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Nick Loper
Here's how real side hustlers and entrepreneurs are using AI to work smarter, save time, and make more money. What's up, what's up? Nickeloper here. Welcome to the side Hustle Show. It's the business podcast you can actually apply, and today I'm excited to share some crowdsourced AI use cases. Last month I asked side Hustle Nation email subscribers, hey, how are you using AI in your business? And I got some awesome responses. I'll sprinkle in my own examples as we go. And the first category here is Content Creation. Hey, it's Jane Havens here from center for Pediatric Sleep Management and the Becoming a Sleep Consultant podcast. So I'm using AI mainly to speed up content creation. I use it to brainstorm social media posts and email newsletters. It's giving me just a rough draft, so I'm not starting entirely from scratch. I'm also using it to build podcast outlines by feeding it just a few bullet points and asking for a suggested flow or interview questions. So a fun recent win. Somebody actually found my Sleep consultant certification course because they asked ChatGPT which course they should take and it pointed them to me, which was so exciting. I'm still figuring out how to leverage this, but it's such a cool reminder of how AI is changing the way people find information. Overall, I would say that AI is helping me to save time and stay consistent and perhaps most importantly, focus on building real connections, which is what I truly love to do the most. Thank you so much for including me. I'm so excited to hear how everyone else is using this tool. That's a super fun win to have built up a reputation strong enough that the robots are going to recommend you. Now we're starting to see some more referral traffic from ChatGPT as well. It's actually our top source of referral traffic lately, but still only between 1 and 2% of all site Hustle Nation page views. Nowhere near enough to account for the traffic loss that I attribute to shifting search patterns and AI answer snippets in the search results, but I suppose still better than nothing. And if you ask, hey chatgpt, what are some of the best side Hustle podcasts? It does show up side Hustle show as the number one result, so better that than nothing at all. Now, lately I've been asking ChatGPT for help in drafting email newsletters based on the text summary of the podcast episode. I fed it a few examples of past newsletters that here's the writing style and it's not yet to the point where it can be a direct copy and paste, but it's probably still faster than starting completely from scratch every week. And I like how Jane mentioned hey, that frees up time to do the more important work focusing on customer connections and stuff like that. Akhila from pattoplates.com so my strategy is to use Ubersuggest AI writer with keyword research and then get content ideas and ask that AI writer to choose blog title and subheadings. I do not like the entire blog content it writes, but the skeleton it suggests is already SEO friendly and I write the meat of the blog content under each subheadings in my own words. And then now I use Hemingway app to edit and the metrics that matter with Hemingway for me is the readability score that is less than 8. English is not my first language, so Hemingway edits my writing that are aligned with my message and thoughts. And I already received compliments about how easy it is to read and digest my writing in LinkedIn and media from the SEO rich blog articles we create short form content like carousels and Instagram for example. And I'm also working on my newsletter with the same long form blog content. So the workflow is to start with ubersuggest to get SEO friendly content, write your thoughts, edit it in Hemingway and use the same content to publish short form content in Instagram, Pinterest, et cetera. Thank you Nick. Bye. I should note here that I've included links to all of the tools and resources in the show notes for this episode. All you gotta do is follow the show notes link in the description and I'll get you right over there. I love Hemingway as well, and depending on your niche, I would argue that a readability or grade level score of 8 might even be too high. Like if I can get my articles down to six or seven, I've seen them perform better. Someone even suggested they shoot for grade five to reach the widest possible audience with the simplest, easiest to understand language. But this is a cool call to get more mileage out of the content you're already creating. And if your site traffic is down, maybe you can use AI to repurpose some of your existing content into social posts to try and engage people where they're at. But prompting and editing and posting it still takes time, and this next clip aims to remove at least a couple of those steps. Hey there, this is Kathleen Selmans from GLOW Social, where we help service based businesses stay visible online without the stress. We've built our entire platform around AI to solve a huge pain point for local businesses Many small business owners know they need to be on social media, but they don't have time to create content, don't know what to post, and can't afford expensive agencies. So we use AI to deliver daily content ideas and voice match posts tailored specifically for service businesses like dentists, real estate agents and home service pros. What makes our approach different is that we're not just generating generic AI content, we're using AI to create authority building posts that match each client's unique brand voice. The impact has been amazing. Our Users are saving 5 to 10 hours per week on social media management while maintaining a consistent presence that makes their businesses look open and credible online. If you're running a side hustle and want to scale without becoming a full time content creator, AI tools that handle automated content generation in your specific niche can be a game changer. Check us out@glowsocial.com to see how we're making Set it and Forget It Social Media a reality. So lots of entrepreneurs getting some AI assistance on the content creation front. That's category number one. And I would put my AI assisted video creation in this category as well. I've been using a tool called Pictory Pictory to pull in dozens of stock footage and B roll clips to make what I think is a