The Most Passive Online Side Hustle I've Ever Seen
Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast
0:00 Why is it that the most simple websites seem to make the most money?
0:03 Is it because they do one thing really well?
0:05 Is it because millions of people are searching
0:07 for these things and no one else thought to build it?
0:09 I don't know.
0:10 But what I do know is that these simple websites that merely have a quiz,
0:13 a calculator, an X, Y, or Z generator have never been easier to build.
0:18 And 2 to 5 years from now, this won't be an opportunity.
0:21 But right now, non-coders such as myself can vibe
0:24 code simple sites like these, forget about it entirely,
0:27 and maybe hopefully possibly make hundreds or thousands or tens
0:31 of thousands of dollars a month almost perfectly passively.
0:34 So today, I'm going to do two things.
0:36 I'm going to profile a handful of these simple calculator sites that are now,
0:40 thanks to AI, very easy to build.
0:42 And the second thing I'm going to do is show you exactly how
0:45 to build one in a niche that is likely to be high demand and profitable.
0:49 And most importantly,
0:50 I'm going to show you how to monetize this calculator website.
0:53 Cuz if you don't have ads on the site, it will never be monetized.
0:57 And your downside is a few bucks and a couple hours of tinkering around.
1:00 So, let's dive in.
1:05 Let's talk about calculators for a minute.
1:08 Not these, but these.
1:10 Boom.
1:11 Boom.
1:11 Boom.
1:11 Boom.
1:12 This simple paycheck calculator website gets
1:15 over 700,000 unique visitors per month,
1:17 which if you just host ads on the site and do nothing else,
1:21 makes it worth about $1.1 million.
1:23 And why is it a thing?
1:24 Because people want to know how much of their paycheck
1:27 is actually going to end up in their bank account.
1:29 So they search paycheck calculator and this guy pops up.
1:32 Here's a simple calorie calculator.
1:34 456,000 organic visitors a month.
1:36 So if you just build this thing, put some ads on it, it's worth six figures.
1:41 And let me be clear, these things take no work.
1:43 You don't need employees.
1:44 You don't even need to invest more than an hour
1:46 a week in this once it's built and running.
1:48 Now, I could go on and on, but we only have so much time today.
1:51 A compound interest calculator, ovulation calculator, pregnancy calculator,
1:55 percentage calculator, mortgage calculator, you get the ideas.
1:58 And this is not just a winner take all market.
2:00 There's a bunch of websites that simply have mortgage calculators
2:03 that get thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of visitors.
2:06 So, I did a little research on how many people are searching
2:09 for terms on Google or AI with the word calculator in it.
2:14 And according to ahrefs, which that's all they do,
2:17 there's almost 36,000 different keyword clusters
2:19 that have the word calculator in it.
2:22 Now, an example of one of those could just be mortgage calculator,
2:25 or it could be 15-year mortgage calculator or VA loan mortgage calculator.
2:30 There's 36,000 of those things with the word calculator in it.
2:33 And I don't want you to think that this is done.
2:35 It's played out.
2:36 All the best calculators have been built.
2:38 Absolutely not.
2:39 Because new things are being invented,
2:41 new trends are happening, people and things are changing,
2:43 which also means that some of these older
2:44 calculators don't get much traffic like they used to.
2:47 That also happens.
2:48 And guys, no pun intended, but I'm eating my own dog food here.
2:51 I have this website that is a directory
2:53 for pet and horse cremation and euthanasia facilities.
2:56 And we added a bunch of calculators,
2:58 all built with AI, to our website to get more traffic.
3:02 This is our pet cremation cost calculator.
3:05 pet type, pet weight, cremation type, and location.
3:07 This helps us generate leads that we
3:09 can sell to veterinarians and horse cremation facilities.
3:11 So, I'm actually doing what we're talking about here today.
3:14 But before I show you how to build a calculator,
3:16 I just have to show you the macdaddy of all calculators,
3:19 and that's the site Omni Calculator.
3:21 This dude in Poland wanted to learn how to code,
3:24 so he thought, I'll build a calculator so I can learn.
3:26 People started visiting it.
3:27 It started getting 800 downloads a day, and then he thought,
3:30 why don't I put more calculators on this same website?
3:33 So now he has over 3,700 custom calculators
3:36 and he gets over 17 million visitors per month.
3:39 He has 70 employees and they bring in over $500,000 a month of revenue,
3:44 most of that profit.
3:45 Am I saying that's realistic?
3:47 Absolutely not.
3:48 But it's an awesome example and it's something that we can be inspired by.
3:51 So I'm going to build one of these from scratch today.
3:53 I'm going to use a new AI tool called
3:55 Hostinger Horizons and by the end of this video
3:57 it's going to be on the internet and hopefully
3:59 making a little bit of money with ads.
