How One Creator Constructed a Profession Out of Making Enjoyable of Your Facet Hustle

Stop me if you happen to’ve heard this one: somebody turns their quirky facet hustle right into a full-fledged profession.

Now, this half you in all probability have not heard: a 31-year-old social media persona turned his facet hustle of poking enjoyable at facet hustle tradition right into a profitable full-time hustle.

Charlie Light fortunately remembers the day he launched an X account below the identify John W. Rich (Wealthy). At the time, Light had no aspirations apart from merely amusing himself and different social media customers.

When the account, solely devoted to mocking rich enterprise individuals, unexpectedly took off, although, he launched a similar profile known as Chase Passive Income that targeted on mocking facet hustle tradition and on-line gurus who promote get-rich-quick schemes.

The jokes hit arduous sufficient that they made Light’s companies in demand amongst purchasers seeking to inject a little bit of enjoyable into their advertising and marketing.

The enterprise of parody

The irony of constructing a facet hustle right into a full-time job mocking facet hustles is not misplaced on Light. He says he by no means noticed himself as a comic, although he’s a lifelong fan of sketch comedy platform CollegeHumor, a model identified for jokes just like what Light does along with his satirical posts.

His widespread parody accounts helped Light discover success as a ghost author for company purchasers, which has paid properly. People within the enterprise neighborhood who had seen his posts reached out for his assist utilizing humor to broaden their attain.

“Brands will hire me to either help them write jokes or write funny content,” he advised Business Insider. “Some individuals will hire me, like CEOs or founders. I primarily just work with clients that I can just do humor or memes for.”

These days, Light primarily sees himself as a content material marketing consultant, which he says describes most of what he does each day. He says extra distinguished corporations are beginning to consider memes and humor to their advertising and marketing methods and budgets. He cited betting markets Kalshi for instance of an organization he is labored with lately.

While Light might spend most of his time as a content material marketing consultant for a variety of corporations, his parody accounts nonetheless generate income on their very own, primarily via sponsored posts. While enterprise typically varies from month to month, Light broke down how a lot he usually takes house from his work.

“The primary income is the clients paying $3,000-$4,000 a month to have me either run their account or help them run it. And then I typically make around $3,000 just doing sponsored posts on my parody account.” Light shared a latest financial institution assertion as verification of the earnings his companies introduced in throughout October.

Light added that his earnings can fluctuate, and he typically has promoting offers price as much as $10,000 a month for his parody accounts.

In April, he shared some insights on his private X account on constructing a parody-driven model, noting that Chase Passive Income had reached 30,000 followers in simply three and a half months.

“Establish a few ‘inside jokes’ right away,” he suggested. “These should be jokes that are unique to your brand; if you post the exact same memes as every other big meme account, you have no unique voice and your following isn’t worth much.”

While a lot of his posts are supposed to mock actual individuals, Light revealed that a lot of his targets, notably for Chase Passive Income, are individuals he used to comply with. One instance is on-line investing guru Grant Cardone, whom Light admitted that the Chase Passive Income caricature is partially primarily based on.

“I studied Cardone’s stuff for a long time, was a big fan of his, and I think there’s some good stuff to learn, but then also, there’s a lot of stuff to make fun of,” Light stated.

He added that he by no means intends for his posts to be mean-spirited, although he considers billionaires to be extra worthy targets than others.