How I built a $200,000 side hustle in 1 year while working full-time

I build a Soso from scratch and scale 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 doll 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 theyve never been before and I was really into travel hacking and was always on this Facebook group called 10x travel 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 coins basically through business expenses that got me thinking about Soso that could generate big monthly expenses so I got on YouTube like everybody and searched for Soso idea eventually that lead 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 involve buying branded stuff like Nike Adida 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 involve getting the product in vog in volume from wholesalers or or distributor and selling them on Amazon and then brand direct it's basically contacting the brand directly and then becoming a authorized reseller for their products private label is basically you yourself creating marketing and selling your own branded product on Amazon each one of this strategy has its own approach and also a lot of learning curve making

Amazon FBA a pretty versatile and could be challenging at first when I decided to start Amon on 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 ra a DVA which is doing business asked basically a name for your business and then I got a virtual physical address and also obtain an EIN which is a 9d tax ID for

your business from the IRS and then also open a bank account and apply for my first business credit card all within like one week so the week before giving birth I actually went to store like TJ Maxx Marshall Walmart to learn how to use a scanning app called seller am 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 ay trash which is what I started with I generated a little over 1,000 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 12h 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 3:00 a.m. it was pretty rough 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 $1,482 in revenue and generated $2,566 in total profit however ever this made me realize how much time I was spending away from my newborn just to make a few hundred 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 30day to 60-day it 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 is 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 was not very scalable 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 called it was a very expensive one couple thousand do but it helped me transition to online Arbitrage basically buying stuff online so I learned to basically use a software called kipa product finder to find winning product to buy and resell online from the comfort of my home so I didn't have to drive around 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 some of that is actually all right 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 Tred before I flipped Furniture before bought from sell 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 I greatly appreciate it back to the numbers for April 2023 marked my second month of online Arbitrage and my sixth month of doing Amazon FBA I achieved 19373 in Revenue with a profit of 4,450 in 1 month alone so by July I hit a personal Milestone of 20K in Revenue with get another 4,400 in profit so to continue scaling this business I made more strategic changes in September 2023

I basically outsourced all of 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 task like checking emails and stuff like that and also sourcing so as a result my expenses were high in October the high as it have 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 now here's an interesting analytic 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 earn in

my full-time job so in my first full calendar year running my Amazon business I achiev 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 first thing is that consistency is key and I know this is kind of cliche everyone talk about it but it's important there will be days with good results that reinforce 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 helped you learn and become more efficient in the end so initially I spent many hours just cing preparing learning managing the daytoday 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 the next one is adaptability when you find inefficiency in a business you got to adapt to new strategy to improve the efficiency that's how I went from ra to OA seasonality is also important most celles actually happen during Q3 and Q4 due to the holidays so this year I focus my time elsewhere during q1 and Q2 basically do another Soso 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 this connections networking also reinforces your belief in the viability of your business because you will literally be seeing a bunch of other people in the same business achieving great success you'll be seeing people posting about like them making consistently 30 to 100K in Revenue every single month and that basically proves that the business model works you know now they have already demonstrated

that success if they can do it so can you now looking into the Press so far in 2024 I have brought in about 70k in Revenue with a net profit of about $1,000 I spent a little bit more hiring people and stuff so remarkably I now spend only about 7 hour a week on this business a quarter of the time I actually spent last year since it's the low season right now however sourcing remains is the number one bottleneck in this business it requires a lot of time to qualify and purchase good products and constantly

monitor sales that is going on in all the different retail stores could be very timec consuming so moving forward I actually aim to yet again transition to a different strategy and that is wholesale and brand direct the virtual assistant I hire before have already researched and contacted over a thousand brands for me and we have already opened about 20 to 30 accounts so far but I still have to basically manually go over their catalog and see what product is actually selling well on Amazon and how many of them I can buy and then I will

have to call them build a relationship negotiate a priceing to make it a worthwhile purchase and then the benefit of going into wholesale and brand direct are pretty significant because while the profit per units is lower you can actually secure a larger volume it's a volume game additionally once you overcome the initial phase of finding good product in a specific brand the ongoing sourcing effort basically decreases because we simply place a purchase order with the brand every month and the prep Center would handle all the preparation and shipping it to Amazon so in the end

I really don't have to do much it will be even less time that I have to spend in this business so as with any new Venture setting up new system and also processes takes time in the beginning the goal is to make the business leaner and more efficient once that's achieved operations should basically run more smoothly so this is my plan for 2024 and 2025 it's basically to scale the business to about a million dollar in Revenue every year and expand further from there now to scale in business access to Capital is crucial I achieved

this by opening multiple business credit cards and leveraging basically their promotion something like the 0% APR or 0% interest on purchase for 12 to 15 months and there are plenty out there so this essentially provided me with a almost like a loan cap at the credit limit which I didn't need to pay off until the end of the promotional period this strategy allowed me to scale the business without using much of my own Capital so for a deeper dive into this topic I recommend checking out my other videos on the power of credit car and

the power of business credit card thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one