Like many entrepreneurs who quit their 9-to-5 jobs to become their own bosses, Jasmine McCall did not find her entrepreneurship journey easy. She juggled two side hustles while working full-time and being a mom.
However, her hustle paid off and gave her the confidence to leave Amazon, where she worked as a resource manager to focus full-time on her side hustles. Together with her husband, they bring in $40,000 a month in passive income.
McCall started with two side hustles. The first was a YouTube channel where she shared money and career advice, and the other was a digital guide to help people boost their credit scores, after what she went through paying off debt.
She attributed her video success to being vulnerable with her audience. According to her, credit issues and debt are so common but are often taboo to talk about.
“With my YouTube channel, I wanted to create a space where I could speak openly about how I struggled with — and then succeeded in — my finances and career,” she told CNBC Make It. “In January 2021, I had paid off $110,000 of student loans and credit card debt with a combination of my salary, savings and stock dividends.”
She revealed that her first video was about how to deal with debt collection agencies and boost one’s credit score from 495 to 836. She got a lot of positive feedback and had 160,000 views within just four weeks. To date, that video alone has earned her $50,000 from YouTube ad revenue, she further revealed.
“I later joined the YouTube Partner Program and earned ad revenue from Google. This also helped me rank higher in YouTube search, boost my subscriber count, and land major partnership deals,” she disclosed.
The feedback she got from her first video also inspired her to create other products. She created her first digital product, a DIY Credit Boost Kit, and then a homebuyer’s kit. After noticing comments on her career advice videos about how “stuck” viewers were with their resumes, she put out a digital resume kit with the help of her husband.
“We priced the resume kit at $17, the credit kit at $47, and homebuyers kit at $69. Our audience-inspired products are a huge part of our revenue. From January to April 2022, we earned $103,511 from the Credit Boost Kit, compared to $14,779 from YouTube ad revenue,” she noted.
McCall’s entrepreneurial journey has been heavily supported by her husband, Jay. He quit his software engineering job to help her. Now, almost all of their income is passive.