pretty visually compelling video much faster and than it would be to do all the filming and editing myself. Do they go viral? No they don't. But they do get views they can rank in search. They give me another chance to be discovered in YouTube and in Google. They beef up the existing content on the site and they make a little bit of passive income through YouTube ads. The next category is less about content creation and more about marketing and promotion. And the first idea that came through here was from Marie from jphandywoman. Com. She didn't send me a voicemail, but she sent me an email about the creative way she collects more positive customer reviews for her local service business. She says, I use AI to write sample testimonials for existing customers. I use personalized info in the prompt such as Please write a positive testimonial for a recurring home maintenance handyman business written by a busy doctor with two young kids at home. The doctor grew up in an apartment, so he's unfamiliar with all the tasks required to maintain his home and is delighted to have found a reliable handy person to take care of everything so he can focus on his family and his career. Then Marie sends this AI generated testimonial to the customer for them to adopt, edit, ignore as they see fit. But since it's personalized, she says, the customer often thinks, hey, this is totally me. And they copy and paste it into the Google Business profile or another review site. I think this is a really creative way to reduce the friction. You need more reviews, but how can you make it easy for people to do it? And I should totally do this when I get a nice email about the podcast. Hey, would you mind copying and pasting this into Apple podcast reviews? Here's the link. So thanks to Marie for that tip. And while Marie is using AI to improve her visibility in social proof in Google, other entrepreneurs are using it to pick up traffic and sales on other platforms. Hey, this is Brooke from bluewillowembroiderydesigns.com I use AI almost every day. I sell on Etsy and I also have my own website, but specifically for Etsy, I've been using AI for listing titles. I also use it for descriptions and tags. Obviously I make some tweaks and changes if I'm not happy with what I see. That some of the things I do when using AI to make it more specific is like I might use a prompt like give me an Etsy title for my listing of X. And then I say make sure that this is optimized for SEO. And if I want to go even further, I might say target this to a certain type of creator. And then with my description I'm doing the same thing. I usually ask it to give me a two sentence listing description using the titles and the keywords from the title. And then with the tags I might say give me 13 tags for this listing based on the description and the title above. And then I ask it to separate this with commas and make sure that the tags are 20 characters or less. And so it's been really helpful for getting those things out there really quickly. I like it. We know Etsy can be a bit of a volume game, so anything you can do to speed up the listing process definitely helps. Hi Nick, my name is Courtney Stitch and I'm a Pinterest marketing and design expert. I own Seaside Creatives, a Pinterest marketing and design agency as well as a digital product store that I just started. I wanted to share with you how I utilize this for Pinterest for my clients as well as how I utilize it for my own marketing on the Pinterest platform. So I love ChatGPT because it actually will, when given the correct prompts or prompted in a certain way, I should say will actually spit out some amazing Pinterest pin descriptions and titles. It's helped me create boards in the platform. So, as you know, Pinterest is a search engine and it relies heavily on keywords. So this prompt is one that I use all the time and it works wonderfully. And so I simply ask ChatGPT to create a SEO keyword description. And let's just say one of my clients just created a blog post on chocolate cake. So we're going to be creating anywhere between seven to ten pins for that post. So of course, for each pin you create, you create a different pin description. You know, vary it somewhat, but I want to make sure that that pin is picked up by Pinterest and is understood by the algorithm and is found in search by our amazing audience. And so if they created this blog post on, like I said, the best chocolate cake recipe, I'm going to put that in there. So create an SEO keyword pin description for the best chocolate cake recipe. Sometimes I put in highly targeted keywords such as chocolate cake, chocolate desserts. Also might add in the keyword sweet treats. I try to put in five to seven keywords here and then I also add in a CTA that reads download your free recipes sweet street today. Then it will ask you for slightly different tone or variation. Sometimes it'll ask if you want to create a pen or, you know, a camera template, which I find helpful. But I will be very honest with you, I don't utilize AI pens very often. I love designing. It's one of the things that I really enjoy about about the work that I do for my clients and myself. So I just tend to do my own designs. And the other thing I wanted to share about this was that the one thing you do need to kind of look through is any additional fluff words that you don't necessarily need in your descriptions for Pinterest. Sometimes ChatGPT, it's great at making it conversational, but sometimes it's too conversational. So you can shorten the pin description a little bit. It will generate more titles, board descriptions, pin titles, and it really, really chops down on the amount of time that you're spending trying to think of these wonderful, you know, pin titles or pin descriptions. So I hope that this was really helpful. Let me know if you have any questions. I'm happy to help you don't want to sleep on Pinterest as a potential traffic source, but it's also kind of a pain to create seven to 10 unique pins or semi unique pins and pinned descriptions for the marketing of your post, so hopefully Courtney's tip can help you out there. I've got more AI use cases coming up including getting coaching and even using it to create money making products right after this. This summer don't get burned by your wireless bill. You should be planning beach trips, barbecues, three day weekends and your wireless bill should be the last thing on your mind. That's why I made the switch to our partner mint mobile in 2019 and haven't looked back. 