This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
Millions of people take part in a similar ritual every morning. That ritual is, of course, the first cup of coffee. Mm. It is the morning as I'm recording this for you now, and I've already made mine. I'm gonna actually start on my second cup of coffee fairly soon.
And did you know that many of the great 1990s ballads were actually composed as love songs to coffee? It all started with Wilson Phillips, who told us, "Hold on for one more day until the coffee is ready." It continued with Whitney Houston, who's saying, "I, I, I, I will always love you, coffee." Then, of course, the breakthrough hit from Ryan Adams, "Everything I do, I do for you, coffee." And my personal favorite from the proclaimers, "I'm gonna be the man who walks 500 miles for that delicious cup of coffee." It is the beverage of life and perhaps the beverage of side hustle profits, at least it is today. How's that for a segue? Welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
Every day I'm bringing you a different story of someone making money in a different, unusual, unconventional way, usually without quitting their day job. Or in some cases, like you heard yesterday, and like, I think you're gonna hear today as well, someone starts a side hustle, ends up taking off, and then they do quit their day job, but not until it's profitable and successful. The key point is they are starting where they are with the skills they already have and without spending a lot of money. Today's story features a petroleum engineer who finds the perfect item to resell on Amazon. That item is the humble coffee grinder.
And he goes on to sell $300,000 worth of these coffee grinders. Incredible. I'll tell you how he gets the idea. It's actually very simple. It's almost incredible how simple it is.
And then at the end of the episode, I'll give you a few action steps if you'd like to try reselling on Amazon yourself. So shout out to our morning coffee and today's sponsor. And then on with the show. [Music]
Raj Jana was just like a lot of our listeners. He was knee deep in student debt to the tune of $50,000.
He was helping out his parents and he was working hard to climb a corporate ladder as a petroleum engineer at Chevron. Trying to please those corporate overlords day after day was exhausting. And Raj dreamed of stepping out of the rat race. He wanted to work for himself, move back to Houston to be with his long distance girlfriend and stop sacrificing his happiness for the sake of a multinational corporation. Raj began reading books and going through courses on internet businesses.
He dabbled with a few ideas but eventually settled on private labeling products to sell on Amazon.com after meeting someone else who'd had success doing so. But what would he sell? Well, making coffee by hand was one way Raj centered himself each morning. He was passionate about good coffee. He wondered if he could capitalize on the growing specialty coffee movement for his hustle.
After researching possibilities on Kickstarter, Amazon and other platforms to see what kinds of devices were selling really well. The answer was clear, coffee grinders and not the big bulky automatic ones but a small handheld manual one. The ideal grinder would be lightweight and sell in the 20 to $30 range. It could also act as a gateway product to selling something else in the future. And it would be perfect for selling on Amazon.
At the time there was a generic coffee grinder selling there and it had zero branding on it. The company that sold it had no website. When Raj saw the same design on Alibaba, a platform that connects overseas factories with people who want to buy products, the idea clicked. He could use that existing design to create his own grinder that he would promote with creative, passionate branding because he was after all, creative and passionate. After a couple of weeks of what he calls confusing emails and phone calls, Raj found a manufacturer that would make 200 units to start with, just a $1,000 investment on his end.
With that investment, a Java press sprang to life with the turn of a sharp steel blade. Raj signed up for a seller account on Amazon and got approved for order fulfillment from one of their warehouses. Waking up at 5 a.m. to work on the hustle was rough, but his morning routine of preparing coffee, writing a gratitude list and making a plan for the day helped him through. This routine set Raj up for success by keeping him focused and centered.
And a few weeks after he placed that first order, his grinders arrived at Amazon's warehouse. It was go time. He let loose his self-written ads and product descriptions, set up some post purchase emails to help customers maximize the grinder's potential and went to sleep. A few days went by without any excitement, but then a week after launch, Raj woke up to his first sale. By the end of that second week, he'd had dozens more.
He studied his ads obsessively, ranking them by views and conversions and refining them. And this approach was working. In only its third month in business, Java Press did over $30,000 in sales. It seemed he was on the cusp of massive growth, but then disaster struck. One of Raj's grinders was returned as defective.
Then hundreds, yes, hundreds followed. His return rate quickly jumped to 90% all from a faulty grinder design. It doesn't get much worse than that, but Raj believed in the power of customer service. He personally replied to every complaint. He offered a full refund, an apology, and the promise of a brand new grinder for free once he saw the issue.
