This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
When I first started working on this story, it started to sound more like an entrepreneur story than a side hustle story. There's a key difference there, so I thought I would provide a reminder of what we're all about here. And also if you're new to the program, this is an important distinction. You'll notice that most of the daily stories I talk about are all about people who aren't necessarily these hard charging entrepreneur types. They're not the kind of people you see on Shark Tank.
A lot of them are just regular people with jobs who want to make extra money or build an asset for themselves, which is something I'll talk about again in episode 1030, this week's recap in a few days. And part of why I started side hustle school was to demonstrate that not everyone wants to take a lot of risk, not everyone's able to take a lot of risk or is able to spend a lot of money. But I firmly believe there's still something you can do. There is a little entrepreneurial project out there for you, even if you've never thought of yourself in those terms. So anyway, that's something we pay attention to as we think about what stories we're going to feature.
And it turned out as I went along that today's story actually does fit within our mandate. It's about a Hong Kong based IT employee who creates a new way for global e-commerce sellers to fulfill their orders. He spends three years working on it before launching all while he's still employed. And even now that it's very successful after year one, he's still working that day job. He's doing that by choice, at least for now.
So remember, there's more than one way to do this side hustle thing, you need to figure out what works best for you. That's why I'm providing you a range of different stories and examples every single day. So this story is called project manager discovers a better way to ship worldwide. And I'll bring it to you after this message from our sponsor. An IT professional working in Hong Kong, Kaiska Drowey's new venture sought to provide a solution for a problem he'd encountered while building his original side hustle.
In 2012, he started a travel accessories company based largely on his prime location, close to suppliers in mainland China. It was then that he experienced the common pain points of small business that the next project would seek to address. Kaiska and his business partner kept a small stack of inventory at home, shipping out orders as they were received. But as the business grew, they quickly saw a sales jump from just a handful of orders a day to hundreds per day. Naturally, this called for some reevaluation around fulfillment.
Until then, the two of them had been fulfilling orders themselves on a daily basis. But as sales picked up, that process became tedious. They would have to pack each order and then wait in long lines at the Hong Kong post office to have them shipped out. To help, they brought on some part-time team members specifically to take care of fulfillment. While this was useful at first, Kaiska soon began to notice issues and errors with this manual process, and even if he wasn't standing in line at the post office, someone had to.
So he and his partner began working with third-party logistics providers, known as 3PLs, to outsource their fulfillment to China. But that didn't go well either because on their first day working with a 3PL provider, the provider's system crashed. With close to 500 orders going through at once, their system couldn't handle the load. Kaiska knew there had to be a better solution. He knew there were other businesses like his needing more reliable help with fulfillment.
So as the story often goes, if someone else wouldn't build it, he would. Knowing the pain points of his potential customers, because he was a potential customer, Kaiska wanted a way to solve the issues they faced. Things like shipping, dealing with providers in different time zones, or being unable to provide consistent service to customers. He wanted all that to be a thing of the past. He would become a bridge between sellers and providers.
So he called his new business Fulfillment Bridge. It began as a one-man show with nothing more than his time and spreadsheets. After talking to fellow business owners who needed help, Kaiska knew he would have to scale this entire system to something that could work across countries, even continents, use one or many warehouses, and still fulfill orders using a single system. So he leveraged his background in building software systems to create that solution. Once a beta version seemed promising, he decided to take it to the next level.
He began taking withdrawals from his personal savings to bring on team members to scale the product, as well as to purchase resources like servers. Then they got to work creating a robust e-commerce company. Kaiska formally launched Fulfillment Bridge in January 2019, after investing three years and about $60,000 into the project. And of course, he did this while he was working full-time, so he's kind of paying as he goes. And his hard work paid off.
Less than 10 months later, Fulfillment Bridge had become a self-sufficient business generating around $40,000 per month. The rapid interest, Kaiska decided to shut down his original side hustle, the travel accessories company, so he could focus solely on the new one. In addition to traditional services like warehousing, pick and pack, and shipping, they were also able to offer ways for global customers to handle returns and even provide insurance. All of this is powered by the cloud-based platform Kaiska and his team created, which means that all the information is accessible by clients from their laptop or phone. Even with these impressive first-year numbers, Kaiska still maintains his day job in IT and spends at least three to four hours a day building Fulfillment Bridge.
It's a mix of working long hours, often over the weekends and holidays, and having the right team, but he finds a way to get it all done. Part of his success comes from knowing when and how to delegate, something that many side hustlers, including myself, by the way, often struggle with. He believes it's been key to the growth of Fulfillment Bridge. One of his proudest accomplishments is the company culture he's built. In three years, he's only lost one team member to a different opportunity.
With a flexible working environment, including video calls, and the option to work remotely, his team members are content and connected. Managing this team remotely while still working full-time isn't for the faint of heart, but Kaiska wants his company to be more than just another job. He continues to reinvest most of the revenue to help him grow. Working ahead, he set a goal of arranging a team trip to Thailand when they reached their first million dollars in revenue. Well, working on this story reminds me of an experience that I had, which I guess was many years ago now, but I still remember it very vividly.
I was living in West Africa and operating this side hustle from afar, of course, like working remotely. And I had this business where I was shipping out product, and obviously, I couldn't be shipping out product while I was working as an aid worker on a hospital ship. So I had a fulfillment center in the US that was basically doing kind of what Kaiska is doing, and it didn't go very well. I had this whole disaster where this fulfillment center went out of business without any notice, and in fact, didn't even tell any of its clients that it had gone out of business. It was like weeks later, everyone realizes, "Oh, the company doesn't exist," and they haven't been shipping orders all this time.
So it was a huge, huge disaster, as you can imagine. I wrote the whole story in The Art of Nonconformity, my first book. And out of that process, I realized a bunch of stuff. First of all, fulfillment is critical for small business owners everywhere. That's why this is a huge need.
And then second, always remember that whenever you entrust your business to an outside vendor, they may make your life easier. That's the whole goal, especially when it works well. But ultimately, you are the one responsible for getting your orders to customers. So you still have to kind of keep your eye on things. So I'm really glad to hear about this fulfillment bridge project, and I also respect just the work ethic of maintaining the day job and building it slowly over time, investing significant amounts of money by doing it in a way that's deliberate and incremental and building on the success of a beta version, etc.
So those are all wonderful, aligned side hustle school values. Okay, listeners, I'll leave you with that today. I hope you enjoyed it. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. What is this going to lead you to do?
What idea does this give you? Or what does this affirm in your life? Something that you know you need to go and do for yourself, because we all need a little bit more freedom and security. That's what a side hustle is all about. Today's show notes.
All right. sidehustleschool.com/1025. I'll be back again tomorrow. I've got some exciting stuff coming up. I hope you will continue to join me.
My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
