a lot of it for you and save a lot of time and therefore money. So that'll be it. This has been Darren Harvey, Marie Shabazz over here at Financial State of Minds, and you've been tapped in, tuned into KGPC96.9 and streaming on KGP6. Wow, KKPC. I've just been screwing up. That's two in a row I've done screwed up. KGPC969.org streaming right now and available everywhere. Podcasts are available to listen to. And if you're too listening to this on YouTube, thank you for listening to it anywhere. Please like, subscribe, and share these episodes of the help podcast.