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Russell Brunson & Iman Gadzhi: The Two Hosts of the Side Hustle Summit
The most interesting thing about the Side Hustle Summit isn't the topic. It's the pairing. These two built nine-figure audiences in almost opposite ways, and September 6–15, 2026 is the first time they teach on the same virtual stage.
Russell Brunson: the funnel architect
Russell Brunson co-founded ClickFunnels in 2014 and bootstrapped it past $100M in annual recurring revenue without outside funding. Before that he spent a decade selling everything from potato-gun DVDs to supplements, which is where his obsession with sales funnels started.
He's the author of three of the most-read marketing books of the last decade: DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets. His live-event track record includes Funnel Hacking Live (a decade running), the 5 Day Lead Challenge, and the AI Secrets Challenge earlier in 2026. Nobody in the industry has run more launch-format virtual events, and it shows in the production quality.
What he brings to the summit: offer construction, storytelling frameworks (the Perfect Webinar, the Epiphany Bridge), and two decades of data on what converts strangers into customers.
Iman Gadzhi: the audience-native operator
Iman Gadzhi dropped out of school at 17 to run a social media agency, then built his name teaching other young people to do the same. His education businesses and YouTube presence made him one of the most recognizable faces in the make-money-online space for the under-30 crowd.
In 2025 he became co-owner of Whop, the marketplace where thousands of digital side hustles (reselling communities, trading groups, SaaS tools, courses) process their payments. That gives him something most gurus don't have: live data on which internet side hustles actually generate income right now.
What he brings to the summit: distribution to a younger audience, blunt positioning, and the Whop ecosystem where a side hustle can go from idea to first sale inside a week.
Why this pairing matters
Brunson's audience skews 30–55, business-owner, email-first. Gadzhi's skews 18–30, creator-economy, video-first. The overlap is small, which means each host is effectively introducing the other to a new market. Launch events live or die on reach, and this one has two distribution machines behind it instead of one.
It also hints at what the paid program will look like: Brunson frameworks for offers and funnels, executed on Gadzhi-era platforms. If that's what ships, it would be a genuinely new curriculum rather than a reheat of either host's old material. We'll verify that in our review once the program contents are announced.