A YouTube video promised something that sounds almost too good to ignore: earn $10 every two minutes using ChatGPT, for free, with no special skills required. The method involved signing up as a tutor on StudyPool.com, taking questions from students, running them through ChatGPT, and pasting the answers back. Alston tested it, went through the full application process, waited for a response, and got something he did not expect.
His application came back with a holding message: pending approval due to a high volume of tutor applications. The platform had been flooded with applicants from people who saw the same viral video and tried the same method. The $10-every-two-minutes promise hit a wall before a single dollar changed hands. What Alston found instead were five concrete ways to use ChatGPT that actually pay, built on real demand from real clients on Fiverr and Upwork. This post covers both: why the StudyPool method is broken right now, and what you can actually do instead.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- Why the $10-every-2-minutes ChatGPT claim does not hold up in practice
- How to use SimilarWeb to vet any side hustle before you spend time on it
- The traffic gap between StudyPool (3.3 million visits/month) and Chegg (42.6 million/month) and what it means for earners
- Why blindly copying ChatGPT answers without verifying them puts you and your clients at risk
- Five specific services you can use ChatGPT to deliver on Fiverr starting today
- How tools like Ahrefs and Instant Domain Search help you find low-competition gigs
- Where to find your specific best starting path at finder.platformproof.com
The Promise: $10 Every 2 Minutes With ChatGPT
The viral video that sparked this experiment made a straightforward claim. Sign up as a tutor on StudyPool.com. Students post homework questions and pay tutors to answer them. Use ChatGPT to generate those answers. Collect payment. Repeat every two minutes.
StudyPool is a real platform. Students do post real questions. Tutors do get paid for accepted answers. None of that is made up. The problem is not the platform itself. The problem is the math of supply and demand once a method like this goes viral on YouTube.
ChatGPT, for those who have not used it, is an AI writing and reasoning tool trained on data up to 2021. You enter a question and it generates a detailed answer. For a student asking about history, biology, or basic computer science, the output can be accurate and usable. The idea in the original video was simple: you act as the middleman between the student’s question and ChatGPT’s answer.
The application to become a StudyPool tutor takes 20 to 35 minutes. You answer a set of screening questions, submit your information, and wait for approval. Alston used ChatGPT to help fill out the application itself, which worked fine. The problem came at the end of the waiting period.
How to Check a Side Hustle Before You Try It
Before you commit 30 minutes of your life to any new online income method, Alston recommends one specific step: run the platform through SimilarWeb. SimilarWeb is a free tool that shows you traffic statistics for any website. You can see how many people visit per month, how long they stay, how many pages they look at, and where the visitors are coming from.
This matters because a side hustle is only as good as the demand it sits on. If the platform hosting the method does not have enough traffic to support new earners, the numbers will not work no matter how good the individual strategy sounds. High visitor numbers tell you there is real demand. Low visitor numbers tell you the market is thin, even if the method itself is technically valid.
When Alston pulled up StudyPool on SimilarWeb, here is what he found: 3.3 million monthly visits, 4.41 pages per visit, and an average session duration of about five minutes. The top traffic sources were the United States, Kenya, India, the Philippines, and Pakistan. By itself, 3.3 million visits sounds like a meaningful number. The comparison to Chegg is what puts it in context.
StudyPool vs. Chegg: What the Numbers Actually Show
Chegg is the best-known homework help platform in the United States. When Alston checked Chegg on SimilarWeb, the contrast with StudyPool was hard to ignore. Chegg receives 42.6 million monthly visits. Visitors look at an average of 6.43 pages per visit and stay on the site for about 10 minutes.
That is nearly 13 times more traffic than StudyPool. It is almost double the pages per visit and double the time spent on site. Those differences matter because more traffic means more student questions posted per day, which means more earning opportunities for tutors competing for those questions.
StudyPool has roughly 50 employees managing the entire operation. That team is responsible for platform maintenance, quality control, tutor vetting, and processing the inbound application queue. When a viral YouTube video sends thousands of people to apply all at once, a 50-person team managing 3.3 million monthly visitors is not built to absorb that spike in supply without bottlenecks forming quickly.
The takeaway from Alston is practical: if you want to explore tutoring as a way to make money online, Chegg gives you a larger pool of student demand to draw from. Your odds of getting questions, getting answers accepted, and earning consistently are higher simply because more people are using the platform to ask for help.
Why Alston’s Application Went Nowhere
After going through the full application process and spending 20 to 35 minutes answering screening questions, Alston received a message that said: “Thank you for applying to be a tutor. Due to recent excess in tutor applications, your application will be pending approval at this time. We will follow up when there is more demand for tutors.”
