A Programmer's Two-Month Side-Hustle Experiment: $360 from a WeChat Blog and AI Tooling

Let me first talk about the situation over the past two months. I tried seven or eight different channels for side hustles. The final conclusion is that the most suitable and easy-to-start option for ordinary people is a WeChat Official Account. If you want to hear my further analysis, keep reading; if not, feel free to leave.

I'll pick a few of my best-performing projects to discuss. The Official Account I'm currently running has had a total readership of 1.07 million over these two months, with total earnings of 2,600 yuan. There were no additional expenses.

Mini-program earnings were 300 yuan. Server, domain, verification fees, and token costs have basically broken even so far.

Personal consulting fees were 200 yuan, for answering questions and providing AI tools.

The above is my total income for the last two months.

Now, let me answer a few questions.

1. Earning just over 1,000 yuan extra a month? Why do others claim to earn hundreds or thousands daily?

I'm just an ordinary person. My highest daily side-hustle income was 245 yuan. I've seen people earning several hundred a day, but I've also seen people persisting with just a few cents of daily earnings. I'm not saying persistence alone works; if the direction is wrong, persistence is useless. I will keep exploring. When my side hustle can one day match my main income, I can consider a freer life.

1. Is AI important? How is it reflected? How should I use it better?

When ordinary people use AI to write copy, they repeatedly modify prompts and manually polish, spending two hours on a single draft. When programmers use AI to write copy, they pre-set templates and parameters, use agents for process automation, freely combine and call workflows, achieving flexibility while producing personalized content.

I also built my own product to help content creators produce content faster and better.

1. How to start your own side hustle? What to do when you hit a bottleneck?

Most people think too much and do too little. I was once like that. Through continuous deliberate training, I now use AI anytime, anywhere to jot down my ideas. Then I choose what to do based on the principles of short-term and long-term returns. That is, if doing something now can bring me a return today, I do it immediately; otherwise, it can be postponed.

So, start by writing or making videos first, and adjust when you encounter problems. If you really don't know what to do, check out my mini-program, which has over a dozen niches and more than 100 templates to help you quickly produce content. Getting moving is more important than anything else.

Speaking of encountering problems, I have some authority on this. I've been hit with traffic restrictions four times. And after each restriction, I managed to get tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of views. For questions about pitfalls and problems, you can leave a comment or DM me.

1. Is having more followers always better?

The answer is no. When my Official Account had only a few hundred followers, my highest daily earnings were 245 yuan. Now that my followers have doubled, I generally earn only a few dozen yuan a day. There are even bloggers with thousands of followers who only make a few yuan or cents a day. Don't obsessively pursue followers, and don't engage in mutual follows just to boost numbers.

The same goes for Xiaohongshu (RED). With fewer than 100 followers, I've already written two articles with over 100,000 reads each. So, having many followers is good, but you don't need to chase it obsessively.

1. Why choose my tool?

This tool is suitable for beginners to quickly validate ideas, or for people with multiple accounts to generate content in bulk. Of course, if you have your own ideas and feel my tool can't meet your needs, customization is available. I believe that if a problem can be solved with AI, it should be implemented with AI. The tool itself is also free to try; you can earn points or watch ads to use it.

1. Why do a side hustle? Is your main job not going well?

In the AI era, every industry and position is being reshaped. As programmers, no industry understands how to use AI better than we do. Riding the wave of the times, using AI to help others improve efficiency can also bring us some returns. As long as time permits, having a side hustle outside of your main job is currently a good choice for workers.

Finally

Choosing to explore a side hustle is about giving yourself an extra path. When the company's halo fades and the platform's capabilities are stripped away, what do we have left? I hope you still have the ability to love, and at the very least, can light a lamp for yourself to move forward.