He and his manufacturer then went back to the drawing board. Once they identified the problem and altered the design, Raj placed another big order. At that point, it was terrifying to invest a few thousand more dollars, but there was plenty of demand and his ads were working. So he knew if the updated grinder didn't break, he'd make back his money. He now likes to say that those initial couple hundred customers are part of his 1,000 true fans.
His honesty throughout the big mistake, as well as his willingness to give them a brand new grinder, generated loyalty that remains strong to this day, three years later, and not to mention hundreds of five-star reviews. It was such a successful turnaround that Raj quit his job to work on JavaPress full-time just eight months into the hustle. And a lot's happened since then. JavaPress now has three additional coffee products and a monthly coffee subscription. He's still selling more than a hundred grinders on Amazon each month.
He's fulfilled two wishes for the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and he's generated over $300,000 in profit just last year. Let me repeat that. He's generated over $300,000 in profit last year. Raj says his success is due to his customer-driven approach and deeper messaging. From those post-purchase emails, to the way his team responds to support requests, to the written content on the website, the social media giveaways, all of this builds an ecosystem of value, care, and passion that encourages customers to use their coffee routine to appreciate the little things in life.
He's brewed up a business, a lifestyle, and a mission, and it hasn't felt like a grind. Of course, another cup, Raj. Here's to your hustle. All right, do you wanna do something like this? This is your vision if you think, "Okay, I like this particular model.
"I would love to have a product that I resell on Amazon, "reaching their entire huge marketplace." I love the customer-centric, value-focused approach that Raj uses. So what do you do? Well, action step number one. First of all, you prepare a large cup of coffee, of course. And then everything after that essentially comes down to two different types of tasks.
So the first type of task, your first objective, is to find the right product. And then everything in your second group of tasks is gonna be to find the right way to sell it. Now, I don't mean to oversimplify. I'm not saying this is easy. Obviously, there's a ton of work that goes into it.
It's not a $300,000 overnight success, what he's done. It's a $300,000, lots of dedication, lots of hard work, lots of passion, lots of recovery from mistakes, and so on. And personally, I think that's actually more exciting than something that just kind of appeared from the sky, and there it is. But those are your two pathways. Those are what you need to do.
You need to focus on what is the right product? And in his case, he kind of looked around and said, okay, what do I like to do? Oh, I have this morning ritual. Maybe there's something to do, especially coffee. And then he did more research and looked at Kickstarter and Amazon, what products are out there?
And he realized that there wasn't a good manual coffee grinder that had actual branding with it. You don't need to have branding on your manual coffee grinder, but the point is anyone who can tell a good story is probably gonna do better than someone just selling a generic product. So once he realized he could acquire exactly the same product that was already selling, but those people weren't doing a great job selling it, everything else flowed from there. And for his second group of tasks, finding the right way to sell it, that's where he went relentlessly into this, like writing the ads and then rewriting the ads and seeing what was working and adjusting all along the way, all while building out this post-purchase email series and everything else that he talks about. So again, the idea is simple.
The execution is everything. The path to success using this model is not easy, but it is identifiable, it is replicable. Like it's not a huge mystery. You can kind of figure out what other people have done and how you can do it in your own way once you find the right product. So three tiers to Raj, I really love this story.
And by the way, I'm actually a customer of his. I actually have a JavaPress manual grinder in my kitchen, which was not related to the research and the writing of this episode. I just have had one for many months. And when I saw this story come through, I thought, oh, this is fun. I actually am this guy's customer.
So thanks, Raj, for this story and also for being part of my morning coffee ritual every day. If you would like to learn more about JavaPress, come and check out today's show notes. Those are at sidehustleschool.com/591. Oh, I also want to encourage you to check out episode 170 of the show. That features my friends, Nathan and Catherine Spaccarelli.
We featured them, you know, whatever that was, 500 days ago or something, and they have a similar story. They have also done something kind of like what Raj has done but in the housewares market. So if this is an area you're researching, you'll want to check out that episode as well. Once again, it is episode 170. So of course that would be sidehustleschool.com/170, 170.
That's it for me today. I'm going to go make that second cup of coffee. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I hope you will take action on your goals and dreams today. My name is Chris Guillebeau and this is Side Hustle School.