4:01 So, the first thing you're going to do is go to hostinger.com/kerner10.
4:05 Looks like that.
4:06 We're going to click start now.
4:08 We're going to choose the starter plan because we're starters.
4:11 Also, on the starter plan, you get up to 25 websites,
4:14 which is important for this business because if one calculator works,
4:17 we want why not 24 more calculators.
4:19 Again, we can build these things in minutes, not hours.
4:21 We get e-commerce built in.
4:23 We get a free domain name.
4:24 And we can use it to prompt with both images and voice instead of just text.
4:28 So, we're going to go for the 12-month plan.
4:31 We're going to use code kerner office to get 10% off.
4:35 Okay, we're good to go.
4:36 Remember, the best tool sites, that's what we'll call these calculator.
4:40 Best tool sites solve a very specific
4:42 problem that have high andor growing search volume.
4:44 How do we know what terms those are?
4:47 What has good search volume?
4:48 Okay, so you can use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs and Chazet,
4:52 Claude, whatever to find out what some of these keywords might be.
4:56 You've got like core keywords like mortgage
4:58 calculator and then what they call longtail keywords which in this case would be
5:02 something like FHA loan mortgage calculator Texas.
5:04 That's a longtail keyword that's obviously going to get fewer searches
5:08 per month but will also likely have fewer competitors which is important.
5:12 The question is where is the supply and demand imbalance?
5:16 Which term or terms have more volume but fewer competitors?
5:20 So what's up and coming right now?
5:22 What title waves are happening right now that we could
5:25 hop on for dear life and build a calculator around?
5:28 Well, AI, health and fitness, GLP1s, solar, green energy,
5:32 protein, creatine, side hustles are growing like crazy right now.
5:37 Why?
5:37 Because everyone's afraid, and rightfully so,
5:39 that AI is going to steal all our jobs.
5:41 So, we'll have time for a side hustle and or will
5:44 need a side hustle to pay the bills or a full-time business.
5:46 Obviously, that's the niche I'm going to go down cuz that's the one I know best.
5:50 And I will say it's important that you choose
5:52 a niche that you love and that you know.
5:55 You don't have to, but it makes your endeavor more scalable, more sustainable.
5:59 Whether it is a calculator website or a taco truck, doesn't matter.
6:03 Now, I think I've whittleled it down to two
6:06 finalist of calculators that I want to build.
6:08 Number one is the side hustle profit calculator.
6:10 I think more people are going to be
6:12 searching for that, but I don't want to guess.
6:14 I want data to show me.
6:15 And number two, an AI cost calculator.
6:17 Because anyone vibe coding, building apps, doing anything with AI,
6:20 there are costs associated with it over
6:23 and above the flat fees that platforms charge.
6:25 They're often overages that you have to pay for these tokens.
6:28 In other words, the amount of data
6:31 you're using when you're prompting these AI tools.
6:33 It would be helpful for layman like me to be able to calculate what
6:37 the cost would be using an AI tool or a vibe coding app like for example.
6:42 So, what I'm going to do is go to Google Trends and I'm going
6:45 to put these two finalists for my calculator
6:47 side by side and see which one wins.
6:49 Okay.
6:49 Well, that's an easy choice.
6:51 AI cost calculator over the last 5 years is growing, growing, growing.
6:55 And Side Hustle Profit Calculator is not really growing.
6:58 In fact, there's very little search volume whatsoever.
7:01 So, it's an easy decision.
7:02 Okay.
7:02 So, I'm going to go back to Hostinger Horizons
7:05 and type in my prompt to get this calculator built.
7:07 Here's my prompt.
7:08 I want a simple website that will be an AI token cost calculator.
7:12 It will help vibe coders and other people wanting to build
7:15 with AI tools to be able to determine how much they will have
7:18 to pay in token usage using any of the popular or obscure
7:22 AI tools and LLMs out there based on publicly available token pricing.
7:26 Make it look clean and simple and easy to use.
7:29 And don't display the result for the end user until I get their email address.
7:33 Okay, let's see what it comes up with.
7:35 We're going to time it as well.
7:37 It's 1259 right now.
7:38 All right, you can see it working here.
7:41 A clean and professional calculator interface.
7:43 22 popular and obscure AI models with real pricing data.
7:46 Email collection before showing results.
7:48 All emails are stored in your database.
7:50 Okay, awesome.
7:51 Said it better than I could have.
7:53 Okay, here we are.
7:54 It's been a total of 6 minutes and we have what we're looking for.
7:57 An AI token cost calculator.
7:59 All right, let's check it out.
8:02 Um, let's say let's say Claude 3 opus.
8:05 Okay.
8:05 I don't like that it just says input and output tokens
8:08 because I don't think that's clear enough to the average user.