That message is not a rejection. It is also not an invitation to start working. It is a holding pattern with no timeline attached. StudyPool was telling him that the platform was receiving more applications than it had openings for, and that it would only reach back out when things shifted in the other direction.
This is what happens when a specific side hustle gets promoted in a widely-watched video. The barrier to entry spikes fast. The people who had already been approved as tutors before the video came out were positioned to benefit. Anyone applying after the viral exposure had already hit critical mass was walking into a saturated queue with an uncertain wait.
The Oversaturation Problem and Why It Hits Every Viral Side Hustle
Saturation is the invisible wall behind most viral income methods. A method gets discovered. Someone makes a video about it. The video gets watched by tens of thousands of people. A fraction of those viewers try the method. That fraction floods the platform or market with supply at exactly the moment when demand has not grown to match it.
With StudyPool, Alston estimates that the platform probably had around 10,000 active tutors answering questions before the video spread widely. After the viral exposure, the application inbox likely swelled with another 10,000 or more people all trying the same method at the same time. StudyPool did not suddenly have 10,000 more students needing help. It just had 10,000 more applicants it could not use.
The platform has 3.3 million monthly visitors and 50 employees. The ratio of visitors to staff already tells you this is a lean operation. It cannot scale its tutor onboarding overnight just because YouTube sent a wave of applicants to its signup page.
This is not a criticism of StudyPool specifically. It is a structural reality of any two-sided marketplace that gets sudden supply-side attention without matching demand growth on the other side. The lesson Alston draws is practical: look at timing. If you are hearing about a method because a video went viral recently, you are probably already late for the window where that method works easily. The people who got in early already took the available spots.
There is also a secondary problem with the platform itself that goes beyond the application backlog. Even approved tutors are not guaranteed payment. Students choose the answer they want, and your submission may get passed over in favor of a better or faster response from another tutor. There is no floor under your earnings. You can answer correctly and still walk away with nothing if another tutor beats you to it.
Why Blindly Copying ChatGPT Answers Can Hurt You and Your Clients
Even if StudyPool were approving applications freely, there is a deeper problem with the copy-paste approach to tutoring that Alston wants to be direct about.
ChatGPT is trained on data that goes up to 2021. Anything that happened or was published after that date is outside its training window, so answers about recent events, software updates, or new research may be incomplete or simply wrong. More importantly, ChatGPT can generate answers that sound confident and authoritative while being factually incorrect in ways that are not obvious if you do not already know the subject.
Alston walked through a specific example during the video. A student on StudyPool posts a question: what is React in JavaScript? ChatGPT answers that React is an open-source JavaScript library for building user interfaces. That happens to be accurate. But if you do not know enough about React to recognize whether the answer is right or wrong, you are trusting a machine without any ability to verify the output before sending it to a student who is counting on you.
His point is direct: “If you don’t know if the information is correct, you could be just putting in junk, getting bad answers out, and then giving somebody who is looking for help bad answers.” A student who pays for a wrong answer is not just disappointed. They may be harmed academically or professionally if they act on bad information in a test, assignment, or real-world application.
The rule Alston recommends: only use ChatGPT to answer questions in areas where you already have enough foundational knowledge to catch errors. Use it to draft answers faster, not to answer questions in fields you know nothing about. ChatGPT should be the first step, not the only step. You brainstorm what you want to say, feed it into the tool, get a draft, analyze it, edit it, and then deliver it. That process is very different from typing a question and pasting whatever comes out.
Five Real Ways to Make Money With ChatGPT on Fiverr
After the StudyPool experiment did not pan out, Alston shifted to what he has actually used ChatGPT for in his own business and what the tool can help you sell as a service to paying clients. None of these methods are passive. They require active work. But the demand is real, the barrier to entry is low, and earning can start immediately rather than getting stuck behind a pending application queue.
Writing Affiliate Disclosures
Any website, blog, or YouTube channel that promotes affiliate links is required by the FTC to include a disclosure statement. Most small creators and website owners do not know how to write a proper disclosure and do not want to pay a lawyer to produce one. Alston typed a prompt asking ChatGPT to write an affiliate disclosure statement and got back a usable draft within seconds.
You can list this as a Fiverr gig. Charge $10 to $25 per disclosure, customize the output for each client’s specific business, and deliver a clean document they can paste into their website footer or About page. Recommend that clients have a legal professional review it for their specific situation, but the core value you deliver is a professional starting draft they would otherwise have to produce from scratch or skip entirely.
