A Dad Started Selling Voiceovers on Fiverr — 18 Months Later He'd Made $1.5 Million

Joel Young was a pastor with an unpredictable income and $50,000 in debt from credit cards, car and personal loans, and medical bills, moving his family to a new town or state with each new church posting. The idea for a side hustle came when he paid a voice-over actor $10 on Fiverr for a church project and wondered why he couldn't sell the same kind of work himself — he already had the equipment, a leftover microphone from a band he'd been in and a MacBook.

He had no professional voice-over experience and expected to make maybe $40 or $50 a month charging $5 at a time for jobs like reading commercial scripts or narrating audiobooks. Instead, he and his wife Jenna were startled by how much he earned working just a couple of hours a night after his day job — sometimes until 1 or 2 a.m. Within 18 months of his first sale in February 2013, the extra income had paid off the family's entire debt.

With debt cleared, Young set a goal: once his side-hustle income matched his pastor's salary, he'd consider making it his full-time job. He hit that mark within six months, expanding along the way into animated explainer videos after voice-over clients started asking for video content too — a skill he taught himself from scratch, again charging little until he'd built up proficiency. In 2015, once the two incomes were roughly equal and the family had an emergency fund saved, he left the pastorate to work on Fiverr full time.

By the time he'd built his business up, his Fiverr profile offered "radio quality" voice-overs at $5 per 50 words with a $30 minimum order, and video work priced from $350 to $750 for 30 to 90 seconds, with some projects running into the thousands; his average customer spent more than $500, and he was producing over 50 videos a month for clients including Comcast, Lowe's, Home Depot, State Farm, and the U.S. Navy. He says 40% to 50% of clients become repeat customers. He also runs his own website outside Fiverr, splitting his overall income roughly 50-50 between the two, with his Fiverr earnings alone totaling more than $1.5 million since 2013.

Young says the money was never really the point — it was the stability and freedom it bought his family. Debt-free, the Youngs adopted a third child, a boy who was 5 at the time of the interview (joining two other sons, 9 and 11), and spent roughly three years living and traveling full time in an RV before eventually settling into a house in Boulder, Colorado, where Young volunteers heavily at a local church without being on its payroll, while Jenna is a full-time mom.

His advice to others: don't dismiss a skill just because it feels easy to you — he calls this the "curse of ability," the same trap that made him assume no one would pay for someone "just talking into a microphone," when in fact thousands of people did, precisely because most people either can't do it or won't. He suggests asking a friend or coworker to name three things you're good at that most people aren't, staying adaptable enough to keep teaching yourself new skills via free resources like YouTube, and not waiting for your skills to feel polished before charging for them — his early, cheaper work served a different tier of client, but it's what got him to the level he's at now.