🔴 She doubled her former full-time salary in less than a year

The day after Jess Ramos was fired from her last corporate job, she signed an $18k creator contract.

By then, the by-day professional data analyst had already built a lucrative side business as a creator covering data and AI. Today, she reaches over 640,000 people across platforms and earns multiple six figures a year, almost entirely through partnerships with enterprise brands.

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By the time Jess Ramos got fired last year, her creator income had already eclipsed her salary. She’d risen rapidly to that point over the previous three years, building momentum off of one unexpectedly viral LinkedIn post.

One Sunday evening, sitting around the house, she wrote about how much working from home gave back to her life. By lunch the next day, the post had surpassed 1,000 likes and coworkers were telling her she was famous. She told them she was a one-hit wonder. “Nobody’s gonna care what I have to say,” she remembers thinking.

Jess was in her early-to-mid twenties, just a couple of years into her career, and wrestling with imposter syndrome. With no specific content strategy, she decided to start posting about SQL, the coding language she used in her day job as a data analyst. She fact-checked the post over and over, terrified of getting something wrong in public.

That first SQL post, she remembers, “popped off, too.”

LinkedIn was in a sort of golden age, when relatively few people were treating it as a creator platform and the algorithm was still wired such that it could send any ordinary post to a vast audience. So she kept writing, chasing the dopamine of each new hit.

By the time she started what would become her last corporate job, she'd already amassed 50,000 LinkedIn followers.

Over the following two-and-a-half years, Jess’ profile grew to the point that, in some months, her creator business brought in two or three times her salary. The success was increasingly difficult to reconcile with how miserable she'd become at work, where expectations kept shifting and she felt as though she was being pushed out.

She was already close to quitting when they fired her, just before her scheduled PTO. The following day, she signed an $18,000 contract, and soon after found herself on a cruise in the Caribbean, wondering, “I’m unemployed, what now?”

Today, Jess’ LinkedIn following is over 304k and, while she declines to share up-to-date revenue numbers, she did say her revenue is more than twice her last corporate salary of $153k.

The website development platform Webflow had Jess host the livestream for their annual conference earlier this year.

She’d signed an NDA to get briefed on secret announcements at short notice. By 8 a.m., fresh out of hair and makeup, she was on set with some 20 people watching from behind the cameras. One person brought her water with a straw; another stepped in to touch up her makeup.

This kind of work has become increasingly common for Jess, whose creator business now generates 90% to 95% of its revenue from brand partnerships with companies including IBM, Microsoft, OpenAI, Salesforce, and Tableau — lucrative deals often built around her attending these conferences to produce on-the-ground content.

We asked her if the high level of dependence on sponsorships makes her nervous. No. Enterprise brands need people who can explain what they're building in clear language, and there aren't many creators who can both understand the subject matter as a practitioner and carry on in front of a camera.

Events anchor her biggest contracts, typically involving at least three to five deliverables that might include a photo post or carousel, a couple of videos, and an interview with an executive.

She's particular about the terms, too (see more in our Takeaways section):

In 2023, LinkedIn flew Jess to its California studios to film a SQL course for the LinkedIn Learning program.

The course paid her relatively little, $1k a month at most. “If money is your motivation, don’t do a LinkedIn Learning course,” she told us. Jess decided she could make more teaching on her own, and she was right.

Her own course line, Big SQL Energy, includes six options:

Intermediate and bundle customers also get access to her Discord and monthly office hours via Zoom. She’s sold roughly 250 intermediate courses and about 30 bundles, most of those on Black Friday, the one time she cuts the price. Most months, her courses bring in a few thousand dollars without much pushing.

Jess is clear-eyed about what she’s selling. “SQL has been around since the 1970s. There is nothing new that I can teach in SQL that has not been done before.”

She leveraged her YouTube channel as the course’s growth engine, posting long-form videos starting in September 2025 and gaining about 5k subscribers a month. At first, it was with two videos a week, then three.

When she was publishing one or two a week, the channel drove $4k to $5k a month in course sales from a 20-second plug for her free course. Then, she burned out on the same beginner topics, how to become a data analyst and how to build a portfolio, and hasn’t posted in about three months. She’s currently looking for a strategist to help her bring the channel in line with the enterprise brand she’s built everywhere else.

Newsletters are filling some of that gap. Her primary newsletter has 45k subscribers, and her LinkedIn newsletter (which she long avoided because it’s not a true newsletter in that you can’t access the email list) has grown to almost 85k subscribers in just half a year.

“It has been the fastest growing platform for me ever,” she says. She now sells ad placements there to data companies trying to reach enterprise readers. Speaking, YouTube AdSense, and paid newsletter subscriptions round out the rest of her income.

When asked what gives her courses an edge, she answered, “In short, me.”

Subscribe to Big Data Energy.
Connect with Jess on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.

Events are the foundation of Jess’ most lucrative deals, and she’s mastered the science of selling brands on much more than just the content she produces while in attendance.

For any creator with the specialist expertise B2B brands need in their partners, her playbook is one of the most portable we’ve covered.

When a brand flies Jess to its conference, they’re paying for multiple days of her time, and she prices accordingly.

Exec interviews started as a deliverable in one brand deal, and quickly became her best sales tool.

Jess uses AI to organize information and catch mistakes, but no longer lets it do the writing. After experimenting with AI-generated copy, she found herself drifting toward stiff, overly polished thought leadership that didn't sound like her. Now, she uses it to keep track of the details behind each brand deal.