Name: How I built a $200,000 side hustle in 1 year while working full-time
Uploaded: 2024-12-18T15:24:12.000Z
Duration: 14 min 35 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I built a side hustle from scratch and scaled it to over $200,000 in revenue in one year while working full time.

And today, I'll show you what the business is and how I plan to scale it to a million dollars in revenue a year.

Back in 2022, I decided to make it a goal to take my family, including my parents, grandma and aunts, to a European trip since they've never been before.

I was really into travel hacking and was always on this Facebook group called 10xTravel where people basically share a bunch of tips and advice on travel hacking.

So while hanging out in the group, I noticed that a lot of folks were racking up tons of points basically through business expenses.

That got me thinking about a side hustle that could generate big monthly expenses.

So I got on YouTube, like everybody, and searched for a side hustle idea.

Eventually, that led me to Amazon FBA reselling.

So Amazon FBA has a few strategies and they are basically online arbitrage, retail arbitrage, wholesale, brand direct, and private label.

Online arbitrage involves buying branded stuff like Nike, Adidas, Stanley, branded product online, and you resell it at market price on Amazon.

And retail arbitrage is very similar, but instead of buying stuff online, you actually go to a retail store, physical store, and you buy the product.

Wholesale actually involves getting the product in bulk, in volume, from wholesalers or distributors and selling them on Amazon.

And then brand direct is basically contacting the brand directly and then becoming an authorized reseller for their products.

Private label is basically you, yourself, creating, marketing, and selling your own branded product on Amazon.

Each one of these strategies has its own approach and also a lot of learning curves, making Amazon FBA a pretty versatile and could be challenging at first.

When I decided to start Amazon FBA, I was actually pregnant with my first baby and already at the end of the third trimester, just literally weeks away from going into labor.

So I quickly learned how to set up a business using my social security number.

I basically went to the town, I registered a DVA, which is doing business as basically a name for your business.

And then I got a virtual physical address and also obtained an EIN, which is a nine digit tax ID for your business from the IRS.

And then I also opened a bank account and applied for my first business credit card.

So the week before giving birth, I actually went to stores like TJ Maxx, Marshall, Walmart, to learn how to use a scanning app called Selleramp, which is used for finding product that I can resell for a profit.

So on the day I actually went into labor, I shipped my first box of product to Amazon warehouse and I was on fire.

I remember the excitement of seeing my very first sale at the end of November, 2022.

It was thrilling to know that I didn't have to ship anything to the end user because Amazon handle all the logistic for me once you ship them the box of product.

So in my first month doing retail average trash, which is what I started with, I generated a little over a thousand in revenue, but only 125 in profit.

But by the second month I brought in about 3,100 in revenue with about 560 in profit.

And then the third month I brought in even more, I increased the revenue to 7,800 with a profit of $1,500.

However, in the fourth month, despite putting a lot more time and a lot more work, I only brought in about $6,400 in revenue and made just $280 in profit due to very large software expenses.

As your business grow, you kind of have to spend a lot more in different software.

I was also returning to full-time work after my 12 weeks of maternity leave.

So I noticed that I basically spend my weekends driving around for like 12 hour and hopping from store to store to find and buy products.

And then I spend the evening basically just preparing, removing stickers and ship them to Amazon warehouses often until like 3am.

The first few months were pretty tough due to all the new things I had to learn.

During this four months of RA combined, I basically brought in about $18,482 in revenue and generated $2,566 in total profit.

However, this made me realize how much time I was spending away from my newborn.

Just to make a few hundred dollars a month.

Despite the challenges though, I didn't give up on this venture.

I was basically generating a good amount of points for travel.

I was opening business credit card every 30 days to 60 days each.

And each one of them have a welcome bonus that is pretty substantial.

So this first few months gave me the confidence and basically positive reinforcement that I could make this business work.

It was a really great proof of concept for starting my own company.