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One strategy I didn't fully embrace or maybe wasn't fully aware of when I was starting out was this idea of the piggyback principle. In the startup phase. That means you don't have to start completely from scratch, but instead you can take advantage of existing tools, templates, playbooks, best practices from the people who've gone before you. A perfect example of this is our partner Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses from household names to side hustlers on their way to becoming household names. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store and start selling. Plus, Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools to accelerate your workflow. We're talking product descriptions, page headlines and even enhancing your product photography. You can even easily create email and social media campaigns to reach your target customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com sidehustle go to shopify.com sidehustlez shopify.com sidehustleen the next way side hustle nation is using AI is almost as a thought partner or a silent or low cost executive coach. Hey Nick, Love the show and appreciate the chance to contribute. Doug Collins here, Best selling author of the Home Based Business Guide to Write Off Almost Anything and founder of the homebusinesstaxsecrets.com One of the most valuable ways I use AI isn't for content creation, it's for strategy and decision making. I prompt ChatGPT to act as a strategic business coach and advisor who has a deep understanding of my business, marketplace and ideal clients. I talk through new ideas, challenges and growth plans with it. Together we brainstorm, kick around my ideas and thoughts, map out launch strategies, analyze opportunities. We even run SWOT exercises and find blind spots I actually missed. I also have a take on the role of my ideal client to review my ideas, offers, sales pages and emails. It gives me fresh audience based feedback. It's helped me save time, launch faster, improve conversions and make sharper decisions. I'm more confident going to the marketplace because of the feedback loop it gives me. It's like having a thinking partner or sounding board on demand. Thanks again for putting this together and really looking forward to hearing how others are using AI too. This can be pretty eye opening and it was one of the first use cases I played around with with ChatGPT and hey, here's what we have so far, what's missing and it would help fill in the gaps. And then in this year's episode where I interviewed RoboBo Nick, my AI alter ego, it actually came up with some decent suggestions for future projects and weak spots in the side Hustle Nation business. Like any coach, it's not going to have all the answers, but it can ask questions and provide guidance to lead you to coming up with the answers. Why? Good morning side Hustle Show. This is Marc Larm and I am a 57 year old man, uneducated, addicted to drugs and alcohol and self abuse for most of my life and recently I have discovered AI and I have turned everything around and now I consider it the level playing field. It gives people without money and education the chance to level up and compete with the big boys. So I have a ton of ideas, a ton of businesses I'm starting. I actually invented a piece of fitness equipment, FX machine, Bells and that's Bells with a Z. I started using AI for marketing and then I started using it as my own personal roundtable. So I have taken the greatest minds and copied them into my own roundtable so I can get motivated daily and Then I was learning about prompt engineering when I realized the better the prompt, the better the response. And I said, that's my problem. I've never prompt engineered that inner voice inside my head. And your great reset was born. So I now have a book available on Amazon, at least in Kindle right now called you'd Great Reset. I have a YouTube channel called you'd Great Reset, trying to help people build that firm foundation which starts with getting the body healthy. And I say we turn stepping stones into launching pads. Have a blessed day. Bye. I never prompt engineered the inner voice inside my head. That might be my favorite line. The better the prompt, the better the response. Garbage in, garbage out, right? It works. Whether you're talking about what you're putting into these AI tools, what you're putting into your body, or the content and messaging you're putting into your head, this idea of creating your own virtual mastermind group, your own personal roundtable like Mark called it, is really interesting, especially if you're just starting out and don't have an entrepreneur or a peer group. Hey, what would Tony Robbins say about this? What would Warren Buffett say about this? You could potentially get feedback in the voice of well known mentors without the price tag of one on one coaching. Hi Nick, it's Josh Thorpe. I'm an educator and my side hustle is independent publishing around education issues. I've written a book called AI for students and I teach in the book and with my students. I teach using AI in more creative ways, less as a vending machine. You know, that's just kind of pumping out content for me and more as a thinking partner, like a kind of a conversation part. This is really useful when I don't have someone immediately available, you know, a human who wants to talk through an issue with me. I use then AI as a kind of a practice audience, a stage to think on, a spark for creativity. And what's interesting about this is that it doesn't matter if AI is giving me really perfect, intelligent answers or not. It's actually more important the thinking that I'm doing. The act of having this interaction is stimulating my imagination, is egging me on to solve problems and so on. And I find that I can use AI quite minimally just for a short amount of time and that will get my thinking sort of jump started for the day. This is the tool I recommend, this is the approach I recommend. Think more, not less with Gen AI. So if folks want to check this out, you could look up AI for students on Amazon. And if you know a student or a teacher or a parent who might find this useful, please let them