Here's How Investing $1,000 and 3 Hours a Day Can Lead to a Successful Side Hustle

Jenny has continued working on her full time profession despite building a successful side business.

PUBLISHED MAR 24, 2024

Cover Image Source: Amazon workers unloading boxes from a truck | Getty Images | Photo by Kena Betancur

Thanks to the availability of online platforms, tools, and resources, budding entrepreneurs get a push to start their own side hustles, and many are even able to turn them into their main source of income. There are innumerable options available to start a side hustle but it depends on which industry you are inclined towards and your liking. Selling products on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and Myntra has become quite a common phenomenon for which no degree is needed instead you must have the business acumen. Take a look at one of many success stories that inspired many other young entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs make sure they succeed in turning their passions into a living reality. Image Source: Unsplash|Photo by Christian Velitchkov

Jenny Woo a Chinese resident moved to Texas at a mere 10 years old and struggled as she didn't speak English. Learning the tactics, she engrossed herself in understanding people's feelings without any words. She then worked on herself and decided to launch Mind Brain Emotion, a side hustle that sells emotional intelligence-focused card games on Amazon.com Inc. She started the business by investing $1,000 from her savings and it generated $1.71 million in sales on the platform last year, she told CNBC. Woo expressed her views in a statement, “The mission has always been to make knowledge, skills, competence, mindsets and attitudes accessible … for really everybody to enjoy".

Woo never considered the side hustle as her main source of income and continued to work as a lecturer at the University of California Irvine. Additionally, she manages an emotional intelligence course online and also provides freelance business consulting services. Woo learned the basics and then nuances of emotional intelligence and its related skills when she was a child. This helped her in getting lucrative career opportunities at big tech giants such as Cisco and Deloitte. She further told CNBC that her company is currently generating sales of $140,000 per month and where she considers 40% as her profit. Woo then extended her advice on how anyone can start a business with a $1,000 investment and work between 3 hours to 30 hours on a weekly basis.

In her conversations, Jenny shared some tips for people looking to start and excel in side hustles just like her.

She advised entrepreneurs to start listing and selling products on Amazon for $40 a month. To stay relevant in the market, Jenny recommended learning about advertising campaigns and search engine optimization (SEO).

Keeping up with new technology as well as other changes can also help one gain an edge in the market. There are several other platforms and marketplaces that are working well for others and they can be discovered through thorough research.

She also suggested leveraging the usage of keywords to increase the reach of ads among audiences online. According to Jenny, entrepreneurs need to have a keen eye on what their competitors are doing as well as their products and strategies.

About being ready to face any kind of challenge by staying motivated, Woo commented, “There will be haters and copycats. You just have to keep going".