Facebook Ad Copy
Facebook ad copywriters charge anywhere from $25 to $150 per ad on Fiverr and Upwork, depending on experience and positioning. Alston showed how ChatGPT can produce a Facebook ad draft from a simple prompt. He typed “write Facebook ad copy for starting a YouTube channel” and got a usable first draft back in seconds.
The key is what happens after the AI output appears. You do not paste it directly into a deliverable. You read through it, identify what sounds generic or robotic, rewrite the phrases that do not fit the client’s voice or target audience, and deliver something that sounds like it was written by a person who understands the product. ChatGPT gets you past the blank page. Your edits turn it into something worth paying for.
Business Names and Slogans
New businesses and entrepreneurs consistently need help naming their company and writing a memorable tagline. Alston typed “create a business slogan for a men’s shoe store” into ChatGPT and it returned multiple options in under 10 seconds, including several that were genuinely usable without major editing.
On Fiverr, naming and slogan gigs sell for $5 to $30 per order. Volume is the strategy here, not premium pricing per job. If you complete five to ten gigs per day using ChatGPT to generate raw options and your own judgment to filter and polish them, you can build up consistent daily income from a simple, repeatable service with very low overhead.
YouTube Script Outlines
Content creators often know their subject well but struggle to organize a video into a logical structure that keeps viewers watching. Alston generated a YouTube script outline for “dog training tips” in seconds using ChatGPT. The output was a usable framework with an introduction, main teaching points, and a conclusion structure the creator could fill in with their own knowledge and examples.
You sell the outline, not the full script. The creator fills in their own knowledge, personal stories, and specific examples. Your job is to give them a skeleton that makes the organizing step faster and easier. Gigs like this sell for $15 to $50 on Fiverr depending on niche and video length, and they can be completed quickly once you have a reliable prompting process in place.
Domain Name Ideas and Research
Alston used a keyword research tool called Ahrefs to find low-competition niche topics, then used ChatGPT to generate domain name ideas for those niches. He typed “write 10 domain names for a men’s shoe store” and got back a list that included options worth checking. He then ran the suggestions through Instant Domain Search to find which names were actually available for registration. SharpFootwear.com was one that came up as available during the demo.
The service you sell is the combination of niche research and creative naming that most business owners do not know how to do efficiently. You find the niche, generate names, filter for available options, and deliver a shortlist of real choices. This gig sells for $5 to $20 per order on Fiverr, and each one takes only a few minutes once you have a reliable workflow built.
Beyond these five, Alston also covered several additional services he uses ChatGPT for in his own work. Writing YouTube video descriptions (he showed a Bluehost vs. GoDaddy comparison video description as an example). Generating five-email welcome sequences for affiliate marketers and email list builders, which also sells well on Fiverr. Creating blog post title ideas (ChatGPT produced “Eating Keto on a Budget: Delicious and Affordable Recipes for the Whole Family” as a strong example title). Writing Fiverr gig headlines to help other freelancers make their listings more compelling. And basic translation work for clients who need short-form content in another language.
Not sure which ChatGPT service idea fits your current skills and situation?
Answer a few questions and get a specific recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.
Honest Drawbacks of Using ChatGPT for Freelance Services
These services are real income opportunities. They are also active income, which means if you stop working, the money stops too. Before you list your first Fiverr gig, here are the specific limitations worth knowing up front.
Fiverr takes a 20 percent cut of every transaction. A $10 gig nets you $8 after the platform fee. At the lower end of gig pricing, you need volume to make meaningful income, and building that volume takes time and a track record of positive reviews. New sellers do not get reviews until they complete orders, and getting those first few orders can be slow.
ChatGPT’s knowledge ends at 2021. Any service you offer that involves recent events, newly released software, current pricing, or products launched after that date will require you to supplement the AI output with your own research. The tool cannot tell you about companies or products that came out after its training window closed.
Product description writing, which Alston mentioned as a viable Fiverr service, only works smoothly when the product already exists online and ChatGPT has enough data to draw from. If a client wants descriptions for an unreleased product or something that has no online presence, the AI will not have enough context and you will need to write from scratch using information the client provides.
The AI output is a starting draft, not a finished deliverable. Every piece needs human review and editing before it goes to a client. Clients who receive raw, unedited AI output can often tell, and the ones who care about quality will leave negative reviews. The editing step is not optional if you want repeat business and the kind of ratings that attract new buyers.
Translation services are worth testing, but verify accuracy before delivering. Alston showed ChatGPT correctly translating “hi” into Mandarin Chinese (ni hao), but for anything more complex than simple phrases, the output should be reviewed by someone who actually knows the language before you charge a client for it.