know. And I've got lots of supporting material around this stuff@uplybooks.com promptlybooks.com well, thanks Nick. Bye. A Practice audience, A Thinking partner I like those phrases. I could feed it, for example, a summary of a podcast episode and ask it to come up with 10 potential hooks or email subject lines or even hey, here are 10 potential episodes I'm thinking about doing. Which do you think is going to resonate the best? It could help me come up with compelling episode ideas or even product ideas that would be helpful or relevant to the audience. And the next category of AI usage is exactly that. It's looking for help with product ideas and then taking it one step further and getting help in building out the actual products. Hi everybody, I'm Becky Beach, Digital Business scaling coach of coachbeckybeach.com and today I want to take you behind the scenes of how I use AI to create and sell digital products. Specifically printables and spreadsheets on Etsy and Shopify. When I first started out, everything took forever. I'd spend hours just trying to come up with product ideas or designing layouts from scratch. But once I started integrating AI tools into my workflow, everything changed. I was able to scale faster, stay creative, and get more done in less time without sacrificing the quality. Here's exactly how I do it. I start with ChatGPT, which I use as my creative partner. I'll prompt it with something like give me 10 printable planner ideas for busy moms or what are some budgeting spreadsheet niches people are searching for right now. It gives me product ideas, content outlines, and even ready to use spreadsheet formulas or table layouts. I then use it to write listing descriptions, social media captions and email copy. It's honestly one of the most powerful tools in my business. Next I move on to visuals. That's where I use Midjourney and Recraft AI Midjourney is amazing for generating beautiful themed artwork and illustrations. Let's say I'm making a self care plan planner. I'll use Midjourney to create soft aesthetic backgrounds or cover designs that match the vibe that I want. I just type in a few words and it gives me professional looking images that really help my product stand out. Then I use Recraft AI to turn those visuals into print ready designs. Recraft is especially great for icons, charts, layouts, design anything clean and functional. Once the product is ready, I create a few mockups, write up my listing and then hit publish. The whole process from idea to live product can take just a few hours now thanks to AI. If you're running a digital product business or thinking about starting one, these tools are game changers. You don't need to be a designer or tech expert. You just need a good idea, the right prompts, and a willingness to experiment. So that's my workflow. ChatGPT for content and strategy, Mid Journey for visuals Recraft AI for design and polish. It's streamlined, efficient, and it's helped me grow my passive income in a big way. If you want to learn how to build your own digital product empire, head to coachmekybeach.com I've got tons of courses and other resources to help you get started. And of course we've got a full episode with Becky. I'll link up in the show notes number 582 if you want to go check that out along with all the resources and tools that she mentioned. Hey nick, this is Dr. Nathan from Outschool and schoolapplicationsprep.com I've been building my part time educational side hustles since 2021 and have seen moderate revenue growth each year. Last year was my first time reaching five figures and I'm on pace to exceed last year's earnings in 2025. Still, I've mostly been trading time for dollars typical job. So I began to create and offer digital courses in 2023 to diversify and scale my earnings with passive income. Clearly, AI tools can help me to speed up the course creation process. So I've been using ChatGPT for research and writing first drafts of course scripts, Pictory to turn those scripts into micro learning lessons, and Kahoot to stitch the Pictory lessons together into courses while also creating interactive assessments. ChatGPT is still my favorite and most useful tool. It helps me prepare live lessons with the kids I teach, and I also teach kids how to use the tool responsibly and effectively in one of my outschool courses. Pictory has been a game changer for me because it allows me to improve the quality of my courses above my first course where I created Google Slides and recorded myself while walking through them. I seldom use the video clips that Pictory's AI recommends, but their vast library allows me to always find something I like. Another AI tool I dabbled with is Magic School, which is essentially a Genai prompt repository. It accomplishes what ChatGPT does, but leads you through the process of providing the most useful context resulting in more precise output. Finally, I recently began using the AI tool within bluekit linking to Khanmigo to create quick multiple choice quizzes that can be gamified. I use this tool for younger kids who don't have the attention span to sit through a formal class, but who will happily play a game that rewards their demonstration of knowledge through repetition. In short, all of the AI tools that I use now are valuable, but I'm learning how to multiply their value in combinations with each other while building my digital courses one by one. Thank you for the chance to share my experiences and keep up the good work. Very cool, Dr. Nathan. And congrats on hitting that 10k mark last year. It sounds like you're Pictory use case is a little bit different from mine, but still a net time saver and create something more interesting than just a talking head on the screen. I've got a pictory demo and promo code if you want to check it out. I'll put that in the show notes, but Dr. Nathan, hit on something important here that maybe the most value added AI use case is in. Combining one or more of these tools with your unique knowledge and experience as a standalone on their own may not be that interesting, may not be that valuable, but it's in the combination and then adding your own human element to it that makes it something that's worthwhile. And it's not just the time savings either, but it's the momentum and the excitement that can come from accelerating or almost skipping a step in the creative process. Hello