I Turned a Side Hustle Into $20,000 a Month — Working Part-Time Without a College Degree

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Kelly Rocklein, an Oregon-based entrepreneur who dropped out of college to pursue a career in user-generated content (UGC). Rocklein, 30, broke six figures with her UGC side hustle in 2022, at one point earning six figures on top of $160,000 in her full-time corporate role. She’s since transitioned into creative strategy consulting to focus on building her business, UGC Pro. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

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I grew up in a single-parent household, so it was my mom raising me, my brother and my sister. My dad basically left us in financial ruin just because of how the divorce played out. I was a free lunch kid going into high school. I knew that a four-year state college was not on the table because I couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t want to take out student loans.

So, in 2013, going into my senior year when all of my friends were excited about where they were going to school, I was trying to get creative and figure out an alternate path. I worked three jobs my senior year to afford my first semester of community college; I enrolled, but very soon it dawned on me that I was just following societal norms and working so hard for something that wasn’t my passion.

I wanted to get into content creation. Instagram was still very new. Stories and reels didn’t exist. When I thought about what I wanted to do, I didn’t have a term for it, but it was user-generated content (UGC) — I wanted to work with brands on Instagram. I wanted to do a barter deal, which is what I did, where I would say, “Hey, if you send me this product that I want but don’t want to pay for, I can make a really cool video about it, and then you could post it to your socials.” I did that for a long time while working as a part-time tour guide at Disney when I lived in Orlando.

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It wasn’t until 2018, when I worked at a digital marketing agency, that I realized I’d been creating UGC for these brands.

I worked really hard to build a portfolio between 2014 and 2015. In those early days, I charged about $25 an hour for my work. I was still living at home. I would stay up all night after my day job. Also, when I decided to start building my portfolio, I didn’t tell my mom that I wasn’t enrolling in community college for the second semester. I told myself I’d give it one year to make content creation work.

About eight months in, I got my first contract with Proctor Gallagher Institute. Bob Proctor from The Secret was my first client. He has since passed away, but it was an incredible first contract, and at the time, paid about $30,000 for that quarter of that year. That was the most money I’d ever seen in my entire life.

That afforded me the luxury of being able to move to the West Coast. I wanted to move to Los Angeles to expedite my learning curve, the real-life experience. I knew that if I didn’t have a degree to point to, I had to have a portfolio jam-packed with incredible work. In LA, I fell into the influencer world. I was doing creative directing, video editing. Essentially, I was doing creative strategy — focused on how to get people to stop scrolling and watch a video. It was kind of like the Wild West because many of those influencers weren’t operating with an HR helmet on.

Related: How I Used Side Hustles to Pay Off $40,000 Debt in 1 Year

By fall of 2018, I was ready to leave that world and go into corporate. I wanted work-life balance to an extent, and to make a salary I could count on with health benefits. Because of the real-life experience that I collected between 2014 and 2018, I got my first agency job at MuteSix. I didn’t realize how much of an opportunity it really was, but similar to how people in tech will say they’re ex-Twitter or ex-Meta, in the marketing space, to say you’re ex-MuteSix carries a lot of weight.

Even though I had mostly organic social experience up until this point, thankfully they saw what I was capable of and realized my skills translated to direct-response marketing. Then I learned that the content I was editing for these brands is UGC, and I’d been doing it for more than four years. I also continued doing one-off UGC products as a side hustle while working my full-time corporate role.

Related: He Spent $36 to Start a Side Hustle. Now the Business Earns 6 Figures a Year — With Just 1-2 Hours of Work a Day: ‘Freedom.

I finally felt like I was getting more financially stable. I no longer had to rely on my credit card just to get by. I had the luxury of being able to pay off my debts and start building wealth. I earned $70,000 at that full-time corporate job and took on UGC projects as they came, but it wasn’t until about 2020 that the side hustle became a consistent opportunity with the potential to make real money — and basically double my salary.

