Millionaire Reacts To Mark Tilbury’s 7 Best Side Hustles Students Can Start In 2026

What's up guys? Rick Pino here from Get Wisdom. Welcome back to this episode of Millionaire Reacts. For those who don't know, my name is Rick Pino. I've been in business for multiple decades now. We've done very well to the tune of multiple eight figures. And in today's video, I'm going to be responding to Mark Tilbury's video on the seven best side hustles that he thinks students should get started with. And I'm going to just tell you the honest truth if I agree or disagree. I think Mark seems like a pretty smart guy, but let's jump in here because I don't think that all side hustles are created equal. We're going to dive into it. Let's jump right on in.

The biggest lie young people are told when they're 18, 19 and 20 is go to university and you're guaranteed to get a high paid job. This lie is drilled into you through the school system and then reinforced by parents who are stuck in the past. While it might have been true in my time, it's not the reality anymore. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that studying is a waste of time. Many degrees are very useful and the student experience is unforgettable. However, relying solely on a degree to make you rich isn't the right approach. That's why it's so important for students to start some kind of side hustle that has the ability to grow into something much bigger in the future.

So here's the thing. I actually really agree with this intro here that Mark's talking about. I always say it like this. There's so many people out there who are trying to make a fortune in the present by making a living in the past. What does that mean exactly? Like what Mark is saying here? There's so many people today who are going through an old system to try to make money today in a new system. It's almost like saying, you know, beepers and fax machines are the best way ever to communicate in 2025. It's not right. Like that was a way that people used to communicate back in the day and it was okay for that day, but it is way outdated for today. And that's exactly how the school system is today. I agree with Mark in this. The only thing that I semi don't agree with is what he's talking about. Like a lot of degrees are useful. Even that statement, like I don't think there's a ton of degrees that are super useful today with the exception of something, say like, you know, a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer. If you're going to build, you know, the bridge in the city, you better have a degree and you better have education. If you're going to fix somebody's brain or kidneys, you better have schooling behind it. You know, lawyer. If you're going to practice law, you better know what you're talking about. Besides those kind of like nuanced areas, I really don't think that there's a huge need for degrees anymore. You see people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, a lot of the big time players now, they've even come out and said like when we're hiring, we're not looking for specific degrees, we're looking for skills. And so I want to suggest to you that when it comes to making money, whatever side hustle you get into, right, make sure that you are investing into your skill set because as long as you can stay skilled, you're never going to be trying to make a fortune in the present by making a living in the past. Continue to work on your skills that are useful for today. Things like digital marketing, things like sales, things like AI. Let's get into it and continue on to see what Mark has to say about these seven side hustles.

Faceless Short form content this is Daniel Bitton. Like many of you, he started using social media for fun at the age of 13. Now at 16, he's earning half a million dollars every single month creating short form content on Snapchat without even showing his face. It sounds unbelievable, but it's completely true. My son Curtis actually bumped into him at LAX airport and after doing some research, I can assure you he's not capping. So why can you make so much money doing this? Well, at the moment there's a huge war going on between Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. During the pandemic, TikTok became so popular and grabbed the attention the world. Since then, all the different social media platforms have been competing for this attention as the more eyes they have on their app, the more money they can make from advertisers. Stick with me because this is where it all starts coming together.

So I actually love this idea about social media. I know Mark is specifically talking about faceless social media and specifically in that clip, faceless short form videos which you could make money. And there's a lot of people building like faceless theme pages on Instagram and TikTok like he's talking about. That's a way to make Money. I'm going to take that a step further and I'm going to just say building a brand on social media is one of the most fantastic long plays that somebody can do. There are short plays that you can do. A little hustle here, a little something there. But I'm telling you this, Moving forward from 2025 and beyond, the people that are going to win in business, the people that are going to win period are those who have online branding. Again, speaking of Elon Musk, there's a reason why Elon purchased Twitter. A lot of people like, oh, he wants to give free speech back to the world. That's a reason. But I think it's much deeper than that. Elon begins to understand, wait a second. Personal brand is extremely, extremely powerful. And before he purchased Twitter, Elon was just kind of a behind the scenes kind of tech guy, car guy, you know, spaceship guy. Now that he purchased Twitter a few years back, now he's become this humongous personal brand. Here's the power of personal brand. You look at somebody like a Joe Rogan, okay, who they make money off of talking to people. But their personal brand is so gigantic, people, companies like Spotify, et cetera, are giving them hundreds of millions of dollars just to say, yo, would you bring all your traffic here to our platform? You've got people like Kylie Jenner, the world's youngest billionaire, self made billionaire. Before she's 21, she made billions of dollars. How she built a huge personal brand online and then began to launch her makeup product or her makeup brand off of the back of her personal brand and boom, it literally skyrocketed her to billionaire status. No matter if you are serving in the church, no matter if you're serving business, if you're in cooking, if you're in health and fitness, if you're in homeschooling, whatever niche you are in, make sure that you are building a personal brand online. Because if you're not moving forward, I personally think that those who don't have a personal brand are gonna get left in the dust. So this for me is not necessarily like a quick cash grab kind of side hustle. Social media brand building is more of like a long haul play. In fact, if you would like to learn more about the game of digital marketing and personal brand building and then connect it to a very, very powerful mechanism called digital products. I'm talking E courses, mentorship programs, ebooks. I want to encourage you, join me for my upcoming five day live virtual training. The link is down below. This video over the course of five days, I'm going to show you exactly, step by step, everything you need to know on how to create and sell your own digital products. You don't need to be a guru. You don't need to have a ton of tech skills. All you need is a phone and a laptop to get started. I'll show you exactly what you need to know and how to get started. CL the link down below. Join me as a vip. You won't be sorry. Let's get into the next one.

