Gartner Estimates AI Market at $300 Billion by 2024

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Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast. Today, we're talking about a side hustle that you could use with AI and make potentially tons of money this fall and winter season. And that is print on demand. Now, print on demand has a bad rap in the AI community because so many people tried it. They started an Etsy shop, you know, with custom t-shirts and it didn't work out. Well, while that may be true, there's a strategy that I believe will work moving forward this year, being in an election year. There's always things happening in pop culture. So today I'm going to talk about a strategy that you could use to potentially make lots of money doing a AI print-on-demand business. Before we get into that, I want to quickly mention our school community, AI Hustle. If you haven't checked that out yet, you need to get over there and check it out. It is a amazing community of over 1,300 members. We have all different types of side hustles you can do with AI that we have courses on over there. Anything from AI music streaming to AI podcasting, AI consulting, and much, much more. So we'd love to have you be a member. It's only $19 a month. So go check it out at least and see if you're interested. And we'd love to have you be a part of it. But let's talk about print on demand. So basically, print on demand is dead for the most part, but there's a lot of people who are doing it really well, and there's opportunity now for you to get into this being, I believe, an election year. So let me explain that.

The whole idea of print on demand is that you're making custom designs that can be printed on t-shirts, hats, mugs, et cetera. So the first step to doing this would be going to a website like Printful or Printify and opening a store. And then from there, you need to be able to plug in your designs through an MCP. So what you would do then is use, I believe ChatGBT is probably the best option right now because they have the best image generator, but you could actually just create your art right inside ChatGBT and then upload it to your store and go from there. But that's only a small part of this business, right? The trick is to get to design art that people really like. And so I'm going to share an example. Last year, the Detroit Lions, or a couple of years ago, the Detroit Lions were doing really well, and it looked like they might go to the Super Bowl. And that was huge news for us as Michiganders because the Lions have been a really terrible team for many years. So we were very excited about that. So there was lots of Detroit Lions merch going around. And I found one on Facebook I really liked. It was like a hand-sketched picture of a lion. It had a beanie on and sunglasses looked really cool. But it looked like a very custom piece of art, but it was just generated with AI.

But I believe that person sold a lot of those because of the timing. And so timing is really everything with a lot of these. And so what you can now do is make hundreds of variations of different items depending on who you want to reach. So for example, it's election year.

So no matter what side politically you fall on, there's lots of content you can make around each candidate, right? And so if you come up with a clever drawing or painting representing that candidate in support or against, you could then put that on your print store. And then this is the next part that's really important, and that is running ads. So you're going to have to run some Facebook ads to get people to actually see this. Otherwise, your store is never going to get seen. So by the time you actually gain some algorithmic traction with your website or your Etsy shop or your print-on-demand site, the moment is going to be passed. So the lions are going to get lose and not be in the Super Bowl, or the elections are going to happen. So you need to get things created and pushed out instantly, which is why ads are a huge part of the strategy. So here's kind of where I'm going to put you on game and where I think there's a lot of opportunity. But that would be basically creating these custom artworks depending on, not just political, but we have Halloween Christmas coming up. If you could take somebody from pop culture, that was really significant this year, 2026, and create art around them and run an ad on Facebook. I think there's a chance that that's going to really take off, depending on how creative and how well done it is. So yes, there's going to be lots of slop, but if you can come up with a pretty clever design and push it out, I think there's a lot of potential here. So and Facebook now has very, very selective targeting depending on what your copy and creative says. So if you have a ad for a certain political candidate, and I know I'm going back to that, but it's only going to show those to people who are in support of that candidate or against that candidate if the copy is against that candidate. So it's going to match really well, and I think you're going to be able to target the right people with the right ads and then the right creative, or in this case, the right art with your print on demand. So if you try this hustle, please let me know and write in the school community how it worked out for you, because I think there's a lot of potential. I have never personally wanted to put the time or money into this, but there's people who do it at scale and are very successful at it, which is why you see a lot of content around it. But if it's not done right and if you don't have the distribution, it's going to flop. So again, if you have the time to put into the side hustle, please reach out to me and let me know how it goes for you. Thanks for listening to the podcast. We really appreciate ratings or reviews wherever you're listening. We're trying to get to 200 reviews and Jayden is not here today, but he would say we read every single one and we appreciate those. So thank you for continuing to support us. And again, check out the AI Hustle School Community if you want to learn how to make money on the side or grow your business with AI. We share a lot of non-saturated hustles over there, so we'd love to have you be a member. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.