8 Income Streams You Can Build While STILL an Employee
How to make money with AI despite limited time and resources.
In case you missed it:
Today, I share 8 Income Streams You Can Build While STILL Employed!
Because if you earn 1 paycheck, you are 1 layoff away from $0.
To support my free AI education: HIT LIKE + LEAVE A COMMENT🙏
The smart move?
Build a side income BEFORE you need it!
I’m not talking about random side hustles.
Each of the 8 income streams I’m about to share either sells your expertise, sells attention, or sells automation.
And each one can be started on nights and weekends while you’re still fully employed.
1. Train AI Models With Your Expertise
We all know ChatGPT is great for general tasks.
But imagine high-stakes, real-world domains — finance, healthcare, law, science — where being wrong has dire consequences. People go to school for YEARS before they’re allowed to serve customers in these fields, and accuracy matters enormously.
The problem?
LLMs hallucinate. They’re often not trained with deep, specialist domain expertise.
That’s where you come in.
Startups will literally pay you to label data and train AI models for specialized tasks. They CANNOT hire random people off the street — they need YOUR domain knowledge.
One company doing this is Mercor. Here’s what they’re paying:
Radiologists: $290–$340/hour
Software Engineers (QA): $70–$120/hour
Lawyers: up to $150/hour
Sales & Management: $90–$150/hour
Project Management Specialists: $90–$150/hour
And Mercor isn’t the only one — there’s a growing number of startups offering these opportunities.
2. Build Your Personal Brand
The next 3 are content-related because I’m passionate that this is the ULTIMATE SHORTCUT.
It’s free, part time, and accessible to everyone w/ wifi.
You can absolutely start even if you’re fully employed.
I only created content 1 day per week for the longest time.
Even now, I still batch 90% of my content 1 day per week, but I’ve added 3 more Youtube videos on WEEK NIGHTS (630pm-8pm) because I’m trying to crack that channel faster.
Yes, at my level:
1 day per week + a few weeknights!
(I spend most of my time building my app or enjoying life)
If I can do it, you can definitely do it.
Post in the evenings, post on weekends.
One of the most common questions I get:
“How much can you actually make as an influencer?”
Impact.com released their 2025 data on influencer pay rates across platforms. Here’s the breakdown:
Most popular platforms: Instagram (92%), TikTok (43%), Facebook (41%).
How much influencers get paid on Instagram:
Nano influencer (<10K followers): $500–$2,000 per post
Macro influencer: $20,000–$45,000 per post
TikTok has similar slightly lower numbers.
If you think these numbers are crazy — I can tell you from personal experience they’re not. I’ve experimented a lot with paid influencer marketing for my app and these numbers are pretty normal. Especially in the AI space, where every company is trying to buy creators.
Let’s do some quick math. Say you post content one day a week. In 12 months, you have a nice small following You start charging $500 per sponsored post and do 5 per month.
That’s $2500/month in side income.
Do I think sponsorships are the best path to millions? No.
But we’re talking about income you can earn while employed — and this one is very high leverage, compounding over time.
3. Build a Faceless Brand
What if you don’t want to show your face?
Everyone is confused about the term “faceless.”
Faceless does NOT mean AI slop. Faceless has gotten a bad rap because so many people are pumping out low-quality AI-generated content that happens to be faceless.
But if you ask anyone who’s been on YouTube for years, faceless just means there isn’t a central person or face in the videos.
That’s it. It’s a format, and it’s been around FOREVERRR.
I found a TikTok video where someone just points at their phone, talking about how to clean your phone speakers using a specific audio track. No face. Just pointing and talking. 90 secs.
That faceless video got 95 MILLION views.
You can also use AI avatars for faceless content… but that doesn’t mean your content is good. The burden is still on you to make it engaging, timely, interesting. You still need to experiment with hooks, trending topics, try dynamic cuts and edits.
One huge bonus of a faceless brand?
You can eventually outsource everything or even sell the brand entirely since your personal identity is NOT attached to it.
4. Repurpose Content for Big Creator
This is a really interesting offer I’ve been thinking about.
If you listen to me, Gary Vee, or literally anyone in content, our advice for ALL creators gaining traction is:
Go cross-platform.
Most creators delay this way too long.
I wish I started my Instagram 6 months sooner.
Heck, I STILL haven’t started X, Snapchat, Pinterest, Bluesky, Reddit, Lemon8, RedNote, etc.
As someone who gets lots of DMs every day selling me stuff, here’s the specific offer that would ACTUALLY make you stand out…
DM a creator with at least 50k followers on 1 platform and say:
“Hey, I saw you’re crushing it on PLATFORM but invisible on OTHER_PLATFORM. Let me own OTHER_PLATFORM for you, you won’t have to do anything.”
