On side hustles, AI, and what happens when neighbors actually support neighbors

It was a Tuesday, which in our neighborhood means trash day. I was pulling into the driveway after work when I noticed a truck pulling up to my neighbor’s house. A guy and his son got out, grabbed a Ryobi pressure washer from the bed of their Toyota Tundra, and went to work on my neighbor’s two empty trash cans with cleaning solution and the pressure washer. Fifteen minutes later, the cans were clean and they were gone, likely to the next stop on a list I couldn’t see.

Genuine side hustle. The kind that requires no storefront, no advertising budget, no formal business plan. Just a skill, some equipment, and the initiative to show up.

I wondered how my neighbor found them. Then I started wondering how many people in my own neighborhood were running something like this without most of us knowing about it. A home baker. A seamstress. A lawn care operation. A photography side gig. Businesses small enough to not have formal marketing but large enough to serve more of the community, if only the community knew they existed.

That question led somewhere I didn’t expect.

Phase 1: The neighborhood experiment

I turned to Claude.ai and asked for help building a simple way to capture and share local businesses and side hustles. In a couple of conversations, we built a Microsoft Form that fed a Google Sheet, a simple directory that could be posted on our neighborhood Facebook page. Nothing fancy. No website, no payment system, no ongoing maintenance required. 

Within a few days, we had about 15 small businesses and side hustles on the list. Not bad for a neighborhood Facebook post. But I kept thinking about the broader community. Our neighborhood is just one piece of Deer Creek, Oklahoma. How many more were out there?

 Phase 2: Building something real

This time I turned to Claude Code. Over a series of sessions, we built a legitimate website: deercreeklocal.com, operated under The Wider Lens LLC. Small businesses and side hustles in the Deer Creek community can list their business for $20 per year. The listing includes links to their own website if they have one, their social media profiles, and a direct contact form that routes inquiries to their email.

The $20 price point was deliberate. Low enough to not exclude anyone who has a real business to offer. High enough to cover operating costs and create a small amount of buy-in. When you pay for something, even a modest amount, you tend to promote it. The goal was a directory that marketed itself because every business listed had a stake in its success.

Phase 3: Launch day

The plan said July 26. The site was ready earlier, so I stopped waiting. On July 15 I soft-launched quietly — a first post on the new Deer Creek Local Facebook page, a share to my personal page, a round of friend invites. Nine listings were live, most of them pilot businesses I had recruited personally with a free first year.

The public launch, the next day, was a single post to a local community Facebook page. The first paying customer, a photography business, found the site through that post and signed up without my ever speaking to the owner. Within four hours, three businesses had joined. Each one went from Facebook post to signup to live listing — checkout, submission form, published page — without me touching a thing. The system worked exactly as designed.

That was day one. One month later, the directory lists thirty-one businesses. Some found it the way that first photographer did — a post, a signup, no conversation required. Others came from the weekly invitations that have become the real work. Either way, the pipeline that carried the first three carried the next twenty-eight: checkout, submission form, published page, no bottleneck at my desk.

Thirty-one businesses at twenty dollars a year still won't fund anyone's retirement — and that was never the point. The directory exists to cover its own costs and to do one thing well: make it easier for neighbors to find and support the people running something useful down the street. By that measure, the first month worked. What got it from three to thirty-one is the same unglamorous work that carries it from here: weekly invitations to local businesses, a steady rhythm of community posts, and time.

The AI angle worth understanding

Neither phase required a developer. Neither required technical expertise. What they required was knowing what you wanted to build and having a conversation with the right tool. Claude.ai handled the form and spreadsheet logic. Claude Code handled the full website architecture, the listing system, the contact routing, and the admin backend. 

Most people think of AI as a search engine upgrade or a writing assistant. What this project demonstrates is something different: AI as a small business co-founder. The idea, the community need, and the judgment calls were human. The execution was a collaboration.

What this is really about

There is an entire economy operating inside most communities that most residents never see. Not because the businesses are hidden, but because there has never been an easy way to surface them. The trash can crew had no website. They didn’t need one. But their potential customers had no way to find them either. 

Neighbors supporting neighbors isn’t a new idea. What’s new is how frictionless it can be to build the infrastructure that makes it possible, and how accessible the tools to do it have become. What used to require a developer, a designer, and months of work now requires a clear idea and a willingness to have a conversation.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice, the directory is live at deercreeklocal.com. It was built for Deer Creek, but the idea isn’t. Every community has a version of the trash can crew. People running something useful that most of their neighbors never find. The tools to change that are available to anyone. The only thing required is someone willing to start the conversation.

Three questions worth sitting with this week:

Three things worth your time this week:

📚  Read

Zero to One by Peter Thiel — A book about startups that asks a question worth stealing: what valuable thing is nobody building? Thiel means billion-dollar companies, but the idea scales all the way down to a neighborhood. Going from zero to one means building the thing that doesn’t exist yet instead of competing over the things that do. Deer Creek already had the businesses. What it didn’t have was a way to find them.

🧠  Concept worth knowing

The invisible economy — economists estimate that a significant portion of economic activity in any given community is informal, unlicensed, or word-of-mouth only. Lawn care, childcare, tutoring, home repair, baked goods, alterations, pet sitting. This economy functions almost entirely on social trust and referral networks. The challenge isn’t demand — it’s visibility. Even in the United States — one of the most formal, measured economies on earth — researchers estimate the informal economy at roughly 6 to 10 percent of GDP: more than a trillion dollars a year in economic activity that never shows up in a storefront or a search result.

📊  Stat worth sharing

27% of American adults run a side hustle, according to Bankrate’s 2025 Side Hustle Survey. The average side hustler earns $885 a month — but the median is just $200. That gap tells you what most side hustles actually are: not startups, but a neighbor with a skill and a few spare hours. Exactly the kind of business a community never hears about unless someone builds the place to find it.

Zoom out. See what’s possible.

— Chuck