Investing A lot of people are going to disagree with me on this one as it's technically not a side hustle. However, it makes me around about $17,000 per week, so I thought it was definitely worth a mention. It's taken me a lot of years to build up to that. However, I've managed to do it all on my own without a financial advisor charging me commission on every investment. It's really not not as complicated as people make out. Of course I'm not a financial advisor and investments can go up as well as down, but my dollar cost averaging strategy has worked wonders for me over the years. This is when you consistently buy into the market, no matter if it's high or low over time. The idea is that the price you buy the stock at averages out. You can do this with pretty much any stock you want. However, the real secret weapon has to be index funds. If you were to invest $200 a month for 40 years and get an return of 10% per year, then you have over $1.2 million.

So here's the thing again, I agree with Mark on here that investing is a really cool strategy. But also like he mentioned, this is not a side hustle type of I need money right now. This is another long haul play and I would suggest for those who are watching, if you're just starting out and you're needing to like break free from your 9 to 5, you're looking for just that quick cash. I need to do something now to pick my income up. Investing is awesome. But instead of investing into the s and P500, you should start focusing on investing into the SME 500 where you literally start investing into your skills, into your knowledge. Exactly Like I just said in the last clip, like I'm telling you this right now. When you begin to build your skills, your knowledge, your experience, your expertise, you become recession proof. There's nothing that can happen in the economy if you are selling skilled enough. No one can take your skills from you. No one can take your expertise from you as you begin to grow and develop. So instead of trying to dump 200 bucks a month into the market like he's talking about, I think eventually that could be a cool move down the road after you're more established. But right now, if you're trying to, like, break free right now, you need to be investing as much as you can into your own education on financial literacy, on business, on sales, on marketing, on, like I said earlier, like, on AI, on how all of this new world works. Because if you can become skilled in the opportunities that are available to you right now in this year and beyond, you're going to have no trouble making money. So, again, investing, yes, investing into the market maybe a little bit further down the road if you're more established. In the meantime, investing into yourself again, it's not a side hustle, but this is a very, very powerful way to begin to grow your income, is to grow your skills.

Discord building. This is Chris Peters, and he's on Track to make $15,000 a month from building and managing Discord servers. And he's only 19 years old. I remember first chatting with Chris a couple of years ago. He must have been about 17 at the time. I had just started my free Discord group and had absolutely no idea what I was doing. He messaged me and offered to help me for free. So I. I took him up on that offer and he completely revamped my server.

So here's the deal. I'm not necessarily against Discord. I think Discord is cool and all, but the concept here is bigger than Discord. It's not just like, hey, build a Discord group. For those who don't know, Discord is like, it's an app where you can basically build a community around a specific niche. And that's my point. So this is bigger than Discord. This is about building a community, building an audience around a specific topic where you can help them, encourage them, educate them, inspire them, entertain them. And the more value you bring to them, the more they're going to want to engage with you into your products or services. So for me, it's not necessarily about Discord. It's about building an audience. And this goes back to the very first thing I talked about as far as building a personal brand. There's many ways to do this. Discord is one of the ways you could do Facebook groups. There's a platform called SkoolNow S K O O L where you can build communities on school. There's a ton of different ways to do this, but the concept is fire, man. This is an excellent concept. Get a bunch of people into some kind of community, serve them a ton of value, entertain, educate, help them, serve them, bring them value, and then once in a while make an offer to them. Hey, buy my product, buy my service. And I am telling you this right now, you can make thousands and hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars by simply building communities. This is actually one thing that I do very often. I've built tons of different communities and try to bring them as much value as possible. Then do a little ask here, there. Hey, by the way guys, if you didn't know, here's a course, here's a mentorship, here's this, here's that, here's my ebook, blah blah blah. And tons of people say yes because you've so helped them and served them. So again, it's bigger than discord. It's about building an online community around a specific topic or niche. This is very easy to do. All you got to do is start putting out content and then be like, yo, join. Like, you know, join my free discord, join my Facebook group, join my school group, etc. And when you do this guys, you can start making some serious money.