So I knew that to scale this business, I couldn't keep spending hours just like driving around, hopping from one store to another, trying to find profitable inventory, but only getting one or two of each product.

That's when I actually decided to invest more in my education.

So I used all the profit that I had made so far, and then I bought an Amazon FBA course.

It was a very expensive one, a couple of thousand dollars, but it helped me transition to online arbitrage, basically buying stuff online.

So I learned to basically use a software called Keepa product finder to find winning product to buy and resell online from the comfort of my home.

The time that I previously spent driving around on the weekends was now spent basically going over hundreds of thousands of products online for hours.

So my first month of online arbitrage brought in about $8,325 in revenue, with a profit of $975 due to additional software expenses to scale the business.

So things started to change quickly as I became more and more familiar with OA strategy.

The revenue and profit were far better compared to all the other businesses that I had tried before.

I flipped furniture before, bought from Estesell and sold on Facebook Marketplace before, but nothing like this.

Okay, wait, before I continue with the numbers, please hit the like and subscribe button if you haven't yet to show support for this very small channel.

For April 2023 marked my second month of online arbitrage and my sixth month of doing Amazon MBA.

I achieved $19,373 in revenue with a profit of $4,450 in one month alone.

So by July, I hit a personal milestone of $20K in revenue with yet another $4,400 in profit.

So to continue scaling this business, I made more strategic changes in September 2023.

I basically outsourced all my prep work to a prep center, which is basically a third party company that receives and prepares my online arbitrage product.

So instead of sending it to my house, I sent it to a prep center and they charge a fee per unit.

So additionally, I hire a few virtual assistants from the Philippines to help me with admin tasks, like checking emails and stuff like that, and also sourcing.

So as a result, my expenses were high in October, the highest it had been.

So even though I brought in $18K in revenue, I only generated about $171 in profit.

However, in November, I hit another milestone with a $31,000 in revenue and a gross profit of about $8,000.

But then because of all the different expenses, the net profits ended up being about $5,000.

Then in December, I generated about $34,000 in revenue and $5,700 in profit.

The most profitable 30-day period was between November 19 and December 19, coinciding with Black Friday and Christmas.

During this time, I brought in about $51,000 in revenue with a profit of $11,600.

That's more than what I earned in my full-time job.

So in my first full calendar year running my Amazon business, I achieved $203,000 in revenue with a profit of about $34,000.

But technically the $34,000, it wasn't really the net profit because we went to conferences, basically a bunch of like business travel expenses, buying new equipments and things like that.

At the end, we still got some profit out of it.

We had to pay the IRS, which is great, but it wasn't $34,000 net that was sitting in my bank account, unfortunately.

It's good that you're like reinvesting all the money into the business because the idea is to grow it big enough that it will actually bring in profit and be able to sustain you and pay the bills.

Now, this first year of running my Amazon business actually taught me several important lessons about just owning a business in general.

It could be applied to any kind of business, honestly.

And I know this is kind of cliche, everyone talks about it, but it's important.

There will be days with good results that reinforces your belief in the business.

And there would be days where you will feel guilty about not spending enough time with your family, making you want to give it all up.

However, staying consistent helps you learn and become more efficient in the end.

So initially I spent many hours just sourcing, preparing, learning, managing the day-to-day of the business.

But by the end of the year, I didn't spend any time doing any kind of sourcing because I did most of the sourcing in September and I basically took like October, November, December almost off.

I barely spent any time in the business and I still make the most money out of it.

When you find inefficiency in a business, you got to adapt to new strategy to improve the efficiency.

Most sales actually happen during Q3 and Q4 due to the holidays.

So this year I focused my time elsewhere during Q1 and Q2, basically doing other side hustle.

And we'll concentrate more on this specific business during Q3, which is about right now, all the way to Q4 to make the best use of my time.

I know I talk about this next one a lot and it's networking.

So follow people who are doing the same thing as you, connect with them often, and really you will never know what kind of opportunity might arise from these connections.