💸 Income Accelerator: 3 ways to monetize AI in 2026

Turning "I have an idea" into "I have an invoice."

Welcome to Part 1 of the 2026 AI Playbook!

Yesterday, we talked about the real reason resolutions fail: friction. It’s too hard to start, so we don’t today. We are going to use AI to remove that friction from your bank account.

The biggest lie about making money with AI is that it’s easy. It’s not! If you just asked ChatGPT to write me a blog post and sell it, you will fail. The market is flooded with low-quality, generic text.

To make money in 2026, you don’t need to sell the AI’s output. You sell the solution that AI helped you build.

Here are the three most viable AI side hustles I’m seeing people actually succeed with right now, along with real examples of people doing it.

1. The “Digital Artisan” (Etsy 2.0) 🎨

The old way was trying to sell AI art as “fine art” (prints). That market is saturated. The new way is selling raw assets to other creators.

Graphic designers, wedding planners, and teachers need ingredients for their work. They don’t want a finished painting. They want transparent PNGs of watercolour flowers, specific vintage textures, or colouring book pages.

Real-World Example: Look at the Etsy Shop Digital Curio. They don’t just sell art. They sell utility, thousands of texture packs, digital paper, and clip art bundles. New sellers in 2025 are replicating this by finding microtrends like “Watercolour Highland Cows” or “Retro Halloween Ghosts”, generating the assets with Midjourney, and using tools to remove the backgrounds.

The Workflow: Use Midjourney to generate specific assets (e.g., “Vintage botanical illustrations of herbs, white background”).

The Sale: package them into a “Mega Bundle” on Etsy for $15-$30. You do the work once and sell it forever!

2. The “No-Code Architect” 🏗️

You used to need four years of computer science to build an app. Now you just need to be good at explaining what you want.

Small businesses are desperate for simple, custom tools: a booking system for a dog walker, an inventory tracker for a local café, or a calculator for a mortgage broker’s website. They don’t know how to build it and agencies charge $10,000.

Real World Example: Pietro Schirano. He started as a designer, not a hardcore engineer. He used AI tools to build DesignerGPT, a tool that creates websites from prompts. His experiments went viral because he focused on shipping products using AI as his junior engineer. You can do this on a smaller scale, charge a local business $500 to build a simple internal dashboard that took you an afternoon.

The Workflow: use a agentic coating tool like Replit, Bolt.new or a Cursor.

The Sale: you charge the client $500-$1000 for a custom software solution that took you an afternoon to generate, shifting from billing for your time to billing for the value.

3. The “Content Operator” (not writer) ✍️

Freelance writing isn’t dead, but “writing from scratch” is. The highest paid freelancers in 2026 are actually Content Operators.

They don’t sell “500 words for $50”, they sell a month of SEO-optimized content. They act as an editor-in-chief, using AI to do the heavy lifting while they focus on strategy and fact-checking

Real World Example: Embarque, a niche agency founded by Julian Canlas. they famously productize their SEO services using programmatic SEO by combining AI with human editing. They helped clients like MentorCruise scale their organic traffic massively. Freelancers are now doing this solo pitching 40 articles a month packages for $2,000 using models like Claude 4.5 Sonnet to draft them and spending their time editing the human voice back in.

The Workflow: Use Claude 4.5 Sonnet (great for nuance) to generate comprehensive outlines and first drafts based on SEO keywords.

The Sale: You stop charging per word and start charging for growth packages. (e.g., 40 articles/month for $2,000+) acting as a scalable agency of one.

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🚀 The “Income Activation” Pack (Free for Founders)

The strategy is simple, but the execution depends on the prompts.

I am currently building a comprehensive database of the exact prompts you need to execute these strategies, including the Graphic Asset Workflow, the No-Code Architect Workflow, and the Agency-of-One Pitch & Workflow.

Eventually, these prompt packs will be paid products on my site, but since you are one of my founding subscribers, I want you to have them for free.

See you in Part 2: The Relationship Algorithm.