The $7K/Month Side Hustle Most People Think AI Killed - Ep. #333

Chris Koerner (0:00)

So, what are your income numbers like today?

Steph Spector (0:02)

Close to 6,000 or 7,000 a month right now. You don't need any specialized degree. I hadn't worked a ton on much of anything when I got started in the freelance world and I was applying to stuff on Upwork, and I got hired by Biggie Smalls' son.

Chris Koerner (0:18)

What?

Steph Spector (0:18)

Notorious VIG's son.

Chris Koerner (0:20)

When you're like, I want to be a freelancer, what do I do? How do you find customers?

Steph Spector (0:23)

They're everywhere. They are hiring AI model trainers, which is another lucrative opportunity. They're paying 90 an hour. I'm not a technical person. I have no coding background.

Chris Koerner (0:33)

Who's stopping you?

Steph Spector (0:34)

No one is stopping you. It's never been easier to just do that.

Chris Koerner (0:38)

All right. What is the playbook to finding companies that will pay you a lot of money?

So the other day, I saw a chart on Google Trends that stopped me in my tracks. This is the phrase, hire a writer and its popularity over the last five years. Would you believe in 2023 when ChatGPT came out, it started dropping. People didn't need writers as much, obviously. But now, over the last two years, it's been going straight up and to the right. Believe it or not, good writers are in more demand than they ever have been, and companies are paying $900 to $1200 per article for people to write AI-assisted articles. I almost couldn't believe this was true. I had to find out for myself. I ran into Steph Spector. She drove up here from Austin. We're about to take a ride in my Cybertruck, so I can ask her, how can we get paid $1000 per article to write in this age of AI? How are we even having this conversation in 2026? How is writing still a thing? Teach me your ways, Steph. Let's go pick her up.

Stephanie in Austin, Texas. This is 2026, the age of AI. No one is writing by hand anymore. Everyone has 100 blog articles all written by ChatGPT, but you make your money writing, like for real writing. For real writing. Right?

Steph Spector (1:50)

Yep.

Chris Koerner (1:50)

How did you get your start? Like what led you to that? ChatGPT comes out in 2023 What are you doing at that point or before?

Steph Spector (1:58)

Around that point, I started working for Apple. I had a contract with Apple as an editor and I was editing sales and easlement materials for them. Just a fancy way of saying stuff that their salespeople would read to help them sell Apple products.

Chris Koerner (2:12)

Okay.

Steph Spector (2:13)

And everyone was freaking out about it, like didn't know if ChatGPT was going to take their jobs, if the writers were going to have anything to write.

And in the beginning, at least within Apple, everything is really secretive. They want to take their time adopting new technologies, so we didn't use it too too much within the company. But I started experimenting with it just for myself, just to know what was going on there.

Chris Koerner (2:35)

Like right after it came out?

Steph Spector (2:37)

Right after it came out.

Chris Koerner (2:38)

Okay.

Steph Spector (2:38)

And immediately, I wasn't super impressed, but I know that I'm biased. I've been writing since 2016, so I can spot little tells that make it seem, I don't know, like it's a little more robotic or a little safe.

Chris Koerner (2:52)

Right.

Steph Spector (2:53)

So I was like, okay, I know that this is a big deal, so I'm going to monitor this. Kept using it for brainstorming, for research, using it for little tweaks like, hey, help me tighten up this sentence or this doesn't seem as concise as it could be. Started improving the way I would prompt AI, tested out Claude. Once that came out, found that that was much better at adapting to my voice. Then I started using all these other AI tools and I was like, oh, okay, everything has its strength.

I'll use Gemini for processing video and audio. I think it's particularly great at that. Claude for marketing content, ChatGPT for writing and research. I found that the more that I experimented and the more that I use these tools, I was like, okay, this isn't apocalypse now, this isn't the end of my career because I know that I can still write with a little more humanity. It still pops. People still want that writing, but it's definitely helpful with a lot of aspects of the writing process.