After MuteSix, I worked in a senior producer role at a women’s clothing brand, but a week before the pandemic hit, I resigned from the position because it wasn’t a good fit. Without a corporate income stream, I started to build up my UGC consulting services. By fall of 2021, I’d taken another full-time creative strategy job, but all along I’d been building my UGC side hustle business and continued to do so even when I started work as creative director of another brand in 2023. At that point, I was making $160,000. I’d even moved out of LA, but the company continued to pay my competitive salary. I’d also officially hit over $100,000 in annual revenue with my UGC side hustle.

Related: From Side Gig to 6-Figure Success — How I Built a Thriving Home-Based Business as a Busy Family Man

So I had this six-figure side business that I worked on for 10-15 hours a week. It was steady work with three main clients and occasional one-off projects. Once I projected I’d do more than $300,000 that year, it made sense to go into work for myself. The more money I could make for my clients, the more leverage I’d have to charge more. I could choose UGC projects willing to pay higher rates. With just two or three contracts, I could make a full-time creative director’s salary working part-time.

That decision ended up being the best one I’ve ever made: I’ve never felt more financially secure than when I’ve been working for myself.

I’m currently solely focused on one contract. I have never before wanted to focus on just one brand, but at this point, it’s such an incredible opportunity — the monthly take-home is up to $20,000 a month. My hourly rate is $175, but if clients commit to 10 hours per week, it drops to $150. I can focus on this creative strategy client, take on my UGC projects that I want to work on and still have the mental capacity and energy to be able to build UGC Pro.

UGC was never a talking point on social media until the summer of 2022, when everyone and their mom was talking about it on TikTok‘s For You page. It got to a point where people were talking about it in a way that I was like, Why does it sound like an MLM? This is weird, guys. It’s a service like graphic design and video editing are services. You don’t need to be an influencer. You just need to be good at content creation. UGC Pro was born when UGC went mainstream on TikTok. It was because of all the misinformation floating around that I made the account to reset expectations and help train the next wave of creators and strategists for performance marketing. So this business popped up organically as a creator resource.

Even though there are more UGC creators than there have ever been before, it’s still an incredible opportunity: More direct-to-consumer brands are popping up every single day.

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And the beauty of UGC is you don’t need to be a 20-something pretty blonde girl to be successful. I have students who are Gen X creators who have built six-figure businesses and have now transitioned to TikTok shop, and they’ll come to me and say, “Kelly, I’m leveraging the best practices that you taught me for TikTok shop” — and these creators are in the top 1% of TikTok shop. They’re now making up to six figures a month.

When I decided to drop out of college in 2014, it felt like such uncharted territory. With the exception of my mom, everyone asked me what I was going to do and thought that without a degree, I wouldn’t make it. Even a family friend who was a serial entrepreneur asked me what my Plan B was. Fast forward to today, and taking alternative paths that don’t involve college is more widely accepted.

If you’re someone interested in taking a different route, it’s so important to get as much real-life experience as possible. Focus on strengthening your skill sets and building a portfolio that showcases your capabilities. It can all feel overwhelming; my journey was not easy by any means. There were a lot of roadblocks, times in my career when I didn’t know why I continued to pursue it. But, ultimately, if you keep putting one foot in front of the other, you’ll look up one day and be like, How did I get here? I don’t know, but I’m really grateful I never gave up.

This article is part of our ongoing Women Entrepreneur® series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of running a business as a woman.

This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Kelly Rocklein, an Oregon-based entrepreneur who dropped out of college to pursue a career in user-generated content (UGC). Rocklein, 30, broke six figures with her UGC side hustle in 2022, at one point earning six figures on top of $160,000 in her full-time corporate role. She’s since transitioned into creative strategy consulting to focus on building her business, UGC Pro. The piece has been edited for length and clarity.

Want to read more stories like this? Subscribe to Money Makers, our free newsletter packed with creative side hustle ideas and successful strategies. Sign up here.

I grew up in a single-parent household, so it was my mom raising me, my brother and my sister. My dad basically left us in financial ruin just because of how the divorce played out. I was a free lunch kid going into high school. I knew that a four-year state college was not on the table because I couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t want to take out student loans.