Nick. Hey. One thing about AI that I was not expecting was exhilaration. I knew I had a new course I wanted to make. I dreaded all the thinking and note taking, although generally I knew what I wanted to do. I popped in all the details important to me. AI, of course, spit out a wonderful outline and then that's when the exhilaration hit. This sense of no, it's just. It's not only time that has been saved, it is now that impulse to create because I got the drudgery out of the way, the tediousness and getting back to creativity. That was Douglas Clark. Thanks for that clip. And if you've ever felt that same dread, I can definitely relate to this that he described. You've got a project you want to get off the ground, but it just feels too heavy for liftop. There's never going to be enough time to do this. There's some foundational boring stuff before you get to the good part. I think that's a really good use case for AI to build that initial outline, break it down into the smallest actionable steps so it becomes almost like filling in the blanks instead of starting from scratch. I think that's a really cool way to build positive momentum. Hi Tiana here from Long Term Care Provider Guide. I used AI to help me make a course to orient new providers, specifically nurse practitioners in the long term care setting. I used AI to help script the entire thing and I've made almost $3,000 since February of 2024. We use Comptissa and teachable. It did cost a little bit of money, but I thought it was a pretty great way to learn how to use AI to help make courses. That my story. Thanks. Way to go Tiana. Taking a niche. You know about creating the thing and making sales. Not easy to do, but super rewarding. And in this case taking it beyond just outlining a product but actually asking it to do the scripting as well. This is an area I'm still working on and have been for for some time. Building a series of prompts or maybe even a custom GPT to take an existing piece of content and turn it into a script that will play nicely on YouTube. Because you can't just sit there and read the blog post. But you don't have to start completely from scratch either. That's what I try and tell it. Hey, you can use some of the same words and phrasing because it was written in my voice originally, but it doesn't have to be word for word. It's like there's an art to it. It's highly subjective, but I'm confident that we'll keep getting closer. Another powerful AI use case here is to do the stuff you simply don't know how to do yourself. If you're frustrated with some technical challenge, it might be an intermediate step between going down a YouTube rabbit hole or hiring a freelancer. Hi, this is John from creatorboom.com I'm using AI for almost everything now. Basically any question you can ask an expert, a trainer or a coach, you can ask AI. So for some recent examples, I've been having some trouble with an HTML newsletter. I want to redesign it and I couldn't find the proper tool to do it. So I put it into ChatGPT, the full HTML and I said I want to add this section at the top. I want to have rounded corners, I want to have 20 pixels of padding in the content area. I want the background to be gray. I gave it that list of instructions and after a couple iterations I was able to get workable HTML that I could just copy and paste into my email provider. So any question that you would ask a developer, you would look for an online tool. You can basically go and use AI to do it. Some more examples are like using NotebookLM for summarizing long podcasts. Rather than listening through hour or two hour podcast looking for like business ideas or insights. I will paste a video link in there and it'll give me a summary of the key ideas and I can work with it from there. And one more use case that I'm building a business directory and so I have a make automation set up. I can give it a list of URLs and it'll go to that website and make a summary of that website and write content up from it and take a screenshot so it does it all in one kind of pass. It'll take a screenshot of that homepage so I can, I can put it onto a WordPress blog and it'll write a summary of what that site is about so I can create these large directories in relatively little time. I think AI can be used to do practically anything now and it's only getting better. CreatorBoom.com, one of my favorite newsletters. Make sure to subscribe over there. John is always curating some really interesting stuff. Make.com, john mentioned another one of my favorite tools, but using it it to build out a directory. He's pretty savvy. Didn't know you could do that. We did a full episode on why an online directory can be a great side hustle. How to come up with directory ideas, how to build them out, how to market them, how they make money. That was late last year with a different John, John rush in episode 647. If you want to go back in the archives and give that one a listen. Pretty popular one that got some people taking action. Now more on this theme of automating workflows plus more powerful AI use cases coming up right after this. For such an important channel like phone, the software powering this important channel was super outdated and clunky. We wanted to make it delightful and make it very easy for businesses to connect with their customers through voice and text. That's Drina Kulia, co founder of our sponsor OpenPhone. Trusted by more than 60,000 customers, this is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. We bring your calls, your messages, your contacts in one simple place. And we allow you to bring in your team so you As a business owner, don't end up being the bottleneck and we really make it easy for you to deliver that incredible experience right. It's all about speed, streamlined communication, team access is one centralized place. I think that makes a lot of sense. Something that all of our customers love is ability to have a shared phone number, which really is great for calling and texting. So when someone calls you or texts you, there's multiple people that can team up on responding and everyone is in the loop about that conversation. This visibility is so critical, especially as you scale and the ability to text a business is like a new and novel thing that as a customer really appreciate. One thing that we launched at OpenPhone, which is, I think a game changer