Most people chasing a side hustle start from zero every single month. They grind through January, make some money, and spend all of February trying to figure out how to do it again. Alston Godbolt is building something different in 2026 — a paid online community that people keep paying for, month after month, without you having to constantly hunt for new clients.
This video kicks off a weekly series where Alston reviews side hustles that actually work — with real proof, step-by-step instructions, and examples you can verify yourself. No “trust me, bro.” Just facts. The side hustle this week: building a private paid community and getting paid every month for support, accountability, access, and shortcuts. The goal is 52 weeks, 52 different side hustles, all real. This is week one.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- What a paid online community is and exactly how it makes recurring monthly income
- The three types of communities anyone can build right now
- Real examples from Skool.com with the actual monthly revenue numbers
- A five-step plan to get your community built and your first members paying
- How to fill your community without spending a dollar on ads
- Who this side hustle is for and who should skip it entirely
- The exact math to hit $1,950 a month with fewer than 50 members
- Still unsure which side hustle fits your actual life and skills? finder.platformproof.com matches you in minutes.
Why a Paid Community Beats Most Side Hustles
Here is the honest problem with most side hustles: you are running uphill the entire time. You do the work, you get paid once, and then you go find the next client. Freelance gigs, one-off services, odd jobs — all of them reset to zero at the start of every new month. The mental weight of that cycle wears people out fast, and most quit before they ever build real momentum.
A paid community flips that model completely. When you charge a monthly membership fee, every person who joins keeps paying you as long as they feel like they are getting something real out of it. Your starting point in February is not zero — it is whatever you built in January, plus new members. That is what predictable income looks like in practice, and it is the main reason this model works when most side hustles do not.
The Three Types of Paid Communities You Can Build
There is no single template. Depending on your skills and the type of person you want to help, you will lean toward one of three structures. Pick the one that fits how you actually want to show up for people.
The Accountability Community
Members check in regularly, report on their progress, and hold each other to commitments. You are the facilitator and the standard-setter. People pay for the structure because the structure is the product. Most people already know what they are supposed to do — they just do not do it without some form of accountability baked in. An accountability community gives them that, and they will pay monthly to keep it.
The Skill Community
You provide templates, tutorials, and practical tools that members can use immediately. Alston found a woodworking community where members send in videos of problems they are having and the host helps them solve it in real time. No degree required. No storefront. Just transferable knowledge wrapped into a monthly access fee. If you know how to do something that other people want to learn, this is your lane.
The Support and Networking Community
Like-minded people pay to be in a room with other like-minded people. You curate the space, spark the conversations, and keep the energy alive until the community sustains itself. The value here is the tribe itself. The host does not have to be the expert on everything — they have to be a good connector and a consistent presence. This model works especially well when the audience is already motivated and just needs a home.
Real Proof: What People Are Actually Making on Skool.com
Skool (skl.com) is a platform built specifically for paid online communities. It lets you host courses, run discussions, and hold live calls all under one monthly subscription. Alston pulled up live, unfiltered examples during this video — you can go verify every one of these yourself. These are not cherry-picked testimonials from people he knows.
The third most popular community on the platform at the time of filming: Calligraphy School. Run by Jordan and Jillian, it has 1,200 members paying $9 a month. That is $10,800 every single month for teaching people how to write beautifully. Nobody gave them permission to start it. Nobody told them the market was big enough. They just built it. That number — $10,800 a month from calligraphy — is the one Alston keeps coming back to throughout the video because it quietly destroys every excuse about niche ideas being too small.
Keep scrolling on Skool and the numbers keep stacking. Pickleball School has 1,400 members at $39 a month — that is $54,600 in monthly recurring revenue from a sport most people pick up at a neighborhood gym. A Dance Academy runs at $99 a month with 471 members. A community built specifically for menopausal women trying to lose weight charges $37 a month and targets one of the most underserved and desperate audiences in the entire health space. These are not outliers. These are examples of what happens when somebody picks a specific person, names the problem, and builds something for them instead of for everyone.
Other Platforms Worth Knowing Before You Pick One
Skool is Alston’s top recommendation for beginners, but it is not the only place communities are making real money. Understanding the landscape helps you make a smarter first decision.
Substack lets you build a newsletter with a free tier and a paid subscriber level. There are Substacks on cooking, finance, pop culture, local news, and nearly anything else you can name. Some creators run the writing alone. Others layer in a community element by connecting their Substack to a Discord server or a private group. The model works because people are already comfortable paying for newsletters they value.
