⚡ Quick Answer
No, the Side Hustle Summit is not a scam. It is a real, free virtual event (September 6 to 13, 2026) hosted by two of the most verifiable people in online business: Iman Gadzhi and Russell Brunson. Attending costs nothing, the replays come with registration, and the income figures on the page are the company’s own best cases.
Looking for the full event review instead? Read our Side Hustle Summit review — sessions, hosts, pros and cons, and whether it is worth your time.
Is the Side Hustle Summit legit?
Yes. The event is real, the hosts are real, and attending is genuinely free. Below: who is running it, what the five days actually cover, and the one place your suspicion is pointing in the right direction. Register with your eyes open instead of your fingers crossed.
Searches for side hustle summit scam spike every time a big launch event opens registration, and that is healthy. Free events from famous marketers deserve scrutiny before you hand over an email address. So we ran the checks: the hosts, the money, the fine print. Here is what holds up, and the one place your skepticism should actually point.
If you came only for the verdict, you have it. The reason to keep reading is the schedule. The five sessions are published in advance, and seeing what is in them is how you decide whether the week deserves your calendar.
Free · No card field, check it yourself · Starts Sunday
The case that it is legit
The hosts are checkable, and that matters more than anything else. Most actual scams are run by people you cannot trace. Here, the opposite: Russell Brunson co-founded ClickFunnels, wrote three widely read books, and has operated in public for over 15 years (our ClickFunnels review covers that world). Iman Gadzhi built IAG Media, an education company, and a YouTube audience near 6 million, with a public history going back to his teens. Our profile of who Iman Gadzhi is goes through what is verifiable piece by piece.
The event mechanics are real and published. Five live sessions on fixed dates (September 6, 7, 8, 9 and 13, at 1pm Eastern), about an hour each, replays within 24 hours, registration with a name and email, no card required.
One detail we expected to find and did not: there is no VIP tier and no paid upgrade anywhere on the registration page. In this category that is unusual. Most free summits sell a recordings pass or an upgrade seat before the first session starts.
What the Five Days Actually Cover
This is the part we had left out, and it is the part that answers the real question. Trusting an event and wanting to attend it are two different decisions. Here is the published schedule:
| Day | Session |
|---|---|
| Sept 6 | The Best Side Hustle To Start in 2026 |
| Sept 7 | How To Build Your First Side Hustle With AI |
| Sept 8 | The Untapped Digital Goldmine |
| Sept 9 | Russell Brunson, The Billion-Dollar Mentor |
| Sept 13 | Building Your Side Hustle LIVE! |
Read the order rather than the titles. Day one picks the thing. Day two builds it. Day five builds one in front of you, live, which is the session that separates this format from a webinar that ends on a sales page.
The timing is the catch, and it is worth planning around. Sessions run at 1pm Eastern on weekdays, which is the middle of the working day for most people who want a side hustle in the first place. The replays land within 24 hours and cover you. If you are going to rely on them, decide that now rather than at 1pm on a Tuesday.
Want the full review? We cover all five sessions, what we liked, what we did not, who the event is actually for, and whether we think it is worth your time. Read our full Side Hustle Summit review.
Who This Is Actually For
The registration page says it is built for people with no experience, no money and no idea where to start. That is honest, and it narrows things usefully.
Five hours is probably a good trade if you recognise yourself here:
- You have tried to make money online and stalled at the part where you have to pick one thing
- You work full time and want something that runs beside the job, without a camera or startup capital
- You have bought courses you never finished, and you want to watch a method work before paying for one
- You keep reading about AI side hustles and cannot tell which ones are real
Skip it if you already run something that makes money and you want depth rather than a starting point, or if promotional content inside teaching genuinely irritates you. Both hosts sell education, and the week ends where you would expect it to.
Why People Search for a Scam First
Three things trigger the scam searches, and each deserves a straight answer.
The income framing. The marketing challenges you to build a “$373/day” side hustle and cites $55.6M+ in tracked sales from people who implemented the system. Those are the company’s own figures, reporting its strongest results rather than its average ones, and they are published instead of buried.
Which is the useful part. The number tells you what the method produced at its best. The five sessions tell you how: which offer those people picked, where the traffic came from, what they cut when something stopped working.
Whether that is worth five hours is your call, and it depends on how much of this you already know. A best case is someone who ran the experiments before you did. What transfers to your niche is the method, not the number.
Worth being blunt about the ceiling here: nobody hands you $373 a day for showing up. The event does not pay you. What it can do is put one specific method in front of you, taught by people who have run it, and let five hours tell you whether it fits before you have spent anything.
The free-event model itself. People assume free means bait. It is simply how events like this pay for themselves. The five sessions are free and complete, nothing inside them is gated behind a payment, and anyone who wants to go further afterwards can choose to. You can watch all five, take the frameworks and buy nothing. Plenty of attendees do exactly that.
Guru fatigue. Both hosts sell education for a living, and some people dislike the entire category. Fair enough. That is a preference, not evidence of a scam, and it applies to every free training event ever run.
That is the whole case, for and against. If it holds up for you, the form takes a name, an email, and about a minute.