8:11 Now, what I understand that to mean is how
8:13 many tokens it uses when you prompt the AI.
8:15 That's the input.
8:16 And then how many tokens the AI uses when it
8:19 gives you the output is referred to as the output token.
8:22 So, I just reprompted it and said,
8:24 "Make it more simple to use and understandable for the average
8:27 layman that doesn't know what input or output tokens are." And show
8:31 examples on the page of how many tokens a few different
8:34 prompts would be of varying sizes and prompt outputs as well,
8:38 so people can gauge how many tokens 1,00 for example, actually is.
8:42 Okay, done.
8:43 But this gave me an idea of how to make it even better.
8:47 For some reason, it made the user interface even more attractive as well,
8:50 which I didn't even ask it to do.
8:52 But I would love for people to also see how many tokens their prompt is.
8:55 So this is very cool at the bottom.
8:57 This is what I asked it to do.
8:59 Real world token examples.
8:59 But how cool would it be at the top if
9:02 they could type in a prompt and it could tell
9:04 them how many tokens that is and then they can
9:06 use that number of tokens to get their cost calculator.
9:09 Boom.
9:09 So I love screenshotting specific things on these Vibe coding tools.
9:13 So I'm going to do this.
9:16 Drag it over here and say, okay, my reprompt.
9:19 This is awesome.
9:19 added screenshot, but add in a field to this section
9:22 where people can type in a prompt or paste
9:25 in an output from another model like Jag or Claude
9:28 and your calculator will tell them how many tokens either one represents.
9:32 And then at the bottom of the page,
9:34 give them tips on how to reduce token usage as well.
9:37 I'm thinking those tips will really help with SEO,
9:39 search engine optimization, so more people can organically find the site.
9:42 And I don't know if you noticed this, but I put in my original
9:46 prompt that I want their email address before they see the result.
9:48 That's kind of what you do when you go take like one of those dumb IQ tests.
9:52 It's called a sunk cost fallacy.
9:54 You spend 15 minutes taking an IQ test and by the time you go to see the result,
9:58 they want your email.
9:59 You are for sure going to give them your email.
10:01 Now, that can work here.
10:02 It won't work as well because it won't take them 15 minutes to fill this out.
10:06 But I want to have my cake and eat it, too.
10:08 I want to monetize the site both with ads
10:09 and to collect email addresses because these are valuable email addresses.
10:12 These are people that are going to be using
10:14 AI tools that are going to be vibe coding.
10:16 there's a decent chance they have some money.
10:18 So, I can use those emails to start a newsletter,
10:21 to send them my Hostinger affiliate link or whatever.
10:23 All right, here's the token counter tool.
10:25 I'm going to type in something like,
10:27 "Show me some obscure websites that are obscure calculators
10:30 that make a lot of money organically." That's only 23 tokens.
10:33 So, then I can take that 23.
10:35 I can put it up here.
10:36 And if I really want to know, then let's go to an AI tool like Claude.
10:41 I'm going to paste in that same prompt.
10:43 I'm just going to do opus 3.
10:46 Okay, there's the output.
10:47 Let's go back to hostinger.
10:49 Boom.
10:49 Put the output into the tool.
10:52 248.
10:52 So about 10 times more than what my input was.
10:56 We used claude 3 opus.
10:58 Calculate total cost.
11:00 Boom.
11:00 So that cost almost 2 cents the vast majority of about
11:03 90% of it on the output tokens which makes sense.
11:06 Now it's a little broken here because it's giving
11:09 me the result before it asked for my email.
11:12 It shouldn't do that.
11:13 So, anytime you're using a vibe coding tool like Hostinger,
11:16 you're going to have some hang-ups.
11:17 That's always going to happen cuz it doesn't know what's in your brain, right?
11:21 So, what I love about Hostinger Horizon is they have
11:23 like an AI tool on top of their AI tool.
11:26 Basically, a robot that fixes the other robot.
11:29 It's called Cody.
11:29 I'm going to pull this up and say, boom.
11:31 I clearly did not prompt this well enough.
11:33 So, I'm going to ask Cody, the AI assistant,
11:36 give me a good prompt to fix my AI token cost calculator tool to where
11:40 it won't show the user the results until they enter in their email address.
11:45 Okay, now it gave me a much more complex prompt that I can just
11:50 paste right over to the main window here to be sure that it's fixed.
11:56 Boom.
11:56 Let's try it again.
11:57 I'm just going to type in some dummy data.
11:59 Boom.
11:59 There it is.
12:00 Look at that.
12:01 Look at that.
12:02 It's blurred out, but I can unlock my results if I type in my email.
12:06 It's perfect.
12:07 Cody, you work perfectly.
12:08 Thank you, Cody.
12:09 By the way, why are there no Cody adults?
