I’m bringing back a side hustle from the dead. From many, many years ago.

Other than my new venture MoneyBren Studios which has just launched its first game Race To The First $100K, the portfolio has been deprived of new income for some time now.

In fact, ever since matched betting became impossible in New Zealand and one of my biggest affiliates closed down, there hasn’t been a significant source of income for the portfolio.

Right now we just get a few hundred bucks each month from some niche sites, a couple of courses sell here and there, and we get some dividends and interest.

But, with the emergence of AI, many new things are becoming possibly. And it seems, many old things too.

Story time – back when I started travel blogging, I started a lot of sites. HEAPS of them. Once you have a web hosting account, you can pretty much host as many sites as you want. So I always had at least 3 or 4 going at a time, a symptom of all the ideas I had in my head that I thought would make money.

One article I wrote on my travel blog was this one – a guide to NZ slang for anyone visiting New Zealand. This went mega viral – it was being shared by radio shows, the news, and tons of Kiwis abroad and here at home. So many friends reached out to me and told me they’d seen my article shared by a friend on Facebook.

So one of my ideas at the time was – let me turn that blog post into a business. I’m going to build a dictionary website about Kiwi slang words, and I’ll sell t-shirts, mugs, I’ll even print hard copies and distribute them through hostels around New Zealand.

The problem was, building a site like that wasn’t easy. I only knew how to build blogs on WordPress, this was a totally different type of site. So, I went on Upwork and hired a team of developers in India to build it for me. They charged me $500 to start and $500 when it was done.

Well, I paid them the first $500 and they got started.

Halfway through, it just started to fall apart.

The site looked like shit, totally my fault, because I asked them to design it how I imagined it in my head, which turned out to be useless because I had no idea how a site like this was built and how it should work.

It took forever to get anything done, because we were emailing back and forth, in different time zones, and after a month we had a site with about 10 words on it that was so embarrassingly bad I didn’t even want to continue.

So I didn’t.

I never paid the second $500. We didn’t even get close to getting halfway, let alone finishing.

That was 10 years ago.

A few days ago, I got a comment on that blog post (that should tell you something about its longevity) and it just dawned on me, maybe I can trying building that site again now?

If AI can build me a fully fledged video game in a few weeks, surely it can build me a basic website?

I opened up Claude, sent it my blog post and asked what it thought of my idea.

It had a prototype for me to test drive within 2 minutes.

The Kiwi Slang Dictionary was up and running later that day.

This project was awesome to work on.

First, it wasn’t just another WordPress blog. It’s a static html site (whatever that means) which is deployed totally differently.

I got to learn how to use two new tools – Github to store the code for the website itself, and Supabase to store the database (both are free).

I’ve heard the word Github thrown around a lot, but had never used it and never really knew what it was.

But Claude walked me through installing it on my computer, deploying a website through it and then pushing updates through my Github client. I had no idea how to do any of this at the start of the day, and by evening I was pushing code through it confidently updating my new live website.

To be honest, I still have no idea how this site works. I know what html is, but I didn’t know you could make a site like this just by pasting a bit of html code. The code doesn’t even look that big! But it’s built this entire website. The instructions for Claude were literally just “here’s what you wanted, copy and paste it”.

And it worked!

So I definitely want to learn more about this way of building sites, but at this stage I’m just going with the flow.

So what is the goal with this website?

Well – obviously it’s to make another income stream for the portfolio.

My goal is to build it up to $5/day, most likely through ads.

Sure, that’s not that much money (about $1,500/yr) and doesn’t even come anywhere close to the same galaxy as matched betting, which is still the GOAT side hustle and probably forever will be.

But also remember what the rules of moneybren were back when we started in 2020:

The portfolio can only be funded by side hustles that anyone can do.

Spending an afternoon chatting back and forth with AI and then paying $10 for a domain name to launch a website is definitely something anyone can do.

And it’s so cool when you actually start building something and see it come to life.

So, what’s next for this side hustle?

I’ll be keeping a diary here on the blog of all our progress, as I’ve always done with everything else we’ve tried.

I also need some help from you! Are you a Kiwi?

Then my friendly request to you is to visit Kiwi Slang Dictionary and submit a definition for a Kiwi slang word.

Just spend 2 minutes browsing the dictionary to see what it’s all about, have a little laugh (it’s supposed to be funny and not too serious!), then click the “add your own” button in the top right and submit something.

If you can’t do that, at the very least browse around and “thumbs up” a few definitions that make you laugh.

And finally, share it with your friends! Let’s see if we can make our own Kiwi lingo famous across the world.

Visit the Kiwi Slang Dictionary here.

Stay tuned, update you soon.

Bren