Free · No card required · Starts Sunday, September 6
What We Checked Before Recommending It
| What we checked | What we found |
|---|---|
| Anonymous or untraceable hosts | No. Both hosts have 10+ year public track records |
| Payment required to “unlock” the free offer | No. Registration takes a name and email only |
| Fake scarcity or fake dates | No. Fixed published schedule with replays |
| Guaranteed income promises | None. The figures shown are the company’s own best cases |
| Hidden costs | None. All five sessions are free and complete, and anything beyond them is optional |
How to Get the Most Out of the Week
Register free, block the five hours, and judge the teaching on substance: does the live build in the final session look like something you could actually do? Take notes on the frameworks, especially Russell Brunson’s session, which draws on the same material as his One Funnel Away Challenge.
Then pick one framework and use it before the week is over. The people who get real value out of events like this are the ones who ship something small while the material is still fresh, rather than the ones with the tidiest notes.
How it compares to other free launch events
We review free launch events regularly, and a pattern separates the solid ones from the forgettable ones: whether the host has a track record that exists outside their own sales page. The AI CMO Training and Krista Mashore’s AI challenge both cleared that bar, and both put real teaching on the table from the first session.
The Side Hustle Summit clears it with room to spare. Two hosts instead of one, both with public histories that predate this event by a decade, and a format (five short sessions plus a live build) that leaves less room for filler than a single long webinar. Among the free events we have covered this year, the credibility floor here is about as high as it gets.
The trade-off is the same as always: bigger names bring bigger marketing, and the income framing here is more aggressive than most. If you can hold those two facts at once, credible hosts and loud numbers, you will get the value and skip the trap.
If your doubt is about the business model rather than the event, that is a fair separate question. Our guide to AI side hustles explains which patterns in this space genuinely work, which are crowded, and how to test any income claim you are shown.
Comparing this route against trading, dropshipping, Amazon FBA and high ticket sales? That is the full scored comparison.
Where We Stand, and What We Get Out of It
Worth saying plainly on a page that has just told you an event is legitimate: the links here are affiliate links, and we may earn a commission if you go on to buy something from the hosts later.
So run the check on us too. The five sessions cost nothing. If you attend all five and buy nothing, you are out five hours and up whatever you wrote down. That is the whole exposure, and it does not change based on what we earn.
Verdict: Legit, and Worth the Week
The Side Hustle Summit legit question has a clean answer: yes, it is a real event from real people, and free means free for all five sessions. Read the income figures as the company’s best cases, then judge the week on the teaching.
So look at the downside honestly, because it is small. If you are starting from nothing, five hours with two operators who have both been public for a decade costs you an email address. If the method turns out not to be yours, you will know that by Tuesday and it will have cost you an afternoon. Not $497, not a card you forget to cancel. An afternoon.
Why we would register:
- Free, with no card field anywhere on the registration form
- No VIP tier and no paid upgrade, so there is nothing to buy to attend
- Five live sessions on published dates, not a vague “coming soon”
- Replays within 24 hours if 1pm Eastern does not work for you
- Two hosts with a decade of public history you can check before you decide
The first session is on Sunday. Registering takes a minute now, and the real decision happens next week, watching.
Free · No card required · Starts Sunday, September 6
FAQ
Is the Side Hustle Summit a scam?
No. The event is real, runs on published dates (September 6 to 13, 2026), is hosted by two publicly verifiable entrepreneurs (Iman Gadzhi and Russell Brunson), and costs nothing to attend. Scam accusations around events like this usually come down to disliking marketing tactics, not evidence of fraud.
Is the Side Hustle Summit legit?
Yes, in the sense that matters: real hosts with checkable track records, a real schedule, free attendance with no card required, and replays for registrants. The income figures in the marketing are the company’s own best examples, and the frameworks taught across the five sessions are what you take away.
What is the catch with the free Side Hustle Summit?
There is no catch on the free sessions. All five are genuinely free, nothing inside them is gated, and registration takes a name and an email with no card. What it asks of you is the time: five hours across eight days, plus the replays if a session clashes with your schedule.
Are the Side Hustle Summit income claims real?
They are the company’s own reported figures, published as best cases rather than averages. The $373 per day framing and the $55.6M in tracked sales come from its most engaged students. Publishing the strongest results is the useful choice: across the five sessions you see the practices that produced them, and those are what you apply in your own niche.
Can I attend the Side Hustle Summit if I work full time?
Yes, but plan for it. The live sessions run at 1pm Eastern on 6, 7, 8, 9 and 13 September, which lands in the middle of a working day for most people. Replays are published within 24 hours and come with free registration, so the practical approach is to register now, catch live whatever you can, and treat the replays as the default rather than the backup.
Who is behind the Side Hustle Summit?
Iman Gadzhi, founder of IAG Media and the education company behind the event platform, and Russell Brunson, co-founder of ClickFunnels. Both have public track records going back roughly a decade, which is exactly what most scam operations lack.
Related reviews
How we checked this: every figure here is read at the primary source and linked, never taken from another article. Where a number is someone’s own claim about their product, we say so in the text. Read our full review methodology and affiliate disclosure.