The people

Russell Brunson & Iman Gadzhi: the two hosts

The most interesting thing about the Side Hustle Summit is not the topic. It is the pairing: these two built nine-figure audiences in almost opposite ways, and September 6–13, 2026 is the first time they teach on the same virtual stage.

Russell Brunson: the funnel architect

Brunson co-founded ClickFunnels in 2014 and bootstrapped it past $100M in annual recurring revenue without outside funding. He is the author of three of the most-read marketing books of the last decade — DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets — and nobody in the industry has run more launch-format virtual events: Funnel Hacking Live for a decade, the 5 Day Lead Challenge, and the AI Secrets Challenge earlier in 2026. The official event page leans on two of his numbers, worth reading as marketing arithmetic rather than audited figures: a claimed $10.4 billion generated by people he has taught, and an office wall tracking 1,784 who have cleared a million dollars with his frameworks. What he brings to the summit is offer construction, storytelling frameworks, and two decades of data on what converts strangers into customers.

Iman Gadzhi: the audience-native operator

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. The official event page now bills him as founder of Consulting.com, claiming over 23,000 clients, with a portfolio past $100 million in revenue. In April 2025 he became a co-owner of Whop, the marketplace where thousands of digital side hustles process their payments — over $4 billion to date, per the event page — which gives him something most course sellers do not have: live data on which internet side hustles actually generate income right now. He has also run this exact play three times before: free events with tracked attendee results the event page totals at $55.6M ($8.9M, then $15M, then $31M). His full business record, including the press scrutiny, is on the Iman Gadzhi page.

Why the 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 week teaches: Brunson frameworks for offers and funnels, executed on Gadzhi-era platforms. Worth knowing, though: the paid program sold during the week is Gadzhi’s existing product, Monetise — not a new joint curriculum.

The connection to their companies

The event runs through Brunson's Prime Mover organization. ClickFunnels and Whop are the hosts' companies and will almost certainly feature in the training, but the summit itself is its own event — and the registration flow runs on event.monetise.com, a subdomain of Monetise's site, which tells you whose product anchors the week.