This is a WAY better offer than just “I do video editing.”
You’re saying: “You’re crushing it on TikTok? Let me help you automatically grow on Instagram. You don’t have to do anything. I’ll repurpose your content optimized for that platform, setup DM automations to drive followers to your offer, etc.”
The reason I love this:
The creator gets growth on a new platform with zero effort, and you get paid recurring income.
Win-win.
5. Coach People on Claude Code
What is the hottest mainstream AI tool in 2026?
It is Claude Code.
OpenClaw is up there too but not mainstream yet. I mean like NORMAL people, not tech twitter bubble hype.
Here’s what I’d do: spend 2 weeks FOLLOWING Claude Code tutorials (not just passively watching).
That alone puts you ahead of 99.9% of people. Then share what you learned via TikTok or Instagram:
“Hey, here’s how to set up Claude Code. Want a one-on-one session where we walk through it together on a screen share? Link in bio.”
The product is SO good that if you just help people set it up and get them typing, it will blow their mind and you look like a genius for coaching them through it.
The key difference between coaching and consulting: coaching is about accountability and clarity. People don’t expect you to do everything for them. You guide them.
And right now, Claude Code is the tool that everyone is trying to figure out.
The demand is massive.
6. AI Consulting
Like I said above, consulting is different: you do it for them.
Someone says, “We heard about Claude Code. We heard about AI agents. Can you come into my business and implement this?”
You go in and deliver.
HOWEVER, this income stream is harder if you have zero experience consulting and zero technical background. The process of closing a consulting client requires marketing and sales ability. You need to set expectations, sell them on what you’re doing, and then actually deliver.
Also, make sure it doesn’t conflict with your day job… the stuff you want to consult on is often the stuff you’re already doing at work. Tread carefully here.
But if you DO have industry experience and you’re comfortable getting clients? This can be a lucrative side income stream.
A nice variation of AI Consulting you can do while employed that takes FAR LESS work than actually building systems:
AI Training Consulting - training teams how to use AI tools.
7. TikTok Shop
This one might surprise you.
Do I think you’ll make millions on TikTok Shop? No. But it’s exploding right now. People are buying a LOT of stuff on TikTok Shop. Even as I scroll, I’m tempted to buy random stuff I definitely don’t need.
And TikTok Shop creators are generating real revenue.
Here’s why I think it’s worth including in this list:
Whatever you learn sets you up for everything else.
You learn core skills around content creation, experimentation, A/B testing, writing viral hooks, doing volume, staying consistent for a very long time.
So if you eventually want to transition to building your own personal brand? TikTok Shop teaches you how to be a great creator. It’s a natural stepping stone.
You can leverage AI here to dissect viral TikTok shop products and videos, then help you script your own versions.
8. Vibe Code Micro Apps
Big precaution here: for vibe coding to actually make money when you don’t have a technical background, you need to focus on one feature. ONE thing your app does.
Then spend 99% of your time on marketing.
That’s the reality.
Here’s a perfect example:
Lovable CEO recently tweeted that a user built a service that turns your pet photos into Renaissance portraits and ships the physical print to you. The app makes $100k per month.
The complexity is NOT the app. It’s a cute idea, designed well, paired with a physical product people are willing to pay for.
The flow is dumb simple:
upload photo → AI transforms it → it ships to you.
But oftentimes, people try to vibe code way too much.
They’re building CRMs and full systems without the technical ability to maintain them or fix bugs.
Keep it stupid simple.
User enters app, user does one thing, user gets the result.
Build that, then market the heck out of it!
Once you get paying customers coming in, THEN you decide: double down on this product and hire a real engineer? Or keep launching micro apps and testing new ideas?
Side income gives you optionality.
My Honest Pick
If I had to pick ONE out of all, it’s always personal brand.
Always.
It’s higher leverage and more accessible to people with no business or technical background than anything else on this list. It’s literally free to start. You don’t need a fancy phone, ring light, microphone, studio setup, coaching, courses, or anything.
Plus, I can’t overstate this:
The compounding benefits over time are just… incredible.
But at the end of the day…
The key is to just start. Pick one. Do it on nights and weekends. Build the income stream BEFORE you need it. Create leverage and optionality for yourself.
Because you definitely don’t want to be one layoff away from zero.
P.S. Need More Help? 👋
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Such great advice! I tell everyone about you. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.
Sabrina, you are an angel. Thank you for curating and sharing.
I have AI and data skills , comfortable to train models as hands on tech and project+product manager, but not sure where or to start with someone like mercor. I am building it under my own brand for now.