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These are the seven side hustles I'd actually start as a student going into the new year. A year ago I made a 2026 version of this video and it became the biggest one on this channel, 430,000 views. So I went back and checked
Seven student side hustles for 2027, from AI training gigs and live selling on Whatnot to UGC ads, Black Friday store testing, and building a personal brand.
Key Takeaways
- Students can monetize existing knowledge through AI training platforms, often at flexible remote hours.
- Small audiences and low budgets are enough to start in live selling, UGC, and product testing.
- Testing products cheaply before peak shopping seasons reduces risk and wasted effort.
- Choosing off-peak time slots and niche focus can help newcomers compete against established sellers.
What the video covers
- The video presents seven side hustles suited to students heading into 2027, revisiting a 2026 version and updating the list after checking how earlier picks performed.
- Number one is AI training work (via Handshake AI and Outlier), where students grade and correct AI model answers, paying up to $40/hour generally and up to $120/hour for experts.
- Number two is live selling on Whatnot, with Gary V's $140,000 two-hour sale cited and Dakota Peters' story of building a seven-figure business starting from streams with under 20 viewers.
- Number three is UGC (user-generated content) creation, where creators film product ads for brands without needing large followings, with experienced creators charging $500-$750 per video.
- Number four is testing products on Shopify before Black Friday/Cyber Monday, using an AI store builder (sponsored by Atlas) to quickly launch and validate product ideas.
- The video also covers app-building by high school students, Gary V's business trajectory, and a sponsored personal brand course with creator case studies.
- The presenter emphasizes that most successful examples started small and that low-cost entry points exist, such as using items already owned.
- Platform fees and requirements are mentioned, such as Whatnot's cut of up to 8% and Handshake's US work authorization requirement.
- The video includes calls to action: subscribing, a free resource download, and sponsor integration.
- Income figures are presented as examples and are not guaranteed, with several claims verified by CNBC according to the presenter.
Chapters
- 00:00Intro: Seven Student Side Hustles for 2027
- 00:57AI Training Jobs (Handshake AI, Outlier)
- 02:03Live Selling on Whatnot
- 04:48UGC Creator Ads
- 05:26Testing Products on Shopify Before Black Friday
- 06:36Atlas Store Builder Demo (Sponsor)
- 08:36Student App Builders and Morning Brew Story
- 11:34Personal Brand Building and Course Promotion
- 13:24Closing Reflections on Starting Small
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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everyone, which almost nobody does with these videos. Two I'd now tell you to skip and I'll show you which at the very end. One I'd push even harder, so it's back on this list. The other six are new
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and one of them shows you how two high school students built an app making $30 a year before MyFitnessPal bought it.
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But I'll start with the easiest one because you could apply for it tonight. Number one is a job where AI companies pay students up to $120 an hour and what they're actually paying you to do is kind of funny. So AI models write a lot
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of answers that are just wrong and they only get better when a real person shows them what a good answer looks like. So these companies pay people to basically grade the AI's homework. You read an answer that it gave, mark what's wrong,
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and write what a better answer would have been. And the part that makes this perfect for students is who they want to hire. They basically want to hire who actually knows a subject. So what you're studying right now is basically your
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resume. So a biology major checking biology answers is the kind of person that they want and the more you know, [music] the more each hour pays. The place that I'd look first is Handshake, which is the career site a lot of colleges
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already use. Their program is called Handshake AI and the listings pay up to $40 an hour for just general work. If you're an expert in something like philosophy or software engineering, it goes up to $120.
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Handshake says that it already paid over $100 to more than 750,000 people. So if you've got 10 hours a week at [music] $40 an hour, that's $1,600 a month from stuff that you're learning anyway. And the crazy part is that
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Handshake says that some students have used it to cover their tuition. It's free to apply and the work is remote, so you pick your own hours. The one thing to know is that Handshake needs US work authorization. If you're outside of the
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US, look at Outlier, which is another site that pays people to train AI. They work with people in over 50 countries, but which projects that you can join depends on where you live, so check with that before you sign up. And the next
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one is the app that Gary V has been obsessed with, and how a woman whose first live stream had fewer than 20 people watching turned it into something huge. Number two is live selling, and this is the one that Gary V won't stop
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talking about. A few years ago, he was yelling at everybody to get on TikTok, [music] and now he's comparing live shopping to exactly that. He went live on an app called Whatnot for 2 hours, and did $140,000 in sales. And then he said that if he
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had spent $10,000 on ads to sell the same stuff, he'd probably have made around $7,000. If you've never seen Whatnot, you basically just go live and hold up items one at a time, like trading cards, sneakers, or clothes.
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Then people in the chat can bid on them or buy them right there while you're on camera. It's basically just an auction show that you can run from your bedroom.