Patreon is where creators charge fans for bonus content, early access, and community membership. Alston was part of the Joe Button podcast community on Patreon — members got extra videos per month, access to a Discord server where people discussed each episode, and a sense of being on the inside of something. It works. But Patreon charges a platform fee and a processing fee on top of your subscription revenue, which cuts into margins in a way Skool does not.
Facebook Groups are free to start and still a valid place to test whether demand exists before you pay for a platform. If you search “AutoCAD” in Facebook Groups, you will find one with 346,000 members. Another with 31,000. People are already gathering there around a shared interest. That is not noise — that is a validated audience waiting for the right person to build them a real home.
Why This Model Works: Four Reasons It Has Legs
Alston lays out four specific reasons the paid community model works where other side hustles fall apart. Understanding these helps you build with the right expectations.
Demand. People are starving for ongoing help after they buy something. They purchase a course, the instructor disappears, and they are stuck on question three with no one to ask. A community closes that gap. Questions get answered, problems get worked through, and progress keeps happening because the help does not stop at the end of a lesson. That gap — the support vacuum after a course purchase — is exactly where a community fits.
Buyer intent. Think about what people already pay for monthly: apps, coaching, streaming services, therapy, gym memberships. The mental model for recurring subscriptions is already built into most people’s budgets. A community that delivers real value drops into a spending category people already accept without much friction. You are not asking them to do something new — you are asking them to redirect existing spending toward something more useful.
Simplicity. You do not have to post every single day. You can schedule content in advance. If you are running your community on Facebook, you can queue posts for the entire week in one sitting. The community does a lot of the work once you get the conversation going and the members start talking to each other. Your job shifts from content machine to conversation host.
Repeatability. The same topic works every month with a different angle. A weight loss community can cover nutrition in month one, weight training in month two, walking and recovery in month three, and then loop back with a different lens. The audience does not get tired of the topic — they get tired of bad facilitation and stale energy. Rotate the focus, not the niche, and you can run the same community for years.
Not sure which niche fits your actual skills and situation?
Take the short quiz at finder.platformproof.com and get matched to the right side hustle for where you are right now.
Who This Side Hustle Is For (And Who Should Honestly Skip It)
Alston has tried building communities more than once and is upfront about the fact that it is not for everyone. He gives you the honest list on both sides, which is worth more than a motivational pitch.
This is a good fit if you like structured, recurring help more than constant content creation. If you can show up at least once a week without burning out. If you genuinely enjoy building engagement and getting people to talk to each other. And most importantly, if you want income that does not reset to zero on the first of every month. The predictable nature of membership revenue is the thing people find most attractive about this model, and it is real — but it requires patience to build.
Skip this if you hate answering questions or find it draining to talk to people about the same problems repeatedly. Skip it if you are looking for passive income, because running a community is not that. Skip it if you refuse to pick a niche — a community for everyone is a community for no one. And skip it if you are not willing to do any marketing, because you still have to get people in the front door before the recurring model kicks in. No members means no membership revenue.
The facilitation piece is the one that breaks most first-timers. You cannot build a space and wait for it to fill itself. You have to spark conversations, give people reasons to respond, and keep the energy alive until the community starts sustaining itself through member-to-member interaction. That skill takes time to develop, but it is learnable by anyone willing to be consistent.
Five Steps from Zero to First Paying Member
Here is the exact process Alston walks through in the video. This is meant to be plug-and-play — take notes, rewatch if you need to, and move step by step rather than trying to do everything at once.
Step A: Pick a Pain, a Person, and a Promise
Do not try to help everyone. Pick a specific type of person going through a specific kind of problem, and make a specific promise about what your community will help them accomplish. The calligraphy school is for women interested in calligraphy. The menopausal weight loss community is not for women who want to lose weight — it is for menopausal women specifically, because that specificity is what makes it feel like it was built for them.
Alston uses himself as the example: a man in his 40s who lost 60 pounds in about a year through weight training. He knows the exact pain points of that demographic — working full-time, having kids, having financial obligations, trying to stay consistent when everything else in life competes for your time. He knows what those men are searching on Google. He knows what they are afraid to say out loud. That level of specific knowledge is what turns a general idea into a community people pay for and stay in.
