Russell Brunson and Iman Gadzhi are teaming up for a new online event called the Side Hustle Summit, scheduled to begin September 6, 2026.

That pairing alone will probably get the attention of anyone who has spent much time in the make-money-online or digital marketing world.

Brunson has been teaching funnels, direct-response marketing and online sales for more than two decades. He co-founded ClickFunnels in 2014 and has since built an enormous following around books such as DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets. ClickFunnels says Brunson has built an audience of more than one million entrepreneurs.

Gadzhi comes from a newer generation of online marketers. He started with social media marketing, built an education business around teaching agency owners and has increasingly shifted his attention toward digital products, AI and creator-driven businesses.

Now the two are combining their audiences for what they are calling the Side Hustle Summit 2026.

The event is free to attend.

But as anyone familiar with either Brunson or Gadzhi can probably guess, there's a much larger marketing funnel behind it.

And that actually makes this launch more interesting.

What Is the Side Hustle Summit?

The Side Hustle Summit is a five-session virtual training event featuring Iman Gadzhi and Russell Brunson.

According to the official event page, the sessions are scheduled for:

September 6: The Best Side Hustle to Start in 2026
September 7: How to Build Your First Side Hustle With AI
September 8: The Untapped Digital Goldmine
September 9: Russell Brunson's side hustle and marketing training
September 13: Building Your Side Hustle Live

Each session begins at 1 p.m. Eastern and is expected to run for approximately one hour. Replays are also supposed to become available within 24 hours.

The central idea being promoted is an AI-assisted digital product business.

More specifically, Gadzhi and Brunson are promising to show attendees how to create an online business without necessarily becoming an influencer, building a huge social media following or appearing on camera.

The marketing page describes a model where you can work with people who already have audiences while using AI to handle portions of the product creation and business-building process.

That last part caught my attention.

I've watched enough internet marketing launches over the years to know that "AI side hustle" can mean almost anything. Sometimes it's little more than repackaging ChatGPT prompts and calling it a business.

The Side Hustle Summit appears to be aiming at something more specific: creating and selling digital products, with AI reducing some of the work traditionally required to research, develop and market them.

That's a legitimate business model.

Whether it is as easy as the sales page makes it sound is another question.

The $373 Per Day Claim

This is where the marketing gets considerably more aggressive.

The headline currently promotes the idea of building a "$373 per day online income in just 5 days with AI."

It also emphasizes that you don't need to quit your job, appear on camera or have previous experience.

Anyone new to online business needs to put that number in the proper context.

$373 per day works out to roughly $11,000 per month if you earned it every day.

There are absolutely people making that kind of money selling digital products.

There are also plenty of people making significantly more.

But creating a product, finding an audience and consistently generating $373 every day are three very different things.

I'd view the $373 number as a marketing target rather than an expectation of what a typical attendee is going to earn five days after registering.

The event's own earnings disclaimer makes essentially the same broader point, stating that results require hard work and that the program should not be interpreted as a get-rich-quick opportunity.

>> Claim Your Free Ticket to the Side Hustle Summit (2026)

Why Russell Brunson and Iman Gadzhi Together Is Interesting

This might be the best reason to attend.

Brunson and Gadzhi arrived at online marketing from different generations and somewhat different directions.

Brunson is a direct-response marketer at heart.

Funnels. Offers. Upsells. Email sequences. Customer acquisition. Increasing average order value. Moving someone from a free offer to a low-priced product and eventually into a much more expensive offer.

If you've studied his books or ClickFunnels for any length of time, you know the playbook.

Gadzhi built much of his following in the social media era. His audience skews younger, and his businesses have historically leaned heavily into agencies, personal branding, online education and more recently AI-assisted digital products.

Putting them together therefore makes quite a bit of sense.

Gadzhi brings the current opportunity and the audience.

Brunson brings one of the most refined online sales systems in the business.

In fact, we're watching that system play out with the Side Hustle Summit itself.

The Side Hustle Summit Is Also a Funnel

This isn't a criticism. It's actually something marketing nerds should pay attention to.

The public offer is a free five-day event.

Behind the scenes, however, the Side Hustle Summit has a substantial affiliate launch running alongside it.

Partner materials show affiliates can earn approximately $1,032 per customer across the complete sales funnel.

The disclosed funnel currently includes:

• A $1,995 core offer
• A $995 one-time offer
• Additional smaller upsells

The launch also has a $122,500 affiliate prize pool, including $50,000 for the affiliate generating the most sales.

That tells us something important about the event.

The Side Hustle Summit isn't being held simply because Russell Brunson and Iman Gadzhi felt like giving away five hours of training.

This is a major product launch.

The free training generates leads.

The training builds belief in the business model.

The hosts demonstrate the opportunity.

And somewhere along that journey, attendees will be introduced to a paid solution that helps them implement it.

In other words, it's classic Brunson.

If you're an internet marketer yourself, I would almost recommend registering just to watch the funnel operate.

Pay attention to the emails.

Watch when the calls to action appear.

Notice how they establish the opportunity before presenting the product.

Watch the transition from free content to paid offer.

There may be as much to learn from how the Summit is sold as there is from the material being taught inside it.

What Are They Actually Selling?

The paid offer appears to be connected with Monetise, Gadzhi's program for building digital product businesses.

Educate, Gadzhi's education company, currently describes Monetise as a program for early-stage founders who want to build and launch their first digital product business.

