Civil Engineer Sells Everything but Kitchen Sink, Moves to Bali, Employs 100 People

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hey there, what's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Very excited to begin a new week with you. Thank you so much for listening and being part of the show.

For those who are new every week on the show, or really every day, I'm telling different stories of people who are creating freedom for themselves. These people don't necessarily want to become full-time entrepreneurs, although we'll stay tuned for today's story because he actually does. But in most cases, it's just regular people with day jobs who want to make more money for themselves. They want to have an additional source of income. They know they don't want to rely on their paycheck forever.

Or at least they don't want to rely on a corporation forever. And they also believe that even if they don't want to be a business owner, there really is something out there they can do, something they can make for themselves that will bring in money apart from their paycheck. All right, so as we begin a new week, there's a lot going on with today's story. Here's how I described it in the summary that appears in your podcast feed. It says, "After a civil engineer in Florida learns to sell hooded baby robes on amazon.com, he moves to Bali with his wife, where he builds an app to help him find more products.

This app then turns into a business that goes on to employ 80 people and serves 100,000 users." Okay, so like I said, a lot going on there. We don't feature a ton of stories about businesses that employ 80 people and serve 100,000 users. But this still very much fits our formula because this whole project started as a side hustle. So you never know what's going to happen once you go down that road of pursuing your idea. If you've got a big dream, you know, who knows?

Like I don't think this guy planned on creating this business, which we're gonna hear about in just a moment. And we're also gonna talk a bit about Fulfilled by Amazon. This is a way that you can sell all kinds of items to literally millions of people across the United States and elsewhere, like elsewhere in the world that uses amazon.com. So stay tuned. I'm gonna tell you all about this crazy story from start to finish.

Also gonna give you some tips if you're interested in doing Fulfilled by Amazon yourself or other bulk selling. And all of that is coming up after this quick thank you to our sponsor. [Music]

Greg Mercer has always been a tinkerer with a mind for business. At 10 years old, he painted and sold acorns. That side hustle was not highly profitable, but the next one got more traction.

At age 14, he 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 Go-Ped, a giant in the industry. The shutdown didn't damper his spirits. He continued to learn after school and experiment wherever he could. But like so many of us, the draw of a regular job eventually began to overshadow his entrepreneurial spirit.

So when Greg graduated from college, he took a job as a corporate civil engineer in Pensacola, Florida. And for a while, he was happy. He had a reliable salary, he was working with talented professionals, and he even got to go out to the oil rigs once in a while. But the sense of satisfaction didn't last long. Greg quickly found himself dreaming of side hustles after work.

Then he found himself dreaming of side hustles during work. So in 2013, Greg started selling wholesale items on Amazon.com. What was he selling? Well, one of his most popular items was hooded baby ropes. Next question, why baby ropes?

Well, Greg spent a lot of time browsing on Amazon. He would look at various subcategories, and he would check on strong sales rankings to determine if any particular item was hot, and then see if he could acquire that item somehow to resell it for a profit. It turned out that those baby ropes were a hot commodity. Those and other items became all he could think about, and he knew he couldn't stay at his corporate job for long. Greg and his wife Elizabeth were itching to explore an adventure.

They continued to grow the Amazon business, except they quit their jobs, sold everything, and moved to Bali, Indonesia to do it. Now, that little business, as interesting as it is, isn't what our story today is about. Because while they were there, while he was working on this business, scrolling through pages on Amazon, creating complex Excel spreadsheets, doing a bunch of math, and going through all the data to find products to sell, it was difficult and confusing. Greg thought there had to be a better way. He dreamed of an app that would help him organize and analyze the data that was already available across Amazon.com.

He figured that if his imaginary tool could crawl and digest that data onto a single page, he could speed up his product discovery time dramatically. The only thing was, Greg had no idea how to code anything. So in January 2015, he drew up his plan and found a freelance developer on a gig for hire site. He paid that developer $1,000 to make the most basic parts of his idea come to life. As the software started to become functional, Greg made a quick video and posted it on Reddit.

He mentioned that he was thinking of releasing his new tool for sale, and he wanted to know if anybody else wanted it. Over 100 people submitted their emails to the opt-in on his video page, and just like that, he had his launch list. The tool was called Jungle Scout, and one month later, the Jungle Scout extension for Google Chrome was released. Greg set the price at $67. His goal was to sell 10 copies to help offset the cost of development, and he did on the first day.

Still, as awesome as that was, the sales didn't keep up the next couple days. Greg tried Facebook ads, and they didn't work. He tried blogging, but writing just wasn't his strong suit. Then one of his first customers asked Greg to demo the product for a Facebook group he managed. They did a webinar for 100 folks and got 10 more sales.