Look at your own last one, three, five, or seven years. What problems did you work through? What do you know now that you wish you had known when you started? Someone out there is standing exactly where you were, and they would pay real money for a shortcut through it. That is your community.
Step B: Validate in 48 Hours
Before building anything, confirm that the demand is actually there. Go to Skool and search your topic. Check Patreon. Go to Facebook Groups and see how many people are already gathering around the problem you want to solve. If you search “AutoCAD” on Facebook, you find a group with 346,000 members and another with 31,000. That is not a niche with no audience — that is a proven market waiting for someone to build the right paid experience inside it.
Check Udemy while you are at it. The top AutoCAD course on Udemy has over 120,000 learners who each paid $9.99. If 1% of those people would pay you $9 a month for ongoing support, templates, and a community to ask questions in, that is over 1,200 members. Run that math before you talk yourself out of the idea. You do not need 10,000 followers. You need proof the audience exists, and these platforms give you that proof in 48 hours without spending anything.
Step C: Design the Minimum Viable Offer
Your first community does not need ten features. It needs three things, each one pulling its weight every week.
- A weekly moment: a live call or a weekly thread — something that makes showing up feel worth it each week and gives members a reason to keep the subscription active
- A repeatable asset: templates, checklists, a prompt library — something members can grab and use immediately without asking you for help first
- A feedback loop: Q&A sessions, co-working calls, video reviews — a mechanism for members to get personal attention when they need it
A simple working schedule could look like this: Monday posts the week’s plan. Wednesday runs a 45-minute live Q&A. Friday does a wins and accountability check-in. Three touchpoints per week. That is enough to give members a rhythm, build a habit of showing up, and make the membership feel active and alive rather than abandoned.
Step D: Set Your Price
Start with a number that makes you slightly uncomfortable. That discomfort is usually a signal that you are pricing close to real value instead of discounting yourself to feel safe. Pricing low to get people in fast sounds smart but teaches your audience that your time is cheap, and that is a reputation that is hard to reverse later.
Work backward from your income goal. If you want $10,000 a month and you charge $39, you need about 257 members. If that feels too far away to start, run the smaller math. Ten members at $39 a month is $390. Fifty members at $39 a month is $1,950. You do not need thousands of followers or a viral video to get to 50 serious members. You need the right message in front of the right people, consistently, over time. Match the price to the size of the problem — the menopausal weight loss community can charge more than the calligraphy school because the pain is bigger and the stakes are higher. Bigger problem, higher price, fewer members needed to hit your goal.
Step E: Know Your Expenses Before You Launch
The startup cost for a paid community is genuinely low. Skool runs $9.99 per month and includes the ability to run live calls inside the community at no additional cost. You do not need a separate Zoom account. You do not need a course platform. You do not need a website. Facebook Groups are free if you want to test the concept before paying for anything. Patreon adds a platform fee and a processing fee that chip away at your margin, which is why Alston recommends Skool for most beginners over Patreon.
Your total upfront cost is your time and $9.99. There are very few side hustles with that low a barrier to finding out whether your idea has legs.
How to Fill Your Community Without Spending a Dollar on Ads
Getting your first members is the hardest part for most people. There are two tracks: free (slower but teaches you what works) and paid (faster but costs money and requires a different mindset). Alston’s strong advice is to start free and add paid only after you know what converts.
On the free side, create content on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter that speaks directly to the specific person you are trying to reach. Each piece of content is a warm introduction. At the same time, go find the Facebook groups where your target audience already hangs out. Search your niche. Find the active groups. Go in and answer five to seven questions per day per group. Be genuinely useful. Do not pitch. Just answer well. Over time, people will look at your profile to see who you are, and your profile should clearly point to your community with a direct link.
The free strategy takes longer, but it teaches you something paid ads never can: what your specific audience actually responds to. Once you find a piece of content that lands well organically — people engage, share it, ask follow-up questions — download it, clean it up slightly, and run paid ads to it. You are not guessing at that point. You already know it works because real people responded to it for free. Start with free. Add paid once you know what converts, not before.
If you go straight to paid ads without doing the free work first, you will burn through your budget while learning lessons that free content would have taught you for nothing. People running ads are not paying for sales — they are paying for data. That is a useful mindset, but it is a lot cheaper to get that data when it costs you zero dollars per test.
