Muskaan Mittal and Aashish Gupta’s a version of this story that’s easy to tell as young techie couple gets bored, quits corporate life, “follows their passion,” gets rich making reels. It fits neatly into a LinkedIn carousel. It’s also mostly wrong.
Their real story is slower, messier, and far more useful than the headline version which is exactly why it’s worth reading properly.
The Part Everyone Skips: They Didn’t Quit First
Before stepping into content creation, both Muskaan and Aashish were deep in the tech world with Aashish working as a data analyst earning around ₹12 lakh a year, Muskaan as a software developer earning about ₹23 lakh, together crossing ₹35 lakh annually. That’s not a “stuck in a job I hated” story. That’s a “genuinely doing fine” story. Which makes what came next stranger, and harder to copy.
Their content journey didn’t begin with a resignation letter, it began in May 2023, quietly, as they started filming their travels. No plan, no strategy deck, no “personal brand” language. Just a couple filming trips because it was fun.
Here’s the detail almost nobody highlights: it was a single video from a Vietnam trip crossing 20,000 views that told them something was working. Not a viral hit with millions. Twenty thousand views. That’s the uncomfortable, freeing truth about “going viral” sometimes the signal that changes your life is embarrassingly small.
They Worked the Job AND the Side Hustle For Longer Than You’d Think
This is where the story quietly breaks the internet’s favorite myth: that you either have a job or a dream, and the brave thing is to pick the dream immediately.
They kept their full-time jobs and only landed their first paid brand collaboration in October 2023 for ₹15,000. Fifteen thousand rupees. Less than a single month’s rent in most Indian metros. If you’re waiting for permission to feel like your early content money is “too small to count” but it wasn’t for them either.
The actual leap only came in 2024, when the tech jobs were finally left behind for content creation full-time, the same year they signed with a talent agency, moved into affiliate marketing, and started hosting group trips. That’s roughly a full year of overlap between salary and side hustle. Not a leap of faith. A calculated, boring, patient overlap.
The Contradiction Nobody Talks About: Leaving Structure to Get More of It
Here’s the part that should make you rethink the “quit and be free” narrative entirely. In their Instagram video, the couple directly compared their techie income against their creator income which is not to flex, but to answer the flood of DMs asking how they actually afford this lifestyle.
Year two was the turning point in numbers, not just identity but signing with an agency, adding affiliate income, and running their first group trip took their earnings to around ₹45.3 lakh. That’s the year most people would’ve called it a win and stopped optimizing. They didn’t.
Then Came the Real Twist: They Walked Away From the Safety Net They’d Just Built
If you think the agency deal was the “arrived” moment, the story does something almost nobody expects. 2025 became their biggest year yet and it started with them leaving the very agency that had stabilized their income, choosing instead to diversify across YouTube and Facebook monetisation and affiliate marketing on their own.
Read that again. They didn’t cling to the system that finally worked. They outgrew it on purpose, and rebuilt their income across multiple platforms instead of one manager and one paycheck. That’s the part that separates a lucky viral moment from an actual business with the willingness to dismantle your own safety net once you’ve outgrown it, twice.
What This Story Actually Teaches (Not the Instagram Caption Version)
- Virality isn’t the milestone, proof-of-concept is. 20,000 views changed their trajectory more than any big number that came later.
- The “quit your job” moment is usually the least interesting part of the story. The unglamorous overlap year with job by day, content by night is where the real groundwork happened.
- Small money validates the idea before big money validates the business. ₹15,000 mattered more than it sounds.
- Diversifying is riskier than staying and they did it anyway. Leaving an agency that was already paying them well is the opposite of “safe,” and it’s exactly what pushed their income past ₹1 crore.
The internet will keep repackaging this as an “escape your 9-to-5” story. It isn’t. It’s a story about sequencing risk correctly, respecting small proof points, and being willing to give up a working system to build a better one. That’s a far less shareable lesson and a far more useful one.