is Sona, which is our voice AI agent. It basically helps you never have a single missed call. It can handle responses to any common questions, basically any questions that you train it on and then can capture that information so you can quickly follow up. We are helping businesses never lose a customer because a missed call is a lost opportunity. Now OpenPhone has automatic AI call summaries so you don't have to worry about taking notes while you're on the call. But another cool feature is what Darina called AI call tagging. Basically allowing you to quickly filter for the calls that were sales objections or customer complaints or requests for a discount so you can review those and see what worked, what didn't and train team members on the most effective tactics and language in those cases. And it's all in the name of building a better, faster and friendlier customer experience. I want all OpenPhone customers to have five stars only. Right now, OpenPhone is offering Side Hustle show listeners 20% off your first six months at openphone.com SideHustle that's O P E N P-H-O-N-E.com SideHustle and if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge. OpenPhone no missed calls, no missed customers. The common advice is to hire slow and fire fast. But there comes a point when you need help in your business and you need it like yesterday. So how can you find amazing candidates fast? It's easy. 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John Just touched on some workflow automation and I've got a few of these set up, but they're usually internal to the team. Like hey, if a file hits this folder in Google Drive, trigger an email reminder or add a task in Asana. But I know there's more that we could be doing. Hey everyone, my name is Sean McGregor with no codestr.com and I help people in the short term rental industry like AirBNBS VRBOs to automate the annoying parts of their business and their life using no code tools like Airtable, Zapier, openphone among several others including the ultimate no code tool which is artificial intelligence. Here has AI built into its steps now where it can analyze documents. It can also drop just basically take any unstructured data and make it structured to where you can then put it in later steps for your business. Really levels things up. Last thing I'll mention real quick is Airtable AI now where I record a video in Loom Loom AI makes a transcript and then I have several fields in my Airtable base that are set up to be AI fields where it will actually automatically create my SEO, automatically create my blog post, automatically create my Facebook post, YouTube description, YouTube title, etc. And all this is done by each different one of those fields in Airtable. You can say I want you to look at transcript fields and generate a blog for no code str. These are my core kind of values. Always end every single one with a call to action for the free five day course. Yada yada. Here's an example I like and what I'll do is I'll take that what I write, put it in ChatGPT, get a more polished version and then we'll put it back into Airtable AI to actually generate the info. And again, it's not perfect the way it is, but what's amazing about is it gets rid of the blank page effect. So it makes it much easier for me to actually write my description, carry through with the work because I'm not just sitting there stressed about like, how do I get started? What do I do? I have to do that later. Instead, AI just I put in the transcript, the things I already said. It already knows a good background about me and then it will generate each of those. I'll copy, paste and then obviously make the edits where necessary. But huge level up AI and Airtable and AI in Zapier, it just takes those already amazing tools to the next level. And with Zapier, obviously you can connect to 3,000 per 8,000 plus apps. So total game changer. All right, thanks again, Sean McGregor. No code SDR.com appreciate y' all. Thanks for that, Sean. Had no idea Airtable could do that. I think I may be able to do something similar. Like after a recording in Riverside, it can generate some show notes, but they're typically not as detailed or structured as we would post on the website. But there's, there's probably a way to export that transcript or automate that export and maybe wait for the edited version, but have it then create the show notes and some kind of supporting content like Sean's talking about with the social posts. Maybe that email draft and important note here. He said it's not perfect the way it is. There's still this round of editing and review and rewrite, which I think has been part of my frustration with AI over the last couple years. Well, that's not how I would have said it. Right. And so I've had a hard time really using a lot of the material it generates. And so I think I can get it closer, get it better trained on my voice and my style, but still recognizing it's probably not going to be completely automated done for you, copy and paste and being okay with that because it's probably still faster than drafting something brand new from scratch every time. Hey nick, I'm Kel McIntosh from Najera.com I run a creative consultancy helping ADHD entrepreneurs and small businesses streamline their content workflows and digital strategy. What's been a game changer for me is combining AI tools like ChatGPT with automation platforms like NAN. I use voice to text prompts on my phone that trigger AI workflows in the background, creating client tasks, content drafts, even scheduling social posts, all without touching a keyboard. Another unexpected win. I use AI to help clients with digital cleanups, decluttering inboxes, files, workflows, what used to Take days now, takes a couple of hours with the right prompts and structure the impact. More time, sharper strategy, less chaos and I'm finally scaling without burning out. I think we're just scratching the surface of what's possible here, but for anyone juggling a side hustle while managing neurodiversity, divergence, parenting, or just plain overwhelm, AI can seriously level the playing field. Thanks for the invite. I can't wait to hear how others are using it. I gotta learn more about voice to text prompts triggering AI workflows. That sounds like some ninja level stuff. The next category of AI use cases from side Hustle Nation is legal and administrative