This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
A civil engineer sells hooded baby robes and many other items on Amazon. This guy, he has a pretty crazy story. I'm excited to bring it to you today. A civil engineer in Florida learns to sell hooded baby robes and many other products on Amazon. He becomes an expert, not just in that particular market, but in selling on Amazon.
Ends up moving to Bali with his wife where he builds an app to help him find products to sell. This app turns into a business that employs a lot of people and serves more than 100,000 users. This is a true story of side hustle scalability. We first brought it to you way back in 2018, doing a little remix here. Whenever we do a remix, we rerecord the story so that everything is fresh, sometimes include a few updates as well.
This is the story of Jungle Scout. Jungle Scout, it is in fact an app. It is still going strong. Well, it's an app extension. I'm not entirely sure of those details, how that all works.
But the point is he's doing really well. He's found a way to help a lot of people and profit himself, which is of course the goal of side hustle school. And I wanna help you be able to do that as well. So quick shout out to our sponsor. Then I'll bring you that story.
Civil engineer sells hooded baby robes, among other things. So let's look at how he goes from selling these items to building this app, building a whole business that is related, but also quite different from how he got started. So detailed story coming right up. [Music]
At 10 years old, Greg Mercer painted and sold acorns. That side hustle was not highly profitable, but the next one got more traction.
At age 14, Greg launched Pedkey, a working key for motorized scooters. He had enough traffic on his website that he was proud to receive a cease and desist letter from one of the manufacturers. The shutdown didn't damper Greg's spirits for long. He continued to learn after school and experiment where he could. But like many of us, the draw of a regular job eventually started to overshadow Greg's entrepreneurial spirit.
When he graduated from college, he took a job as a corporate civil engineer. And for a while he was happy. He had a reliable salary. He was working with talented professionals. He even got to go out to the oil rigs every once in a while, but it didn't last long because Greg found himself dreaming of side hustles after work.
And then he found himself dreaming of side hustles during work. In search of an outlet, he started selling wholesale items on Amazon.com, including hooded baby robes. Why baby robes? Was he passionate about them? No, he just browsed various subcategories on Amazon.
He looked for strong sales rankings to see if there was a market for it and to see if there was a gap in the available products that he could fill with imported items. Basically he's like, are there things people want to buy that I can find a way to sell? That was the start of selling many other items. He continued to grow the Amazon business. He and his wife actually quit their jobs, sold everything and moved to Bali to do it.
And this business grew and grew, but as interesting as it is, it's actually not what our story is about because scrolling through pages on Amazon, making complex Excel spreadsheets, doing a bunch of math, all of these tasks were difficult and confusing. And Greg thought there has to be a better way. In fact, he dreamed of an app that would help him organize and analyze the data that was already available across the Amazon ecosystem. He figured if he could crawl and digest that data onto a single page, he could speed up the product discovery time dramatically. So with this idea, Greg drew up a plan and found a freelance developer on a gig for hire site.
He paid that guy $1,000 to make the most basic parts of his idea come to life. Next, Greg made a quick video and posted to a handful of Reddit communities. He mentioned he was thinking of releasing this new tool for sale and wanted to know if anybody else was interested. Over a hundred people submitted their emails to the opt-in on his video page. And just like that, he had his launch list.
One month later, the Jungle Scout extension for Google Chrome was released. Greg set the price at $67. His goal was to simply sell 10 copies and he did on the first day. That was thrilling, but the sales didn't keep up the next couple of days. Greg tried Facebook ads, they didn't work.
He tried blogging, but writing just wasn't his strong suit. And then one of those first customers asked Greg to demo the product for a Facebook group. He did a webinar for a hundred folks and got 10 more sales. So then that was obvious. He's like, okay, here is an effective method for selling.
He got in touch with users for feedback. He kept building out more features. He kept releasing more webinars. And as the business grew, Greg hired two full-time employees, a developer and a marketer. Together, this small team started creating a web-based app that had the potential to be far more powerful than just the Chrome extension.
That September, the Jungle Scout web app was launched, a subscription-based software as a service. Unlike the one-time sales for the Chrome extension, this recurring revenue was sustainable. They kept hiring people. They hired developers and designers in Vancouver, Canada, and in Austin, Texas, where Greg and his wife eventually ended up moving part-time. Now, despite the rapid growth, not everything in the jungle was ripe for the picking.
Greg's team spent months working on a new email marketing app called ReviewKick. This tool would help sellers gain reviews by offering incentives to buyers. And weeks after they launched the tool, Amazon's terms of service changed and the site banned incentivized reviews altogether. We've actually talked about that in some other episodes of the podcast. Many of the tool's users faced penalties on Amazon, which was a hard blow to Jungle Scout's work.
They had to stop selling subscriptions to the app, reimagine the value of the tool, and relaunch under a new name with a new compliant process for email marketing. Other strategies were much more profitable. He launched something called a million-dollar case study, which generated over $30,000 in profit, which was donated to Doctors Without Borders. He also partnered with Pencils of Promise to help open schools in rural communities around the world. Now, at the time of our original story, Jungle Scout had 80 employees, 80 employees, eight, zero, 100,000-plus users, and was working to open five schools through Pencils of Promise.
Greg and Elizabeth now travel a good bit while also being in Austin, and their goal moving forward is to keep doing what they're doing and keep serving more people. Entrepreneurship has enabled them to live a life that works, and they want to help as many people as possible achieve that same sense of accomplishment. For Greg, it all started with those hooded baby robes. [Music]
Well, over the years, I've heard of many other side hustle school sellers and other people doing stuff on Amazon using Jungle Scout. I don't think I've ever heard a bad thing about it.
I mean, I'm sure people have different experiences, but I have mostly heard positive ones, so I'm glad to know that it's still out there, and it just also points to the fact that sometimes the weirdest items are the best sellers. We talked about those hooded baby robes, but also cat furniture has been a big seller, lots of other things that you might not immediately think of when you're like, "Oh, what's my e-commerce dream?" But basically, if there's a market and you see a gap in the market as Greg first identified long, long ago, that's potentially something to look at, and Jungle Scout can help with that. All right, listeners, thank you for being out there. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I appreciate you joining me for this blast from the past.
I'm excited to keep moving forward in the present and future. We've got all three conditions of time covered, and also many time zones as well. You can listen to the podcast wherever you want, so actually, every time zone is covered. It's all completely free. The full archive's available on the website, sidehustleschool.com.
New stories drop every day. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]
From the Onward Project.
