5 "Ignored" AI Side Hustles from Wholesale Ted: What's Good and What's Missing
Five AI-enabled business models — from children's books to affiliate sites — are pitched as overlooked opportunities. The math behind the headline revenue example puts the author in the top 0.1% of self-publishers, and the video itself guarantees these "ignored" niches won't stay that way.
THE OPPORTUNITY
Wholesale Ted presents five AI-enabled business models: self-publishing motivational children's books on Amazon KDP, selling AI-designed woven blankets through print-on-demand, offering AI book creation services on Fiverr, running a "cozy coloring" social media channel, and building affiliate review websites using AI coding tools. The pitch centers on using newly accessible AI tools to create products and content that were previously labor-intensive or expensive to produce.
HOW IT'S EXECUTED
Children's books:
- Claude for market research and story generation (switching between Sonnet and Opus models for cost efficiency)
- Google's Imagen 3 ("Nano Banana") for illustrations
- Canva for PDF assembly before uploading to Amazon KDP's print-on-demand service
Woven blankets:
- Generate designs with Imagen 3
- Upscale them to print resolution using tools like AI1D
- Upload to Printify for fulfillment through Etsy, eBay, or Amazon
Service agency model:
Offering AI-generated coloring pages and book formatting on Fiverr at $200 per order
Coloring channel strategy:
Creates short-form video content while selling self-published coloring books through Shopify
Affiliate website path:
- Uses AI coding platforms like Base44 to build niche review sites targeting low-competition product categories
- Monetizes them through Amazon Associates or direct affiliate programs
WHAT'S CREDIBLE
AI democratizing content creation is true. These tools have lowered the technical barrier to producing acceptable-quality illustrations and formatted books. The market gaps identified (ADHD-focused children's books, kneeling chair review sites) represent legitimate research, even if the specific examples may not remain gaps for long, once publicized. Print-on-demand economics are accurately represented; Amazon KDP and Printify do operate on those models, and the profit calculator screenshots appear legitimate. The social-emotional learning book trend is real. That market segment has grown, but the "quadruple in nine years" claim isn't backed with anything. The basic mechanics of each workflow are reasonable and correctly describe how these platforms function.
WHAT'S OMITTED OR OVERSTATED
The revenue estimates are the primary issue. Ted extrapolates monthly earnings from a single author's current bestseller ranks, without acknowledging that ranks fluctuate, that these specific books may be experiencing temporary spikes, or that the estimator tools themselves carry wide margins of error. She presents $110,000+ monthly revenue for one children's book author as representative without explaining that this would place them in roughly the top 0.1% of self-publishers. This is not a typical outcome.
The time investment is systematically minimized. She demonstrates creating one book page in Canva but glosses over the reality that a marketable children's book requires 24–32 finished pages, multiple revision cycles, and ongoing marketing effort. The claim that these niches are "ignored" becomes self-defeating the moment she publishes this video to 674,000 subscribers. Any gap she's identified will be flooded within weeks.
The competitive landscape is presented backwards. She shows successful existing sellers as proof of opportunity, but those very sellers represent the competition a newcomer would face. A saturated Etsy blanket market with stores doing 115,000 sales doesn't signal easy entry; it signals entrenched players with first-mover advantages.
Her affiliate marketing claims are particularly misleading. She mentions earning "a lot of money" from affiliate commissions while simultaneously explaining that coloring book commissions are "not much at all" at 30–50 cents per sale, without reconciling this contradiction or providing actual figures. The kneeling chair example projects $95 commissions at 22% but doesn't address the volume required or whether that affiliate program actually converts. Building an affiliate site that ranks on Google is not primarily a coding challenge. It's an SEO and content challenge that can take 6–12 months of consistent publishing before seeing organic traffic. She never mentions that.
BOTTOM LINE
These are business models that work for some operators, but Ted is selling the tools and the dream rather than honestly presenting the work involved. The children's book approach might generate beer money for someone who enjoys the process and has realistic expectations about market saturation. The service agency angle has the most immediate viability. There is demand for AI-assisted formatting work, and Fiverr provides built-in customer access. The affiliate website strategy requires the most deferred gratification and SEO knowledge that she doesn't actually teach. If you're considering any of these, subtract the hype, multiply the time investment by four, and treat the revenue examples as outer-bound lottery tickets rather than median outcomes.
OPPORTUNITY DESK RATING
Concept Viability: 3/5
The business models themselves are sound. Yes, people do earn money through KDP, Printify, and affiliate sites, but the ease of replication she suggests will create immediate saturation in any niche she specifically names, and the AI tools lower barriers for everyone simultaneously, not just you.
Presentation Honesty: 2/5
Ted cherry-picks high-performing examples, uses revenue estimators as fact, omits time horizons entirely, and conflates her own affiliate success (selling courses and tools to a large audience) with what a newcomer selling coloring books could expect. She doesn't acknowledge that publicizing these "ignored" opportunities to hundreds of thousands of viewers eliminates the opportunity that made them viable.