Find Your X
The whole point of this video is to push you off the wall. The calligraphy community, the pickleball community, the menopausal weight loss community — none of those creators waited for someone to hand them a green light. They picked a specific person, named the problem that person was struggling with, built something real for them, and started.
If you are still trying to figure out which side hustle actually fits your skills, your schedule, and the knowledge you already have, use finder.platformproof.com. It is a short quiz built specifically to match working adults with the online income path that fits where they are right now — not a generic list, an actual match.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to be a certified expert to run a paid community?
No. You need to be further along the path than the people you are helping. If you lost 60 pounds over the past year, you can help someone who just started. If you have been using AutoCAD professionally for three years, you can teach a complete beginner. Official credentials matter far less than lived experience with the specific problem your community solves. The people who join are not looking for a certificate — they are looking for someone who has already figured out what they are still struggling with.
How many members do I need before this feels worth it?
It depends on what you charge. At $39 a month, 50 members puts you at $1,950 in recurring monthly income. At $99 a month, 20 members gets you just under $2,000. You do not need hundreds of members to make this meaningful — you need the right number of the right people at the right price for the problem you solve. Alston’s math throughout the video is deliberately small to prove the point that you do not need a massive audience to build real income from this model.
How much time does running a community actually take each week?
It depends on how you structure it, but the minimum Alston describes is three touchpoints per week: a Monday post, a Wednesday Q&A call, and a Friday check-in. In the early stages, plan for a few hours per week on top of any content creation you do to bring in new members. As the community grows and members start carrying more of the conversation themselves, you can delegate parts of the facilitation to a community manager. But early on, your active presence is what keeps people subscribed.
Is Skool really the best platform to start on?
For beginners, Alston recommends it because it bundles discussions, courses, and live calls into one $9.99 per month subscription. You do not need a separate Zoom account, a separate course platform, or a third-party payment processor. Everything is in one place. Facebook Groups are free and worth using to validate your idea before you pay for anything. Patreon adds fees on top of your revenue that cut into your margins more than Skool does. For most people starting from scratch, Skool is the cleanest option.
What is the biggest mistake beginners make with paid communities?
Quitting too early, by a wide margin. Alston is blunt about this: if you do not hit ten members in the first two weeks, that is not proof the idea is dead. Communities take time to build, and the early stage always feels slower than it should. The second biggest mistake is being too broad. A community for everyone appeals to no one. Picking one specific person with one specific problem and building specifically for them is the difference between a community that scales and one that stalls.
Can I build a paid community around a hobby instead of a business topic?
Absolutely. The calligraphy school and the pickleball school from this video are both hobby-based communities pulling in five figures per month. If people are already spending time and money on the hobby, they will pay for a community that helps them get better at it faster or connect with others who share the passion. Hobbies often have more emotional buy-in than business topics, which makes members more likely to stay and more likely to recruit others.
What should I charge when I am just starting out?
Start with a number that makes you slightly uncomfortable, then reverse-engineer it from your income goal. If you want $2,000 a month and you charge $39, you need about 52 members. If you want $2,000 and you charge $99, you need around 21. Test the price for a month before changing it. The market will tell you fast whether the price is the problem or the offer is. Most of the time, the offer is the problem, not the price.
Is this passive income or active income?
Active income. Alston is clear about this, and it is worth repeating so you go in with the right expectations. Running a paid community means showing up, facilitating conversations, answering questions, and keeping the energy alive. It is predictable income once it is built — which is more useful than passive income for most people trying to replace a paycheck — but it is not something you set up once and forget. The value members receive comes directly from the fact that you are present and engaged. Remove that and the churn starts immediately.
Read Next
If this post got you thinking about which recurring income model actually fits your situation, the next step is understanding what actually works when you test real side hustles against real life. Getting that clarity early saves months of building the wrong thing.
Read: I Tried 7 Online Side Hustles. Here’s What Actually Paid.
Sources
- Skool.com — platform for paid online communities, starting at $9.99/month
- Calligraphy School on Skool: 1,200 members at $9/month ($10,800 MRR)
- Pickleball School on Skool: 1,400 members at $39/month ($54,600 MRR)
- AutoCAD course on Udemy: 120,000+ enrolled learners at $9.99
- AutoCAD Facebook Group: 346,000 members
- Substack.com — newsletter platform with free and paid subscription tiers
- Patreon.com — creator membership platform with platform and processing fees
Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.