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Whatnot did $8 billion in live sales last year, and sellers between 18 and 28 had the highest average sales of any age group on the app. And I know what a lot of you are already thinking, Gary already has millions of followers. The
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story that actually matters for you is Dakota Peters. She started out selling sneakers on Instagram with her sisters, then found Whatnot in 2021, and then switched to sports cards. Her very first stream had fewer than 20 people watching, and she made about five or six
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hundred dollars. And she did one thing differently from everyone else. She went live from 10:00 at night to 2:00 in the morning, so she wasn't competing with the bigger sellers. By the end of her first year, she'd done over a million
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dollars in sales, and CNBC actually checked the paperwork on that. And it just kept on growing. As of last year, her company was doing over a million dollars a week. The cheapest way in is whatever's already sitting in your
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closet. Whatnot takes cuts of each sale up to 8% plus a small payment fee, and that cut gets smaller as you sell more.
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And do what the coder did and just pick a time slot the biggest sellers skip.
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Real quick guys, only about 1.7% of you watching are actually subscribed. Doesn't make me any money or anything, it's just a nice morale boost that tells me to keep making these and the like on the video really does help with the
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algorithm and help this reach more people. And the next one on the list even works if you have zero followers.
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Number three is how people with zero followers get paid hundreds of dollars for one video. And you've definitely seen their work without knowing it. So, you know those videos or ads where it's just a normal person talking into their
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phone about a product that they use. A lot of those were filmed by regular people and then the brand runs that video as an ad on its own accounts. It's called UGC, which stands for user generated content. And because the video
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goes out on the brand's page, nobody ever checks how many followers you really have. A creator named Kelly Rocklin started doing this in her early 20s on the side of a normal day job. She was putting in about 15 hours a week, so
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a few evenings and a part of the weekend. And the year that she turned 28, it brought in $142,000 and CNBC checked the documents on that one, too. And creators with a bit of experience can charge anywhere from
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around 500 to $750 for a single video that's 20 to 60 seconds long. So, even one video a week at the low end is $2,000 a month. The cheapest way in here is under $100 if you already have a
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phone with a decent camera, and that's Kelly's own estimate. I'd start by filming three or four sample ads for products that you already own and then send those to brands because a brand wants to see what your videos actually
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look like before it pays you for one. And the next one is the one that I'd actually start this month because the biggest shopping weekend of the year is only a few weeks away. Number four is testing a product before Black Friday.
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Shopify is what a lot of online stores are built on and last year these stores sold [music] $14.6 billion over Black Friday and Cyber Monday. More than 15,800 people made their first ever sale on Shopify that weekend. So, that weekend
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is just huge and if you want a piece of it, you want to know what you're selling before it actually starts. So, the idea here is that you build a store around one product, send a little traffic to
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it, meaning a few people from a post or a small ad and see if anybody actually cares to buy. And if they do, that's a product that you push hard on Black Friday. If they don't, you just try the
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next one. And the reason that most people never even get to the testing part is everything you used to need first. A good-looking store design, which is called a theme, was about $400.
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Then you needed someone to write the product page, then a stack of paid apps for bundles and upsells. That's weeks of work and real money before you even find out whether anybody wants the product or not. So, I want to show you how long
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this takes now. So, this is Atlas. It's an AI store builder and it's a sponsor of this video. All I'm going to do is grab a product link from basically any website, paste it in and that's all I'm
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going to do. So, Atlas AI is now writing the product descriptions and building out the sections for me and the bundles and the cart upsells which are the little add this to offer at checkout.
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So, that whole stack of paid apps is already handled internally. And the best thing is that it works with any theme, too. So, [music] you're not locked into anything. And think about the time that it took to do that. So, building the
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store used to be the hard part and now it just takes an afternoon, which means that the part that actually decides whether you make money is picking the right product. And you never really know if a product works until real people are
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asked to pay for it. So, if you put a proper page up and send a little traffic to it and let buyers give you the answer. If it sells, now you know it's worth putting your Black Friday budget
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behind it. And if it doesn't, you're out of a few minutes instead of a whole month, and you've still got weeks to test the next one. And this is what the people actually making money with this do. Also, the beautiful thing about
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Atlas is that once a layout works, you can save it as a template and reuse it for every new product. So, in the time that it used to take to launch one store, you can test five or 10. Most of
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your tests are going to fail, and that's completely normal, which is exactly why you want each one to only cost you a few minutes. Atlas users have done over 385 million dollars in sales. [music] So, plenty of people are already running
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this. The link is in the description, and you get a free 7-day trial, so you can build your first test store before this video is even over. All right, so this next one is the app that those two
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high school friends built, and the one MyFitnessPal ended up buying. Number five is building an app with AI. So, before CalA I, the first thing that Zach Yglesias had ever sold was something a lot of you probably use at school. It
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was a website where students could play unblocked games, [music] and he sold it at 16 for 100,000 dollars. He taught himself to code [music] when he was seven. Then at 17, he and his high school friend Henry Langmack
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launched CalA I. You literally just take a picture of your food, and it tells you the calories, and that's pretty much the whole app. They grew it with TikToks and influencer deals, and in under two years, it was making 30 million dollars
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a year. And then, MyFitnessPal bought it. Now, Zach could already code. What's changed is that AI tools like Claude can write a lot of that code for you now.
