How This 21-YO's Side Hustle Has Earned Him $1 Million In Two Years After Starting With Just $300

Two years ago, all it took was just a TikTok video to go viral for a teenager to believe in the side hustle that he had begun. Fast forward to today, and the 21-year-old guy has already earned more than $1 million from that business.

Who Is The 21-Year-Old?

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In October 2021, when the video of Jayson Siu¡¯s car accessories side hustle first went viral, he was completely ¡°unprepared.¡± The video was about one of his products¡ªan LED-lined rearview mirror¡ªwhich started racking up views. Quickly, he was making sales of $12,000 in a single day.

Siu, who was a freshman at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, ran to Office Depot and stayed for hours, printing and then cutting labels by hand to fulfil the orders. A year later, another of his videos¡ªone featuring an LED-backed light-up sticker¡ªwent viral, with more than 9 million views and counting.

Invalid.jp, i.e., his business of selling customised car stickers and rearview mirrors, then brought in $38,000 in revenue over the next 24 hours, says Siu, as per a CNBC report.

In total, the business brought in $512,000 in 2022 revenue and has already exceeded those sales this year, according to documents reviewed by Make It. Roughly 30% of those earnings are profit, Siu estimates.

Jayson Siu¡¯s side hustle has generated more than $1 million in sales in less than two years. Jayson Siu still customises all of the stickers and mirrors himself.

And now, invalid.jp isn¡¯t really a side hustle anymore. Siu works at least 40 hours per week on top of a full-time job, he says. Before renting a warehouse this past summer, he ran the business from his parents¡¯ two-bedroom apartment in Honolulu.

¡°I¡¯m super stressed all the time,¡± says Siu, 21. ¡°It¡¯s not just a business in my [parents¡¯] house where I can just, you know, pause it anymore. Now it really has to work.¡±

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How Did He Start The Side Hustle?

Siu started Invalid.jp as a high school senior, working for a valet company. He wanted extra cash to buy accessories for his own car, a Nissan Rogue SUV, and stickers were popular among his peers. He spent $300 of savings from a previous side hustle on a $300 vinyl printer, selling stickers for $3 to $5 apiece to his friends on Snapchat.

Eventually, Siu¡¯s goal shifted to something more expensive: new parts for his car. That meant he needed to sell a more lucrative product. While researching, he found an LED-backlit rearview mirror on Instagram. ¡°I could be the one selling this,¡± he recalls thinking.

He ordered a $20 mirror from a factory in China, popped out the glass, and placed LED lights on the inside¡ªalong with his most popular sticker, which says ¡°drive safe.¡± The backlighting made the sticker visible when he replaced the glass. A friend told him that he could drive sales through TikTok, so he started posting videos ¡°as often as possible,¡± he says. As purchases trickled in, Siu recalls thinking to himself, ¡°Yo, maybe this could be a real business.¡±

Soon after his first brush with online virality, which came months later, Siu left his valet job.

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When Social Media Acted As A Fuel To His Growth

Once the attention dried up, so did Siu¡¯s profits. Searching for more consistent sales, he turned to social media ads ¡ª and struggled, as per the report,

¡°I was wasting, like, thousands of dollars,¡± Siu says. ¡°I was barely breaking even, even losing money some months. It was super unmotivating.¡± Ads on Snapchat, YouTube and Twitter, now known as X, didn¡¯t seem to help his sales ¡ª so he reallocated his marketing budget to TikTok, Google, Facebook and Instagram. The quality and reach of his campaigns improved, he says.

Siu added new product lines, like cupholders, visors and license plates ¡ª buying them wholesale, customizing them and reselling them for profits. His two most in-demand products remained stickers and LED mirrors, so he combined them to create the light-up stickers, which are customizable and can change colors when controlled with a small remote.

Siu doesn¡¯t recommend leaving them on while driving. He attributes the viral video about the stickers ¡ª which, again, came just months after creating the product ¡ª to both his social media ads and his commitment to posting TikTok videos regularly.

Here¡¯s how he grew his side hustle, and how he manages his double life as a business owner and college student. The viral days can be highly lucrative. The social media ads help keep Invalid.jp¡¯s cash flow a little more consistent the rest of the year, Siu says.

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