This was the winner. Webinars were the most effective method for getting Jungle Scout sales. Greg's idea was validated, but it wasn't finished yet. He got in touch with his users for feedback, built out more features in the Chrome extension, and saw sales continue to climb as he released more webinars. In mid-2015, Greg hired a developer and a marketer.

Together, this small team started creating a web-based app that had the potential to be much more powerful than that Chrome extension. That September, the Jungle Scout web app was launched, a subscription-based software as a service. In the software as a service world, users pay monthly. So unlike the one-time sales for the Chrome extensions, this recurring revenue was sustainable. Based off that revenue, Greg hired a few more people, then a few more.

Many of these new developers and designers were living in Vancouver, Canada. So Greg traveled there and found a small office space for his team to work together in. Then he did the same thing for his employees in Austin, Texas, and he and Elizabeth actually ended up moving there themselves. Despite the rapid growth, not everything in the Jungle was right for the picking. Greg's team spent months working on a new email marketing app for Amazon sellers called Review Kick.

The tool would help sellers gain reviews by offering incentives to buyers, either with free or discounted products. Weeks after they launched the tool in 2016, Amazon.com's terms of service changed and the site banned incentivized reviews. Many of the tool's users faced penalties, and it was a hard blow to Jungle Scout's hard work. They had to stop selling subscriptions to the app, reimagine the value of the tool, and then relaunch under the name Jump Send with a new, compliant process for email marketing. Business continued to grow.

In 2016, Greg launched the first million-dollar case study. His idea was to create a product, sell it on Amazon.com, and document each step of the journey. It was a way for him to continue selling products just as he had started, and it turned out to be an excellent content marketing tool. It also generated over $30,000, which was donated to Doctors Without Borders. That case study became the number one source of growth for Jungle Scout, so Greg did it again in 2017, except this time he partnered with Pencils of Promise.

Greg likes to say that his success is pretty simple. He made something that solved a problem, he continued to improve that product according to his customer's feedback, and he grew organically. He had no outside funding, no big startup budget, just a good idea that was fundamentally sound. As of early 2018, Jungle Scout has 80 employees, 100,000 paying users, and aims to open five schools through Pencils of Promise this year. All the while, Greg and Elizabeth now live in Austin for much of the time, but still travel a lot and work remotely.

Their goal moving forward is just to keep doing what they're doing now. The growth of their side hustle, now a healthy mid-sized company, has enabled them to live a life that works for them, and they want to also help as many people as possible achieve that sense of accomplishment and personal freedom. It is indeed a grand side hustle success, and it all started with selling hooded baby robes on Amazon. [Music]

All right, I'm sure there are many lessons to learn from this story, so perhaps we'll revisit it at some point. Could be a great extended cut, just like we've done with some of our other popular episodes.

For example, in this story, I don't actually know what his 80 employees do. That seems like a high number, but of course they have 100,000 users to support, so I suppose it makes sense. It definitely is amazing how he's grown this from his own side hustle, being able to relocate to Bali, and then turning it into this very sustainable business that's now supporting a lot of people. And as for those baby robes, like when it comes to using the Fulfilled by Amazon model, or just selling on Amazon in general, sometimes the strangest items or the weirdest items are the best sellers. When I say weird items, I don't necessarily mean like strange, I just mean some things you wouldn't normally think of.

If you think, hey, what do you want to sell online? Most people wouldn't say I want to sell hooded baby robes. But with a bit of research, you can go and do the same kind of thing that he did when he was getting started, looking through all the various subcategories on Amazon, trying to see what's selling, which you can tell more or less based on the sales ranking there. All this information is public. Then you can figure out how to get that item, which we've talked about in other episodes in terms of using Alibaba, using other directories, finding a way to import that item or otherwise acquire it.

And depending on how you structure this business, you can often do it in a way where you never actually handle any of the inventory, so you never even see it. This topic is something that a lot of our listeners have asked about, and a lot of our listeners are trying in different ways. So of course, on our show notes page, I'm gonna link up a bunch of resources, several past episodes that have covered this topic, as well as a link to Jungle Scout, of course, this software as a service that Greg developed. So if this whole side of the model is something you're interested in, maybe come and take a look and see if it might work for you. Until next time, I hope you enjoyed the Jungle Scout story.

Don't forget, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Those show notes I mentioned are online at sidehustleschool.com/520. That's episode 520. Thank you for listening. We've got a great rest of the week coming up.

My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School.