- Daniel Chung, 36, decided to leave his six-figure corporate banking job in 2019.
- He tried the restaurant industry and had success, but he and his partner sold their business.
- In 2024, he decided to pursue food influencing rather than going back to the corporate world.
I began my career in corporate banking in 2011 and stayed until 2019. Although I was making six figures and had spent eight years of my life in the profession, I decided to quit because I wanted a career where I could do my own thing and not have to take orders anymore.
After leaving corporate in 2019, I decided to pursue a career in acquiring restaurants and found my business partner. We had no experience in the field, but we knew we wanted to be our own bosses. We focused on purchasing profitable existing restaurants, and then we would improve them. We went from owning one restaurant to three in under a year and a half.
The restaurant industry is also what connected me to my wife. Though we first met at church in 2013, we never really talked. In 2021, the lease for her family's Korean rice cake store was coming up, and she was looking for some guidance, so she reached out to me. I gave her some info, and afterward, she said, "Hey, let me buy you lunch." I realized that our relationship could go somewhere at that lunch and asked her out to dinner. We started dating, and we eventually got married in July 2022.
After selling my restaurant businesses, I tried to go back to a corporate job
My business partner and I did well for ourselves in the restaurant industry. I was able to buy a house and continued investing in real estate; however, even though we were financially successful, we weren't happy, and we got sick of running the business. You have to deal with a lot of employees, and ultimately, it's very tough.
We owned three restaurants, and we sold them in 2023. We planned to move on to buying and flipping real estate, but he started getting really busy. Without the restaurants, I began burning through my savings between paying my mortgage and trying to support my wife, who got pregnant in October 2023. My wife's pregnancy made our situation even more desperate, so I decided to try to go back to a corporate job to support us.
Because I had been out of the corporate job market for four years, I struggled to get interviews. When I finally did get an interview, the position ultimately didn't work out for me. That's when I decided I was determined to make things work another way.
I decided to try posting my videos on social media to make money
Given our financial situation, I started cooking two meals a day to save money. I figured if I cooked every day, we could probably save $200 a month. For example, if you order takeout, you're spending about $50 for two people. But if I cooked, I could be under $20 for two people.
In early 2024, I realized that if I posted my videos on YouTube or TikTok, I might make some extra money. I bought a neck mount to hold my phone and record myself cooking simple meals. I started posting one or two cooking videos daily across Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and Facebook. For a while, nothing happened, but all of a sudden, they started going viral.
My first viral TikTok was this April. I created a video where I made a breakfast burrito for my wife. It got around 4 million views, and I went from practically no followers to 10,000 from that one video. I was also able to get my account monetized at that point.
The success of the video encouraged me to keep going. After I started making money on TikTok, my Instagram also went viral. I now have over a million followers on Instagram. Since then, I've continually grown pretty quickly.
What I earn depends on the month. With TikTok and YouTube Shorts, I can make anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 a month because my accounts on those platforms are monetized. Instagram is the best place for me to create content for brand deals. I don't get brand deals every month, but when I do, they pay anywhere from $6,000 to $30,000. I won't know what my annual income from food influencing is until next year, because I started this year.
I find my recipes online and occasionally personalize them
I don't use cookbooks for recipes. I just go on my computer and search Google or YouTube for a video on how to make a recipe. When I find something I think will taste pretty good, I choose that and tweak it based on the ingredients I have or if I feel like there's a better way to do one of the steps.
In addition to my cooking, sometimes my videos include my wife trying out the food and reacting, and sometimes I even cook with my mom. I film our videos using my iPhone and my neck mount for POV angle videos, and occasionally, my wife will also help me film. I also do all of the editing and uploading.
In a corporate environment, I felt like I was just going through the motions to make money. With food influencing, I enjoy the freedom and challenge of content creation. When I create a video, it stays online for everyone, and it has a snowball effect, with people still watching my videos from a while ago. I see myself pursuing content creation for the foreseeable future.