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17-Year-Old Makes Over $30K Per Month With Amazon Side Hustle
January 8, 2024
17-year-old Bella Lin used her $2,000 savings to start an Amazon side business, which she created to solve the problem of disappearing pet guinea pigs.
When Lin was 12 years old, she lost one of her three pet guinea pigs when she let them roam free in her parents’ grassy, fenced-in backyard just outside San Francisco. At the time, she thought it was a better idea than keeping them cooped up in their “prison-barred” cage. But unfortunately, one of her guinea pigs disappeared outside, and her dad saw an eagle fly by and take another one away, according to CNBC.
Following this, Lin, who is a senior now at Khan Lab School in Mountain View, California, started to draw prototypes for guinea pig cages.
She went through a number of models and invested her $2,000 in savings to launch her side hustle GuineaLoft on Amazon in November 2022. According to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It, Lin sold almost 11,000 cages and turned over $410,000 last year, which amounts to approximately $34,000 per month.
Lin says she works around 20 hours each week on GuineaLoft while also juggling a full academic course load, extracurriculars, and college applications. She is now thinking about taking some extra time before college to focus on her business.
According to Lin, she got started by telling her dad, who is a computer programmer, that she had the vision to create a better cage. “He had a connection to a family-owned factory in China through a former client, and he made an introduction,” per CNBC.
After initially coming up with prototypes for the cage, Lin “got distracted by a different idea” and created a business called TLeggings in July 2019 by designing, manufacturing, and selling cost-effective athleisure leggings for girls, which turned over around $300,000 in revenue in 2020. This helped Lin earn a spot at BizWorld, a project-based entrepreneurship program for 16- to 22-year-olds.
However, she did not win the pitching contest or any prize money upon completion of the program. It was one of a few indications that TLeggings was fizzling out despite the steep revenue figures. The company was never profitable, and Lin found it hard to compete in the market. So she shut it down in 2022 and turned her focus back to GuineaLoft.
Lin said, “I had a weird epiphany [where] I kind of realized there are a lot of other companies trying to [make leggings]. There was no innovation there, whereas with GuineaLoft, I could fill a really big gap in the market.”
After selling out of her first batch of 100 cages within two weeks without any marketing, Lin reapplied to BizWorld in 2023 and “won $10,000 in investment funds from the pitching competition. That money will go toward adding accessories and new cages for different types of small pets, like rabbits and hamsters, she says.”
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