support. As entrepreneurs, we got a lot of hats to wear and you can't expect to be an expert in all of that. Hey, I'm Billie Jo Kohnes. I'm a professional voice actor and accountability coach. You can find me@billyjoveo.com and audacious accountability.com it took me a while to warm up to AI, but one of the first areas of my business where I found AI super useful was for contract reviews on, you know, say smaller jobs where hiring a lawyer wouldn't be super cost effective. So I'd use the AI to scan agreements and flag any potentially problematic clauses. Since I don't come from a corporate background, I also use it to help me craft professional sounding emails and sometimes to help me negotiate. It's been really helpful with that type of language. So on the side I run Audacious Accountability where I coach voice actors and other creative professionals on how to create goals and break them down into actionable steps. And I use AI there to help my clients organize their plans into clear bite sized tasks. Because when someone hasn't done something before, they often get stuck on the what's next. And AI really helps bridge that knowledge gap by suggesting logical next steps based on their specific goals and then it allows you to even break them down further. There's this really great tool called Goblin Tools and it has a smart to do list which is really cool. These AI tools have really streamlined my workflow because I'm somebody who has a lot of ideas and and doesn't really know how to organize them very well. And that is something that I found AI has been super helpful with. That's very cool. I like that. What are the logical next steps here? That's a prompt we would probably all use. In addition to Goblin Tools, which was new to me, Billy shared another one specifically for voice actors or narrators called Positron which compares your recorded audio to the script you were supposed to read and then automatically highlights mistakes to speed up your quality control. So I'll link that that up in the show notes as well. And actually a niche contract review AI. I think that could be a cool tool to build or market for any sort of legal service. Kind of like maybe a freemium service. Hey, upload your contract or your lease agreement or other paperwork and the tool highlights any troublesome language or what you might want to push back on or double check about, ask a question, clarify. And then as a productized premium, maybe you could sell the redrafted version or the human assistance level of service. And you could probably even build a tool using AI. Like we talked about with Pete McPherson earlier this year in episode 659, the next use case that came up for members of side Hustle Nation was data processing and analysis. We got all this data. What does it all mean? What should we do with it? Hi Nick, this is Tina. I've been using Google's NotebookLM to streamline my marketing research process for my Side Hustle 99 wings and my day job as well. As a marketer, I am constantly learning and gathering information from multiple sources like articles, videos, my own notes in Google Drive, and it can get a little overwhelming to switch between all the different resources when I need them. So this is where I've been using NotebookLM and it's been really useful. Instead of juggling the different tabs in the documents, I use NotebookLM to create a single summary document that pulls together all my research on topics, say like SEO or content creation. I input my resources, which might be website links, YouTube videos, my own notes, and it spits out a well organized summary document that I can use. Another thing that I really love about it is NotebookLM automatically cites where each piece of information came from within that document, so I can always track back to the original source if I need to. The second thing that it does, which is kind of fun, is it creates an audio overview that sounds like two podcast hosts basically discussing your summary document. This lets me digest the information in a different way or digest the information if I'm on the go. So so far I really like having a tool that easily consolidates information that I can reference later. NotebookLM we got a couple votes for that one, so I'll have to put that to the test next time I find a YouTube video I want to watch, but don't want to spend the time to watch it. I could also see it being useful for maybe travel planning as well, pulling in a bunch of different sourcing sources and asking for the highlights. I wonder if you can access or share other people's notebook LM summaries like if they've already done the work. I don't know if I need to use more computing resources to re summarize it. The audio thing seems really fun too. It's got me thinking there might be a way to build like a like a kid's learning podcast based on that. Upon summary back and forth. I don't know. That's an interesting one. Hey, this is Kyle Jennings. I'm a freelance copywriter email marketer. You can check out my work@kylerites.com this is a use case that I found pretty unique valuable to all kinds of businesses when writing for a new brand, particular brands that have a bunch of customer reviews and feedback that what I'll do is I'll aggregate basically all of the customer reviews. The more the merrier. Could be hundreds, could be thousands, as many as you can get. Copy and paste all those reviews into a Google Doc. I'll upload that Google Doc into the GPT and from there I'll just ask it to extract some key insights. For example, I'll ask it just what are the top words and phrases that customers are actually using to describe this brain, particularly in a positive way. That can be some text stuff that you can use like pretty directly just for copy and just take it right from the customer's house to just identify like the top reasons that customers prefer this brand. Maybe I help them identify the key emotional drivers that have caused this audience to make this purchase. Like what points and problems have they been able to solve from this brand service? This use case really taps into AI's ability to like comb through through some data and extract insights from that data a fraction of the time that it would take to do so. This can be an extremely helpful way of getting to understand what the customers actually care about. And from my experience working with business