12:11 We all knew Cody's in high school,
12:12 but I don't know one Cody adult other than Cody Sanchez, which is a female.
12:16 Side note.
12:17 Okay.
12:17 Now, with most other vibe coding tools,
12:19 if you want to edit something simple like the text, you have to prompt it again.
12:24 You got to screenshot something like this and say, "Change the title to X,
12:27 Y, or Z." But what are we talking about right now, guys?
12:29 We're talking about tokens.
12:30 That costs tokens.
12:31 It costs you money to edit the text.
12:33 It should not cost you money to edit simple things like this.
12:37 So, I'm not a huge fan of this sub headline.
12:39 So, I'm going to change it to say this.
12:42 How much does your AI tool cost you?
12:44 Find out here.
12:45 Boom.
12:45 Love it.
12:45 Okay, I'm ready.
12:46 Let's publish this bad boy.
12:47 Big purple button on the top right.
12:49 Now, we're going to monetize it.
12:50 So, stay tuned.
12:51 It'll only take a minute.
12:52 While we wait for the site to be published,
12:55 let's talk some real numbers on how much
12:57 money you can make from these with Google AdSense.
12:59 If you're unfamiliar with Google AdSense, it is like the ad platform.
13:03 Any banner ad, sidebar ad, anything like it's all Google AdSense.
13:06 And I will say Google AdSense is a great starting point.
13:10 It is a very low friction way of making money on the internet,
13:13 but it should not be what you end with.
13:15 I love Hostinger because it has a built-in integration with Google AdSense.
13:18 You don't have to go through all the rigor on Google's website.
13:21 you can just do it with a few clicks.
13:23 But don't stop there.
13:24 Don't be content with that.
13:26 Because if you're getting like, let's say, 10,000 page views a month,
13:29 that's going to be like 30 to 100 bucks a month.
13:33 Not bad.
13:33 But if you use other ad tools or if you collect emails,
13:38 those emails could be worth 10 bucks each, right?
13:41 Each.
13:41 How many emails could you get from 10,000 visitors a month?
13:45 If you get 1%, that's 100 emails.
13:47 That'd be a,000 bucks a month.
13:48 Over 10 times as much as if you just use AdSense.
13:50 So, we're going to show you how to use
13:52 AdSense because we don't want any friction to making money,
13:55 but don't be content with AdSense.
13:57 Now, how do we integrate AdSense?
13:59 I'm just asking Horizons,
14:00 please enable AdSense on my site cuz they already have an integration.
14:03 You just have to ask it to do it and it's done.
14:06 Boom.
14:06 Your calculator is now a complete monetized tool.
14:09 Done.
14:09 One sentence prompt.
14:10 Okay.
14:10 So, we need to add a custom domain to this bad boy.
14:14 And I chose the starter plan because it includes a free domain name,
14:17 a free email, and hosting as well.
14:19 All right.
14:20 So, we just go here and what domain name do I want to connect to the site?
14:25 I'm going to type in a tokens calculators.com.
14:27 Click it.
14:28 Go next.
14:29 All right.
14:29 You can see that it's ascent for the first year, which is almost free.
14:33 But if I want a free one, then I can choose a.cloud domain name,
14:37 which is fully free included in the starter plan that I bought.
14:41 And here's what's crazy.
14:42 Everything I've done so far to build the final
14:44 product here cost me four credits on Hostinger.
14:46 I have 70 for the month and I have 66 left.
14:49 Looks like I got to update this as well.
14:52 2024 pricing.
14:53 Nope.
14:53 2026.
14:54 Boom.
14:54 Now, how does my website look on the actual internet?
14:58 Well, here it is published.
15:00 We did it.
15:01 And because we chose calculators with an S,
15:04 we can add multiple calculators to our site.
15:06 And with Hostesser, you can just copy and paste.
15:09 We can copy and paste this calculator
15:11 and swap out different features or functions.
15:13 Different niche, same looking calculator.
15:14 You can share your template with other people.
15:16 And you can manage the domain, the SSL,
15:19 everything all in one platform, one dashboard.
15:21 So, I've started over 80 businesses over the last 18 years.
15:25 Some took me months or years to start.
15:27 Many failed.
15:28 This business took me minutes.
15:29 If you want to win online, you got to ship.
15:31 You got to ship more.
15:32 You got to build.
15:33 You got to post your crap.
15:35 Post it to the internet.
15:37 Analysis paralysis is a fourletter word here on the Kerner office.
15:40 So, don't even think about doing it.
15:42 Hostinger Horizons is a great partner to the Kerner office.
15:44 They're obviously sponsoring this video and I wouldn't choose them
15:46 as a sponsor if I didn't love their product and their company.
15:50 So use code kerner office for 10% off
15:52 link in the description and go build something already.
15:54 We'll see you next time on the Kerner