Online coaching. This is Jack Jefferson. He decided to quit his $70,000 9 to 5 in London to pursue his online fitness coaching side hustle full time as it had started generating him $7,000 a month. Now you may be thinking that's only $14,000 more than his full time job in London. However, now he has something even more valuable. Freedom. He can now operate his side hustle from anywhere in the world as long as he has an Internet connection so he can check in with his clients and review their progress. Jefferson Training now has over 40 clients and is growing by the month. I get that not everyone is a gym expert and this might seem a little niche. However, notice how the title of this idea isn't online fitness coaching, it's online coaching. That's because there are countless things you can teach people online and get the same results as Jack. From my travels to Dubai and Miami recently, all the young millionaires I meet seem to be coming from the online coaching space. They all have some kind of info product and they're earning three thousands. It's honestly an absolute gold mine.

Guys, I love this one. Online coaching. This is actually a digital product. Okay? So when you sell your coaching, like he said, it doesn't have to be fitness only. You could be a business coach, you could be a sales coach, you could be A homeschooling mom coach. You could be a sourdough bread coach. You could be a basketball coach. Literally. I saw a clip the other day, about two nights ago, somebody had a coaching program for helping you train your horses. Like I'm telling you, online coaching is one of the most powerful ways that you can begin to build online wealth. This is a fantastic niche. Obviously, you do have to have a little bit of some kind of experience or even expertise. Preferably you've done it for yourself. The thing you're coaching people to do. Hopefully you've helped at least one or two people to where you have a little bit of social proof. Like, hey, I can actually help people. You know, you don't want to do the unethical thing. Like, I can coach you on, for instance, me, I'm a terrible handyman. I can coach you how to, you know, do a diy, lay the masonry in the brick. Like, if I sold coaching like that, I would be a complete fraud because I don't know anything about it whatsoever. But I want to encourage you to consider this, okay? Stop calling your something nothing. What does that mean? There's so many people right now watching and you're just like, oh, there's nothing I could coach people on. Yes, there is. Oh, I'm just a. Whatever. I'm just a stay at home mom. Do you know how many new mothers would love to learn? Like, how in the world do I keep my house going and my kids fed and keep everybody alive and juggle the schedules? Like, you're probably decent at it. Especially if you have more than one kid. The. You could totally coach people on how to do that. Maybe you're like, oh, I'm just a car salesman. No one wants to learn. Yes, there are. There are tons of people who would love to get into selling cars and they don't know where to start. But if you were to put together some kind of coaching program, teaching them how to get started as a car salesman, and then maybe inside of your program you also put some courses or some lessons on. Here's some of my top tips on how to sell. And on and on and on. Like, I have students right now in my digital product academy, okay, where I literally teach people exactly how to do coaching, how to do digital products, how to serve their people. And we have dozens and even hundreds of different niches. Everything from fitness to homeschool mom to I have seamstresses. Like, they coach people on how to sew. People love it. They're making money. I've got all Kinds of different niches. So I love online coaching. It's an absolute gold mine. Like Mark said, it's one of the most powerful digital products that you can sell. And if you don't know, I'm a digital product guy. We'll get more into that here in just a little bit. But online coaching, two thumbs up. You should absolutely check this one out.