owners in all different industries, I keep finding this theme that what the customers care about and what they say they care about is is oftentimes very different than what the brand highlights in their marketing and what the business owners think are the most important aspects to the customer. Understanding that as a creative is a huge way to sort of come in and have this major value prop as well. This is a great use case. Thanks for sharing that Kyle. I actually did something similar last year when I got the side Hustle Nation survey data back and this is always kind of the dilemma in sending this survey out because then, well, now comes this, this added task of many, many hours of combing through the data. And to be fair, some of it is pretty easy to visualize. Like the questions that are multiple choice, those are pretty easy to chart. But there's always a few questions that are free response and they're that way for a reason. You know, give people some space to share what they think. And one particular question is what's your biggest side hustle struggle right now? And I think there were a thousand or two thousand responses, sometimes paragraphs long in there that in years past I would read through manually and then kind of tag into a handful of broad categories. Oh, this person is struggling with marketing, this person is struggling with coming up with a side hustle idea. This person is having a hard time hiring the right team member. Took forever a worthwhile exercise, but took a lot of time. Last year I realized ChatGPT could summarize and categorize all those responses. Great use case. Saved a ton of time and was able to pull out the most common themes and give a rough count of the number of people who mentioned specific struggles, even if they didn't use the exact same wording. It was really cool. I actually used Claude in a similar way for this episode as an excuse to test it out. I uploaded all of the transcripts and actually before that used Riverside. I don't know if that counts as AI, but used Riverside to transcribe the clips that we got asked Claude to create a summary outline of the common themes here that turned into the episode structure which ended up turning into this Google Doc where I could easily place the clips in the right spot and hopefully in a coherent order. And it was, it was a fun experiment. Riverside also, you can use it to use their text to audio editor to make some light edits to the clips. It's really cool tech that has come a long way in the 12 years of doing the show. I don't think it existed. Back in the beginning it would have been you had to find the exact little spot on the waveform to cut and edit, or you had to have everything transcribed manually or the AI transcriptions that did exist weren't nearly as accurate. But all of these, all these were great recommendations. I love the variety and thoughtfulness of everything that came in. If you submitted a clip and I wasn't able to use it, don't take that as a rejection of your idea. More often it was related to audio quality or someone else shared something very similar. But to summarize we have the content creation use case articles, emails, social media posts. We had the marketing use case SEO descriptions optimizations, improving existing content, pin descriptions for Pinterest, Etsy listing descriptions. We had people using AI as a business strategist, a business coach, a personal roundtable. I thought that was really cool. And we had people using it for product creation. That was the next use case. Digital product ideas outlining scripting, really good for that. We had the technical problem solving use case, having it create code or figuring out how to do a certain thing and make the HTML behave the way you want it to. We had the workflow automations use case. I think there are some really powerful opportunities, both in my business and hopefully yours, but also in potentially selling this as a service to other businesses. We had the legal and administrative help use case contract reviews, what language can I use in an email negotiation? That kind of stuff. And then finally the data processing and analysis use case. Really, really powerful use case. It's something that I'm leaning on it more and more for. I know I got several ideas for process improvements from this episode. Hopefully you did as well. It's easy to get overwhelmed though. My recommendation, hey, pick one, pick two, and dedicate some time to playing around with those and building those into your week and into your workflows. Some of the key takeaways or big picture stuff that I noticed, number one, was this trend towards, you know, using AI as an augmentation or an accelerator, not a replacement. Most of the submissions that came back described using AI to enhance their work rather than just replace their expertise. Right. They're still going to have to edit the AI output, add their personal touch, their personal expertise. There was a theme about democratization, of leveling the playing field for people without specialized training. A couple people mentioned that there was this theme of shifting to higher value work. Hey, if I can accelerate the tedious part of this, that leaves me to focus on creativity, on connections, on broader strategy. I think that's a really important thing to highlight here. Number four was the use of integrated tools, using multiple tools, right? You know, it would be great, you know, have one tool to rule them all. Right. But more often than not, the, the magic came from stitching perhaps two or three of these things together in combination with your own expertise and then creating something valuable there. And then number five, several users mentioned using AI to help overcome some personal challenges. Hey, I'm not a native English speaker. We're dealing with technical knowledge gaps, we're dealing with ADHD challenges, and then using the AI to help get through some of that stuff or work through that. But big thanks to all our contributors for sharing their insight. I also want to thank our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up Sidehustlenation.com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend. Fire off that text message to somebody who is AI curious and let them know all of these awesome examples and use cases. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle Show. Hustle on the.