The Time I Used To Work With Internet Star ‘ShayCarl’

Well, there's us. I'm the guy with glasses in the back (the goofy face is on purpose), the guy in the middle and the guy on the floor were two of my other co-workers and the dude with the beard yelling is ShayCarl. Who's ShayCarl? He has over 238,000 Facebook fans, over 288,853 twitter followers and almost one million YouTube followers. But, all in all, he's just some dude as was made obvious when we worked together.

I used to be a DJ on a radio station in Idaho Falls, ID and we had this one listener that kept calling in to try to win contests. He was always a great sport and made for fun, winning audio when he did win or play along with our contest. Not too much long later he started to swing by and actually talk to us in person whenever we were out and about. We ended up hiring him part time.

He'd do the usual radio stuff. He was on the air on the weekend and he'd be behind-the-scenes pushing buttons during our live broadcasts.

The entire time I knew him, he was humble about what he did. I think we were talking about our interests when he casually said, "Oh, I make some YouTube videos for fun." I told him I did, too, which I did. It wasn't until I looked at his YouTube channel which, at the time, had about 200,000 subscribers. I was blown away. He had all of these subscribers to watch what, essentially, were his home movies. Some of them were slice-of-life, some of them were for fun like he would juggle boxes of cereal at a store. They were pretty funny because he had a great personality and his wife and kids would play along, too.

I moved back to Washington state while he stuck around, but he didn't stay long. He ended up moving to California, but he's still doing what many do for fun, but he's getting paid to do it via endorsements and sponsorships.

The moral of this is Find out what you love to do, then find a way to get paid for it. Shay is just some dude who's a family guy. Wife and kids and all that. He loves being fun in front of a camera and now that's what he does. Good on him.