This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
When North Americans travel to parts of Europe or Asia for the first time, they sometimes encounter a strange fixture in the bathroom. That fixture or feature is a bidet, and more than one person has asked, wait, how does that thing work? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Today's story features a man in Toronto, Canada, who decides to bring in the bidets and sell them primarily to immigrant families who are accustomed to using them.
Is he flushing away his startup costs, throwing his dreams down the toilet? Not at all. He's keeping clean and banking sales of more than $10,000 a month. That's right, $10,000 a month for bringing bidets to Canada. I'll say a quick thank you to our sponsor who allows the show to be completely free to you, and I'll tell you exactly how this guy does it.
[Music]
Ahmad Iqbal grew up traveling the world. His father's work meant his family often moved to foreign countries. Although he was born in Canada, before his 22nd birthday, he'd spent time living in Pakistan, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Korea, England, United States, Italy, and Dubai. His constant moving gave him a unique perspective of the world. It exposed him to new ideas and instilled a maturity beyond that of most kids.
That perspective meant he got good at spotting opportunities, opportunities that most people growing up in a single culture don't see. By his early 20s, the travel had settled down and Ahmad was no longer being moved around by his family. He'd set up home base in Toronto, Canada. Rather than take a traditional job, Ahmad first decided to take a shot at starting his own business with a friend. Without doing much research, they dived right into a business printing name tags and lanyards for conferences.
Unfortunately, Ahmad and his co-founder had no idea what they were doing. The business failed and they shut it down. Ahmad then went to work as a consultant for one of the world's biggest firms, Deloitte. But the ambition to work on his own project never really went away. Fast forward to two years ago when he had another idea.
This time he'd do things differently and use what he'd learned from that first failed attempt to be successful this time. Desperate to avoid past mistakes, he knew the first thing to do was validate his next idea. He figured the easiest way to do that was to look at what he already knew. He began exploring the problems people in his family and neighborhood faced. He lived around a lot of immigrant families and this triggered a memory.
In all the countries he'd lived, people used the bathroom differently. In North America, we take it for granted that we flush and wipe with toilet paper. However, in many Middle Eastern, European, and Asian countries, they use a bidet to tidy up. Now let's say you're out there and you're like, hey, what's a bidet? Well, to describe it, I'll use Ahmad's own words.
He says a bidet is like a mini shower you can use while you're on the toilet. That really is the best way to put it. If you're ever traveling somewhere else in the world and you encounter this, now you know. Ahmad thought it strange that something so fundamental to foreign bathroom habits hadn't made its way to North America. He decided to find out why and he asked his family and friends why they hadn't installed one.
Their responses gave him hope. First, many of them didn't know they were available. And second, it seemed hard to install or might require a sophisticated knowledge of plumbing. Both those concerns were addressable. Ahmad just had to make or acquire a bidet that was super easy to install and then get the word out.
So he decided to create his own company, Nadeef Bidets. He'd had experience dealing with Chinese manufacturers while creating lanyards in his previous business. So he knew where to start. That would be the first step towards sourcing his own bidet. He headed over to Alibaba.com, a common website for Chinese suppliers and began searching for handheld bidets.
He came across a few different options and ordered samples from each of them. Once they arrived, Ahmad commenced rigorous testing. I'll let you use your imagination to figure out how. He settled on the one that was the best performing, highest quality and easiest to install. He had found the gold standard of bidets.
The next phase was to make sure his hunch would match up with reality and that people would actually buy them. To do that, he turned to Shopify to create a storefront. At this stage, he didn't have any actual bidets to sell, but he knew he could get them quickly if anyone ended up ordering online. He didn't wanna place a large wholesale order straight up and potentially flush money down the toilet. He got his first few sales from people he knew, but things really took off when he ran some Facebook ads targeting immigrants in his local area.
In no time at all, he'd made 20 sales of his Nadeef Bidets. That was enough validation for him to proceed with an order from his supplier. He started with a wholesale order of 100 but should have made it more because by the time they arrived, he'd already sold out the additional 80 units and had to reorder straight away. Things were happening so fast that he didn't even have packaging for the product. For the first 100 orders, he ended up wrapping them like a Christmas present.
It wasn't until his second large order from the supplier that he had them pre-package each unit before shipment. Not one to rest for too long on his toilet seat, Amman quickly tested new avenues of marketing. By this stage, he was ordering 250 units per batch. He posted on Kijiji, a Canadian classified ads platform, and eBay. He added buy buttons to his Facebook page.
He started adding discount coupons inside the packaging for customers to share with their friends and even put up flyers at local halal grocers and bought ads in local foreign language TV channels. But when all was said and done, Facebook ads are still the most successful funnel for Ahmad because his audience is just so well-defined. Right now, the majority of sales come from Facebook, Kijiji, and organic search results. And those sales have not slowed down. The business now generates around $10,000 a month and is still run by just one guy, Ahmad.
It's been enough for him to quit his job at Deloitte and go full-time. And the successful business was launched for very low cost, just $180 for a paid Shopify theme, $500 on Facebook ad tests, and $50 on sample bidets, well under $1,000. Ahmad is happy with the success, but not entirely surprised. His previous business experience, a previous business failure, to be precise, as well as his knowledge of the market, meant he went in feeling confident. However, that's not where the story ends.
Throughout this whole process, Ahmad has learned a lot about what it takes to build and run a Shopify store. Through that process, he's developed some apps for his own store that have made his life easier. He's begun selling those tools to other Shopify store owners and the results have been positive. In fact, it may eventually become more successful than Nadeef Badeis. It just goes to show you never know where a good flush can lead.
Well, how is this for a fun side hustle school story? Definitely not something you might think about selling, not something you might think about somebody making $10,000 a month from. And it's not a crowded market, which is part of the point. But it's also one that makes sense. If you grow up using the bathroom a certain way, then that's probably what you're gonna wanna do when you move somewhere else.
Bathroom habits aren't something that most people wanna change later in life. Also, and this is critical, Ahmad mentioned that most of his buyers, most people have more than one bathroom, so they're gonna buy multiple bidets. Each bidet costs $70, so this makes the average order at least $140 in most cases. Some people have three or four bathrooms, depending on the size of their family and their home. And then my last observation is from his website, it looks like Ahmad ships to the US, but it's mostly focused on the Canadian market.
So maybe there's somebody out there who needs to take a look at becoming the bidet king or queen of America. Just throwing that out there for you. You never know what kind of idea you're gonna get from the show. Like I say, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. If you wanna take a look at the Canadian bidet empire, just come and see our show notes.
Those are at sidehustleschool.com/562. That is for episode 562. I hope your week is beginning well. I'll be back again tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.
[Music]