The Side Hustle Summit affiliate materials list the core offer at $1,995.

So while registration for the Summit itself is free, I'd go into it assuming there will be a substantial pitch for a roughly $2,000 program at some point.

There's nothing particularly unusual about that.

Free challenges, webinars and summits have been used to sell high-ticket training programs for years.

Russell Brunson may have done more than almost anyone else to popularize that exact strategy.

The key distinction for attendees is simply understanding what they are signing up for.

You are getting free training.

You're also entering a carefully designed sales funnel.

Both things can be true.

>> Claim Your Free Ticket to the Side Hustle Summit (2026)

Is the Business Model Legitimate?

Selling digital products is certainly legitimate.

Courses, templates, paid communities, software tools, research products, newsletters, ebooks and other downloadable resources have supported online businesses for decades.

AI has also made parts of the process dramatically faster.

Research that once took days can sometimes be completed in hours.

An entrepreneur can generate outlines, brainstorm product ideas, draft sales copy, analyze competitors, summarize customer feedback and create basic graphics without hiring several different freelancers.

What AI hasn't solved is the hardest part of almost every online business:

Getting people to buy something.

You still need an offer people want.

You need traffic.

You need credibility or access to someone who already has credibility.

You need positioning.

You need a way to convert attention into customers.

And you generally need patience while you figure those things out.

That's where I'm most interested to hear Brunson's contribution.

The internet doesn't suffer from a shortage of digital products.

It suffers from a shortage of digital products that anyone actually wants to buy.

Creating another AI-generated ebook isn't much of a business.

Finding an underserved audience, understanding what that audience wants and building an offer specifically for them can be.

Related: Stoic Success Secrets - Russell Brunson Interviews Ryan Holiday

The "Stay Invisible" Angle

One of the Summit's stronger marketing hooks is the suggestion that you don't need to build a personal brand or put yourself on camera.

For some people, that's appealing.

Not everyone wants to become a YouTuber or spend several years trying to accumulate 100,000 Instagram followers.

The event suggests attendees can instead partner with people who already have audiences.

This isn't a new concept.

Affiliate marketing, joint ventures, newsletter sponsorships, influencer deals and revenue-sharing partnerships have been doing variations of this for years.

But AI may make the product side easier.

Someone with strong product-development and marketing skills could theoretically approach a creator with an audience, develop a product for that audience and split the resulting revenue.

In that scenario, one person owns the attention.

The other builds the monetization system.

That's considerably more interesting to me than another "open ChatGPT and sell an ebook" side hustle.

I'll be watching to see how much of the Summit revolves around this type of partnership model.

Who Is Iman Gadzhi?

Iman Gadzhi is a British entrepreneur and online educator who originally became known for teaching social media marketing agency businesses.

According to his official biography, Gadzhi began buying and selling Instagram accounts as a teenager before moving into digital marketing and eventually building several online businesses.

His education company says it has served more than 23,000 customers since 2016.

Gadzhi has also become one of the better-known personalities in the online entrepreneurship space, particularly among younger audiences interested in making money online.

His marketing style is aggressive and aspirational.

That means some people love his content and others immediately recoil from it.

Regardless of which camp you're in, he's very good at generating attention and turning that attention into product sales.

That's relevant when the subject of the event is building an online business.

Who Is Russell Brunson?

Russell Brunson has been teaching internet marketing considerably longer.

He co-founded ClickFunnels with Todd Dickerson in 2014 after spending years selling products online and experimenting with sales funnels.

ClickFunnels says the company reached $100 million in sales within its first several years, while Brunson went on to build an audience of more than one million entrepreneurs.

He is also the author of several popular marketing books, including DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets.

Whether or not you use ClickFunnels, many of Brunson's concepts have become standard vocabulary within internet marketing.

Value ladders.

Hook, story, offer.

Dream customers.

Sales funnels.

One-time offers.

Continuity.

Backend offers.

He has been teaching this stuff since long before every 19-year-old with a TikTok account started calling himself a growth marketer.

That experience is probably the biggest thing the Side Hustle Summit has going for it.

>> Claim Your Free Ticket to the Side Hustle Summit (2026)

Is the Side Hustle Summit Worth Attending?

At a price of free, I think it's difficult to argue against attending if you're interested in online business.

That doesn't mean I accept every income claim on the landing page.

I don't.

I also wouldn't sign up expecting Russell Brunson and Iman Gadzhi to hand you a business that produces $373 per day five days later.

Online businesses rarely work that neatly.

But the event brings together two people who unquestionably know how to sell products on the internet.

And the subject they're tackling is timely.

AI is lowering the cost and difficulty of creating digital products. At the same time, creating the product is becoming the least defensible part of the business because everyone else now has access to the same tools.

Marketing, distribution, audience access and offer creation matter more than ever.

Those happen to be areas where Brunson and Gadzhi have considerably more experience than the average person selling an "AI side hustle" course.

So I'll be registering.

My recommendation would be to attend the free sessions, take notes and judge the paid offer separately when it arrives.

You don't have to buy Monetise to learn something from the Side Hustle Summit.

In fact, if you've been around internet marketing for a while, watch the launch from two perspectives.

Listen to what they're teaching.

Then watch what they're doing.

The second lesson may be the more valuable one.

Side Hustle Summit 2026 begins September 6 at 1 p.m. Eastern. Registration is currently free.