Online side hustle culture is broken. I'd love feedback on the tool I'm building to fix it.

I'm currently an executive at a company in the e-commerce/side hustle space. Over the years, I’ve seen the same pattern play out over and over.

People sign up with dreams of getting rich quick for no effort… but they were sold a fantasy. Influencers overpromise, sell a course, and create unrealistic expectations, then we get a bunch of support tickets from unhappy customers asking for refund requests.

We partnered with a lot of these influencers because they drive traffic, but we've waned off of them over time because they send bad traffic. They oversell then we get some extra revenue, but the users churn out and are headaches.

But these people believe the influencers and flock in because millions of people want to find a side hustle. Everyone wants more money and financial freedom, but it's hard to know where to start.

The info is out there, but it’s scattered across YouTube, podcasts, Reddit, Twitter, blogs. But everyone pushing it has an agenda. It’s biased. It’s scattered. It's not organized in a way that you can compare everything side-by-side.

Reddit (probably) has the most honest takes, but the best insights are buried in comments or lost in endless threads. Everyone keeps asking the same questions because there’s no centralized answer.

So to try to get a grip on what was real, I started building a spreadsheet that would theoretically document every side hustle out there, along with key data points:

How much money does it take to start?

Can you do it remotely?

Can it become passive income?

How hard/technical is it?

What skills help?

etc.

It quickly became too much for me to do myself. So I got the ChatGPT API, built prompts, and over time captured 500+ side hustles in a spreadsheet.

This was a pretty good outcome, but the result still wasn’t GREAT. Like no matter how much I tuned the AI, it still wasn’t good enough to the point I would tell my loved ones to rely on it.

Then I tried hiring researchers and writers to improve it. That got really expensive really fast, and still didn’t feel right. I have high standards and I want my advice (which this tool essentially is) to reflect that standard.

Then I had a bit of an aha moment when I started exploring Reddit. Reddit works because of the community. But Reddit’s not structured.

So I decided to combine the two ideas:

A structured, filterable database of side hustles

A Reddit-style thread for each one

Community-sourced data, upvoted and weighted averaged

Now, every side hustle lives on its own page and metrics, discussions, justifications, and real feedback. Kind of like an organized sub-Reddit for each side hustle. The data evolves as the community refines it.

No more single influencer’s opinion. Just collective, transparent community knowledge.

That’s what I’ve built.

It's called Moonlite. It's 100% free, and still in early beta.

There’s no monetization yet. It’s just a side hustle discovery tool.

But in the coming months, I’ll be expanding the concept to include:

Tools

Courses

Creators

Communities

Eventually, if someone pops up in your feed with a bold claim, I want people to check Moonlite first. See who they are, how they make their money, and whether their side hustle is legit or if they’re just some scammer who is selling you a false dream.

I’m also working on a “life’s task” survey inspired by Robert Greene’s Mastery to help people figure out why they were put on this earth, then match that with a way to make money that is perfectly aligned with their nature.

There’s a broader vision around helping people align purpose with profit, but I figured I’d solve the most clear underlying problems with scattered info, not knowing who to trust, and misaligned info first.

Would love feedback on any of this!

Does the vision resonate?

Is the core product helpful?

Is this something you’d actually use?

What would make this become a resource that you’d want to send to your friends and family to when they say they wish they could make more money, are unhappy with their job, or think they found something that is going to get them rich quick?

The website is moonlitemoney.com

Thanks for reading and your support!

Appreciate any thoughts 🙏