None of these limitations mean the services are not worth pursuing. They mean you should go in with accurate expectations about what you are building: a freelance business that uses AI to work faster and produce better first drafts, not a passive income stream that runs without you.
Find Your X
ChatGPT is a useful tool. But the question most people skip is which specific service they should offer first, given their skills, available time, and what they already know well enough to verify. A teacher, a graphic designer, a retail worker, and a student all have different best starting points, and none of those starting points is the same.
If you want a specific recommendation instead of a list of options to sort through on your own, go to finder.platformproof.com. Answer a few questions about your background and goals and get back a starting point built around what you already have, not a generic list of things that work for someone else.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is StudyPool a legitimate website?
Yes, StudyPool is a real tutoring marketplace where students post questions and pay approved tutors for answers. The platform itself is not a scam. The problem Alston encountered was an application backlog caused by too many people trying the same viral side hustle method at the same time. StudyPool paused new approvals because it received far more applications than it had active demand for tutors to fill.
How much can you realistically make on StudyPool?
Pay varies by question and subject. Some answers are worth a few dollars, others more depending on complexity and length. The $10 every two minutes claim in the viral video was based on a best-case scenario, not a typical result. Even approved tutors compete against other tutors for each question, and there is no guarantee your answer will be the one the student selects. The viral claim does not reflect average earnings for new tutors on the platform.
Why is ChatGPT free to use?
OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, offers a free tier to drive adoption and collect feedback that improves the model. The basic version is free to use without a subscription. A paid version called ChatGPT Plus offers faster performance and access to newer model versions for a monthly fee. For the types of freelance services covered in this post, the free version is sufficient to get started and test whether the service model works for you.
Can you get banned from Fiverr for using ChatGPT?
Fiverr does not ban sellers for using AI tools to assist their work. The platform requires that you deliver what you promise and that you are honest with buyers about what they are purchasing. If a buyer specifically asks whether AI was used in the work and you say no when it was, that could be a violation of the platform’s terms. Disclose your process when buyers ask, deliver quality output, and you are within the rules.
What is the fastest ChatGPT service to start on Fiverr?
Business name and slogan writing has one of the fastest setup paths of any ChatGPT-assisted service. You need a Fiverr account, a gig description, and a process for prompting ChatGPT to generate name and slogan options. The deliverable is a short document with a selection of filtered, polished choices. Orders can be completed quickly once you build a consistent approach, and new businesses need naming help year-round regardless of season or economic conditions.
Do I need to disclose that I used AI when delivering client work?
Disclosure expectations vary by platform and client. On Fiverr, if a buyer asks about your process, be honest. Some clients specifically require human-written content and prohibit AI assistance in their project briefs. Always read those requirements before accepting an order. When in doubt, ask the client upfront. Being transparent protects you from disputes and chargebacks later, and most clients who have no restriction on AI use will not care as long as the quality is good.
Is Chegg a better option than StudyPool for new tutors?
Based on traffic data, Chegg is a stronger starting platform. It receives 42.6 million monthly visits compared to StudyPool’s 3.3 million. More visitors means more student questions posted each day, which gives tutors more opportunities to earn. Chegg also has its own application process and subject-matter requirements, so you will still need to qualify in areas where you have real knowledge, not just ChatGPT access.
How do I know which online income method is right for me?
The honest answer is that it depends on your skills, how much time you can commit each week, whether you want to work directly with clients, and what topics you know well enough to produce quality output. There is no single right answer that works for everyone. The Platform Proof Finder at finder.platformproof.com asks you the specific questions that help identify the best starting point for your actual situation rather than a generic recommendation that fits no one in particular.
Read Next
Curious whether other ChatGPT income claims hold up to the same kind of honest testing? Alston ran a similar experiment on a different method.
Read: I Tried It: ChatGPT $1,200 a Day – AI Bot + Affiliate Marketing
Sources
- StudyPool.com: online tutoring and homework help marketplace
- SimilarWeb: website traffic analytics tool used to compare StudyPool and Chegg
- Chegg.com: 42.6 million monthly visits per SimilarWeb data at time of filming
- StudyPool traffic: 3.3 million monthly visits, approximately 50 employees, 4.41 pages per visit, per SimilarWeb
- ChatGPT by OpenAI: AI text generation tool with training data through 2021
- Ahrefs: paid keyword research and SEO analytics tool
- Fiverr.com: freelance services marketplace
- Upwork.com: freelance services marketplace
- Instant Domain Search: domain name availability checker
Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.