Nine years ago, I was working two jobs and freelancing, and felt stretched thin. After reading about people earning passive income in the e-commerce space, I decided to start a side hustle of my own.

I spent $0 to launch a print-on-demand shop through Amazon, selling t-shirts. I sold my first shirt for $14.99 — it had a Loch Ness Monster design — and made my first profit, $2.58. It changed everything.

Today, I sell a wide variety of apparel to customers in the U.S. and internationally. Now I have four passive income streams: my print-on-demand business, a YouTube channel, online courses to help others start their own side hustles, and one-on-one coaching. 

I've found that automation and AI tools have helped me more efficiently run my business. These are some of my favorites:

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Tools that help me reduce tedious work

When I first started my shop, I would spend hours writing up my product descriptions, and then manually uploading and listing everything. 

In recent years, I've started using a platform called MyDesigns, which has really helped me cut down on the most monotonous tasks.

MyDesigns has one feature that generates product listings and publishes my products in bulk online, and another feature called Vision AI, which creates SEO-friendly titles, descriptions, and tags, which turns hours of grunt work into minutes. 

Tools that help me promote my shop

One of my favorite platforms is Zapier. For years, I used Zapier to help me build a social media presence for my Etsy shop (on autopilot of course).

Every time a product listing on my Etsy shop renewed, it would trigger a "zap" that grabbed the product's title, image, and URL and created a new post on my store's Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter accounts. 

This helped me organically grow my social media following with minimal effort on my end. 

This freed up time to focus more on scaling my business and launching new products.

Tools that help me multitask

I'm often focusing on several things at once, but I am a very slow reader. I would also consider myself more of an auditory learner. That's why I really like using OmniReader. It is an AI-powered text-to-speech reader that allows me to listen to any webpage on the internet, especially while I'm working. 

I'm a big fan of Google's AI assistant Gemini for a similar reason. When I open an email, I'll have Gemini summarize the email in a single click and distill it down to the most important details.

I also use Gemini to schedule meetings and brainstorm new ideas. For example, I recently asked it for a list of 25 common professions so I could come up with some new ideas for print-on-demand t-shirts, and it fetched answers for me in seconds.

Tools that help me communicate better

I'm no longer in school and I don't have a corporate job, but I sometimes make slideshows for my YouTube videos. For that, I like to use Gamma's AI-powered presentations.

The user experience is very straightforward, and as a former web developer I also draw aesthetic inspiration for my own website from the slide themes. 

HeyGen is an AI made specifically for anyone producing video content that allows you to create an AI avatar of yourself and recreate your videos in other languages, without the need for captions. 

I've been enjoying experimenting with it and seeing how it can help me expand into more international markets. 

Ultimately, all of these tools have made it possible for me to grow my business and run it all on my own.

Ryan Hogue is a former web developer and adjunct professor who quit both jobs to run his e-commerce business. His YouTube channel teaches people how to earn passive income using "Ryan's Method."

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