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You describe what you want the app to do, and the AI just builds it. Then you test it and fix it until it actually works. So, building it isn't the hard part anymore. What made CalA I work was
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getting it in front of people, which is exactly what they did with TikToks and influencers, and that's the skill that I'd actually practice. Forbes even described Zach as someone who kept launching apps until one worked. The cheapest way in is building it as a web
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app first, which just means that it runs in the browser, and you can do that for free. If you want it in the App Store later, Apple charges $99 over a year, and I'd build something that fixes a
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problem that you already have because then you're your own first user, and you already know what it needs to do. An app needs people to find it, though. And the next one is about building the audience first. It started as a PDF a college
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student emailed to his classmates, and wait until you hear about what it ended up being worth. Number six is a niche newsletter. A newsletter is just a free email that goes out on a schedule to people who care about one topic. And
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once enough people are opening it, brands will pay you to put an ad inside of it. Back in 2014, a University of Michigan student named [music] Alex Lieberman started emailing his classmates a daily summary of business news as a PDF. Then a fellow Michigan
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student named Austin Reif saw what it could turn into and joined him. And in 2015, they turned it into Morning Brew.
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Five years later, a big media company, the one that owns Business Insider, bought most of it. And that deal valued Morning Brew at $75 million.
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So, their first readers were literally just their classmates, and that's how I'd start one, too. Just pick a topic for people you can already reach, like your campus or your major, and send it every week. The cheapest way in here is
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free because Beehiiv, which is a newsletter tool, lets you send up to 2,500 subscribers without paying anything. And these lists grow slowly at the start, so begin with the people that you can actually reach this week. And every single one of these gets easier
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when people already know your name, which brings me back to last year's video. Number seven is the one from last year that I'd push even harder now, and the best way to explain why is a guy named Andre Fernandez. He was working at
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a $10 an hour job and grew an Instagram account to 30,000 followers. Then in late 2020, he joined Whatnot as one of his first five Pokémon card sellers. So, the day that he started streaming, he already had an audience that wanted to
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watch him sell. And last year, his business did $7.8 million in sales by his own numbers. And that's why building a personal brand is back on this list.
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It makes every other one easier. Goldman Sachs thinks that the creator economy, which is basically everyone getting paid to make content, could be worth close to $480 billion by 2027. That's the exact year in the title of this video. This channel
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is my own proof of it. Last year's version of this video was one upload and it got 430,000 views. It's the slowest one on this list to start paying. I won't lie about that.
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So, the first step is picking one topic and posting on a set schedule while you do any of the other six. And if you only grab one thing from this video, make it this. I put everything I know about
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building a personal brand into a free guide called the creator ecosystem blueprint. It walks you from picking what you want to be known for to three ways to make money from it to the system that keeps it growing. And my favorite
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part is where I broke down 20 creators, people like Mr. Beast, Alex Hormozi, and Gary V, and the one thing worth copying from each of them. Over 2,000 people already have it. It's free and it's the second link in the description. And
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since you made it this far, here are the two from last year that I'd skip now.
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The first one is faceless short-form channels. In July of last year, YouTube started cracking down on what it calls inauthentic content, which basically means videos pumped out from the same template over and over. Channels that keep doing it can lose their ad money.
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And faceless is still fine if you're making original stuff, but I skip the copy-and-paste version. And the second one is online writing as a beginner side hustle. One study found that writing jobs on a big freelance website dropped
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about 30% in the eight months after ChatGPT [music] came out. That study was already out when I made last year's video. So, I really should have caught it then. But the other four from last year still work and that video is linked up top if you
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want them. And if you notice, every person in this video started small. Dakota's first stream had fewer than 20 people watching. Kelly was doing this around a day job. Zack and Henry were still in high school. And Morning Brew
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started as a PDF for a few classmates. So, pick one of these seven this week and do the first step that I gave you for it. I'm probably going to be doing this video again next October, going back through these seven exactly the way
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I just went through last year's. So, drop a comment with the one that you're thinking about starting and I'll check back on it in the 2028 version. And again, if you want to check out last year's seven side hustles, the video's
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[music] right here. See you in the next one.
Topics:side hustlesstudents2027AI training jobsWhatnot live sellingUGC creatorShopify Black Fridaypassive incomeHandshake AIstudent entrepreneurship