AI animation. This is Mercy. He's responsible for all the animations you see on my channel. And he's making a 8 to $10,000 per month creating these for multiple clients. This side hustle is really interesting as AI is the biggest thing to happen to technology since the Internet. Just think how many billionaires that created. Despite the ongoing buzz, you might be surprised how few businesses have actually begun to use it. You see, there are five stages to technology adoption and they look like this. First, you have the early innovators, which make up 2.5% of the people. They are the people that are willing to take a risk and go against the grain. They'd go out and buy the Samsung Fold or the new Apple Vision Pro on its first initial release. Second, we have the early adopters making up 13.5% of the population. Similar to innovators, they're willing to take a risk. However, they prefer to test the product before forming an opinion and recommend recommending it to others. Thirdly, we have the early majority, which is 34% of the population. These are the people that look at the product reviews before making a purchase. They want to see proof of it working before committing to it. This is a line where I believe we currently are with AI at the very first stage of early majority adoption. This is followed by the late majority making up another 34% and finally the laggards, which is a surprising 16%. When you get to my age, you'll find that most people are in the laggards category. They like sticking with what they know and they really don't want to learn anything new. Now here's the important thing. Whether you like it or not, AI will go through this cycle. So let me ask you this very simple question. Would you rather embrace it now or wait for a everyone else to get the benefits and end up having to use it anyway?

So AI is pretty cool. And by the way, I noticed in that clip, Mark and I have the same watch on. So let's go. Mark, nice Rolex you got there, brother. I think this is an amazing side hustle to get into because the whole world is going AI. If you can learn how to be A prompt engineer. That's a, that's a title now where you can literally learn how to engineer really powerful prompts, put them into AI and, you know, pop out amazing copy for your marketing campaign or your emails, etc. In my opinion, it doesn't necessarily have to be just an AI animator like he's talking about. I think anything AI is going to be super, super powerful. And I've been seeing a lot of the studies on this. I've heard some of the top finance guys talking about this. It is believed that the first trillionaire in current modern history is going to have something to do with AI. So maybe that would be you, right? You should totally. And again, this goes back to investing into yourself, investing into your skills. Maybe you're like, well, I'm gonna have to learn new skills and I don't know anything about AI. That's exactly why you should check out learning AI. Like, there are some things that are just worth learning. Like, none of us here came to the planet knowing how to walk, but none of us stayed in the bed for the rest of our life. We. We learned how to walk. Nobody here was born into this planet knowing how to drive, but we figured it out. There are certain things in life and in business that are absolutely worth figuring out. And I believe that AI is one of those very important things moving forward. I wouldn't necessarily call myself an AI specialist by any means, but I am always working and studying and learning all the new cool stuff that are out there. And I will tell you this. I've used AI personally in my businesses to make millions of dollars. Even in the past three or four years, before AI kind of really exploded, I was already using it and we made millions of dollars with AI using. You should consider checking out AI as well. This is a very cool side hustle to get into. And maybe you could become an AI expert and then you could start coaching on that and start digital products on that and teach others how to do it. A lot of this stuff begins to snowball, guys, as you begin to learn the game on side hustles and making money with your creativity and not with trading more time for dollars.

Reselling luxury items. This is Ben Gallagher, a normal lad who started reselling luxury items online as a side hustle. In 2023, he generated 7.2 million pounds through his business, Luxe Collective, and even recently appeared on Dragon's Den, which is a bit like Shark Tank, and received investment from Stephen Bartlett in exchange for a 3% equity stake. I'm so proud of how far he's come since appearing on my old podcast. Years ago, the luxury resale market soared to a whopping $39.23 billion in 2023. So it's no surprise that Ben is having so much success.

So, guys, I'm not really into reselling luxury items or any items for that matter. In fact, my wife and I, we built a pretty successful e commerce business a number of years back, and it was kind of along these lines of selling luxury items and stuff online. And I hated it. I don't like reselling or selling, selling these, these kind of items for a number of different reasons. You have to manufacture if it's your own product, if it's somebody else's product that you're kind of reselling, let's say, if it's a luxury item, let's say it's like luxury, you know, shoes or sneakers or something. And they, let's say, you know, they retail for 700 bucks and you can get the pair of sneakers for 500, and then you could somehow sell these for whatever, 690, 50 bucks. You've got like $150 spread there. For me, it's just not worth it to make a hundred bucks. In that case, I would rather just create my own digital product. I'd sell my own course, my own mentorship, my own ebook, and instead of selling somebody else's product and sharing money with them or like going through all of the hustle of trying to find which products does the market even want, I would just straight up go to my audience, my community that I have built on my social media brand. And I would say, yo, guys, here's how I can help you. Get everybody gathered together in some kind of audience and serve them, serve them, serve them in a specific niche. And then whenever they're like, yo, this was incredible. How else can you help me? I would have some kind of course, a mentorship, an ebook, a cheat sheet, a PDF, some kind of digital product, maybe, maybe a coaching program where you could literally do the work one time, create it for yourself, and then sell it. Think about this. If you have a course around your specific niche and it sells for a thousand bucks, that's way better than trying to sell somebody else's luxury item for, you know, smaller margins or sharing the spread with them because you have to kick back an affiliate fee or whatever it is. I would much rather just create my own product, keep 100% of the profit. And I think digital products is the best way to do this. Like I mentioned earlier, all of the stuff that he's touching on actually is pointing towards what I call digital products. We'll talk about it here in just a second. Let's keep going.

