Five hours a week of posting earned more than her 9-to-5: Meet Sundas Khalid of Seattle, she posted career wins on Instagram while at Amazon. In 2024 the side hustle earned $302,000

In 2024, Sundas Khalid earned $292,000 in salary at Google. Her content business brought in $302,000 that same year. She spends four to five hours a week on it.

Khalid is a principal analytics lead in Seattle, working mainly on search and advertising. She’s in her 30s and has two kids. She described her finances in an as-told-to essay for Business Insider in October 2025.

Revenue is the money that comes in before costs come out. Khalid pays a virtual assistant and video editors, and she buys equipment. She didn’t say how much she keeps.


So the accurate comparison is revenue against salary. It isn’t profit against salary. Add the two figures and the total is about $594,000, close to the $600,000.

Her salary went from $77,000 to $292,000 in nine years

Khalid interned at Amazon in 2013. She got a return offer in mid-2014 and started as a data engineer. Her first full year, 2015, paid about $77,000.

In 2016 she was promoted to data engineer II, and her pay rose to $127,000. Her approach to promotion was simple. She looked at the work she already did, then worked out what she’d need to show to prove she was at the next level.

By 2018 she was a data scientist earning $232,000. That’s three times her 2015 pay, in three years. Most of the growth came early. From 2018 to 2024, a stretch that includes the move to Google, her salary rose by $60,000.

In 2019, Khalid had offers from both Google and Microsoft. A former colleague who worked at Google had spoken well of it. She liked Amazon, so she was picky about where she’d go next.

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Microsoft proposed $255,000, which was $23,000 above her 2018 salary. She used that number to negotiate her starting pay at Google. Google’s final figure isn’t in the essay.

Her advice is practical. You can argue from market value, but a second offer gives you more leverage. She suggests lining up interviews so the offers land around the same time.

She joined Google in December 2019.

She was posting years before it paid

The content started in 2016, while she was still at Amazon. She posted mostly about her career wins on Instagram. The aim was to connect with other women in tech.

Instagram launched Reels in 2020, and she began making educational videos on breaking into tech and moving up in it. She also made longer YouTube videos on the same subject.

Money wasn’t the plan. She says she didn’t realize content could pay well. She knew YouTubers earned from ads, but her ad revenue never came close to her tech salary.

As her channel grew, brands began contacting her about paid partnerships. She estimates these account for about 90% of her content income. On 2024’s $302,000, that would be roughly $270,000. The figure is her own estimate. She didn’t say what makes up the rest.

When she works with a brand, she puts a section about it inside the video and says the video is sponsored. Her view is that brands want to be linked with a creator who has a strong personal brand and makes relevant videos in a subject she cares about.

In 2023, she hired a virtual assistant to manage her inbox and negotiate partnerships. She also brought on video editors. All of them work part time.

That frees her to plan content ideas and write scripts. She does this outside her 40-hour week, in the evenings and on weekends. She says she enjoys it.

The hours invite a quick calculation. Five hours a week is about 260 hours a year, and $302,000 divided by 260 is roughly $1,160 an hour. That number misleads, though. It leaves out the assistant’s and editors’ time and what she pays them.

Her audience now totals more than 878,000 followers across platforms.

Here are other inspiring stories of people who built successful side hustles while working full-time

Scott Goodfriend lost his $215,000 Meta job. His food tour business was already running.

Scott Goodfriend, 39, was laid off from Meta in February 2023, eight months after he started. He now runs Ultimate Food Tours in New York. The business made $145,000 in revenue in the latest year he reports, and he says it hasn't yet matched his old salary.

Goodfriend moved from Los Angeles to New York in 2011 and made corporate videos at We Are Plus. In 2016 he joined Edelman, the PR and marketing firm. He rose to executive producer and led its augmented- and virtual-reality work.

He started applying to tech companies in 2022 and joined Meta in July as an augmented-reality producer. The salary was $215,000. He ran operations for the company's "real-time avatar" feature and worked remotely, covering both coasts.

Mass layoffs came in November 2022. His role was cut and he was put on an internal redeployment plan. In February 2023 he was laid off.

After moving to New York, Goodfriend researched food tours and took friends to places he'd found. In November 2019 he listed his first tour on Airbnb.

It started slowly. He got about four bookings before COVID-19 arrived in March 2020. He charged $60 a person, which covered food and non-alcoholic drinks but not tips. Groups were capped at 10.

His bosses at Meta and Edelman both supported the side business. In 2022, while still at Meta, he made $30,000 from tours.

Tanveer Singh started at a Penny a Word. By 2024 he averaged $5,000 a month

Tanveer Singh lives and works in India. He has an MBA and spent four years at a tech firm before he started freelance writing on the side. He quit his job in January 2023. By the end of 2024 he was averaging $5,000 a month from writing.

Singh's office went fully remote in 2020. He says that gave him his first sense of freedom, though he was still unhappy. He started ghostwriting.

His first projects came from Facebook groups. They paid $0.01 a word, which works out to about $10 for a 1,000-word piece. They carried no byline.

After about six months he landed technical writing work that paid up to $0.10 a word. That was ten times the rate he'd started with.

His first byline came in early 2021 at a gaming publication. It paid about $18 an article.

By mid-2023 he had a steady client at a large tech publication, writing about PC hardware. At the end of 2023 he reached about $2,000 a month. He says that was roughly double what his corporate job paid.