Online writing. This is Adam and he earns over $10,000 a month through online writing. Before you get carried away, he's not writing the next Harry Potter or Game of Thrones. That kind of writing doesn't earn you a good income until you get published and hit it big, which is a one in a million chance for most writers. Adam instead writes what's actually in demand and publishes where the readers are online. He started off writing blog posts about his travels to earn passive income and live anywhere in the world. This later led him to working as a copywriter for large influencers. He got one client, which led to another, and so on. He told me when he offers a service, he always tries to be exclusive and do it in a way that no one else could. There's always going to be someone cheaper than you, but not always someone more expensive. Find a client who can afford to pay the premium, then offer a world class service.

So guys, here's my thing. When it comes to being like a copywriter online, for those who don't know, copywriting is writing the words in the marketing campaigns or, or the emails, kind of like he's talking about or the words in your Instagram post, that's called copy, right? And yes, you could become an online copywriter, but unfortunately I don't see this thing being very lucrative because you can literally just go into chat GPT again, talking about AI. You could go into any kind of copywriting AI tool and just say, hey, write me three paragraphs around XYZ niche and make sure they're compelling and informative and funny and, and they convert clients after they read the copy and boom. The AI is probably going to do a better job at copywriting than most people. Now what you could do is you could become a copywriting tech and your side hustle could be like, I use AI to write copy for influencers like he's talking about. But I think what would be more important is to actually get into digital products because instead of writing copy for somebody else, what if you could just write copy for yourself for your own digital products, for your courses, your mentorships, your ebooks, your cheat sheets, your coaching programs, etc. And instead of selling that service to somebody else, just make your copy on your digital products super, super awesome and then sell your digital products. In fact, let's talk about this. So guys, I want to say I really to want appreciate Mark here. I agreed with almost everything that he's talking about and I think some of these side hustles he listed were pretty decent. But as you can see, a common theme that I'm beginning to respond with on all of these side hustles. I believe that the number one best side hustle for 2025 and beyond is to actually start your own digital product business. Digital products, they're educational resources like I keep talking about courses, mentorships, ebooks, coaching programs, et cetera. Where you take your knowledge, your experience, your expertise that you already have, you turn it into one of these educational resources. Digital products are incredible because you do the work one time and then it sells over and over and over and over again. Think about that. You create the course once and then you can sell it forever. You don't have to split the fees or the commissions. If you're doing affiliate marketing, you don't have to sell somebody else's product. You don't have to do all this goofy stuff. You don't have to try to find and market the different products like he's talking about reselling items and stuff. When you have your own digital products, it's absolutely game changer, man. Think about this. If you had one course that you sold like every other day, right, that could be an extra $3,000 a month. If it was like 100 bucks, right, like you could make an extra few thousand dollars a month off of one course. But the crazy part is is what if you had two courses? What if you had three digital products? What if you had five digital products? What if you had 10 digital products? The asset that digital products are is the best side hustle anyone can do. Whether you're a young person in college, whether you're a stay at home mom, whether you're tired of the corporate 9 to 5 grind and you're just like, dude, I need something different. I need to increase my income. Digital products, in my opinion, are the number one best way to do this. I'm doing it, my students are doing it. And guys, I want to encourage you, click that link down below and join me for my upcoming five day live virtual training. I'm going to show you how to do it as well. Trust me, it is the best side hustle. I have built businesses in real estate and E commerce, in marketing agencies and consulting and intellectual property and a number of other places in the market. And if I could go back knowing what I know now, and I could go back and share with myself when I was first starting out, I would say, listen, just go straight to digital products. Because if you can just get started with digital products right now, everything will change for your financial situation. Especially if you have a proven blueprint and a proven framework to plug your thing into somebody else's successful framework. It's over with, man. That's what the upcoming five day live Virtual training Create and Sell Digital Products is all about. Guys, if you like this video, make sure to like and subscribe. Let me know down in the comments if you want to see more content like this from me. Don't forget to join me as of VIP for that five day training. Thank you so much Mark. I appreciate the video. This was awesome guys. Thank you so much. And we'll see you in the next video.