21-year-old spent $300 to start his sticker side hustle—now it brings in up to $38,000 a day: I was ‘unprepared' to go viral....

College junior Jayson Siu's side hustle has more than $1 million in sales in less than two years. College junior Jayson Siu’s side hustle has more than $1 million in sales in less than two years. When Jayson Siu’s car accessories side hustle first went viral, he was completely “unprepared.”

It was October 2021, and a TikTok video about one of his products — an LED-lined rearview mirror — started racking up views. They turned into sales: $12,000 in a single day, Siu tells CNBC Make It.

Siu, then a freshman at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, ran to Office Depot and stayed for hours, printing then cutting labels by hand to fulfill the orders.

A year later, another of his videos — one featuring an LED-backed light-up sticker — went viral, with more than 9 million views and counting.

 brought in $38,000 in revenue over the next 24 hours, says Siu.

In total, the business brought in $512,000 in 2022 revenue, and has already exceeded those sales this year, according to documents reviewed by Make It. Roughly 30% of those earnings are profit, Siu estimates.

isn’t really a side hustle anymore: Siu works at least 40 hours per week on top of a full class load, he says. Before renting a warehouse this past summer, he ran the business from his parents’ two-bedroom apartment in Honolulu.

“I’m super stressed all the time,” says Siu, 21. “It’s not just a business in my [parents’] house where I can just, you know, pause it anymore. Now it really has to work.”

Here’s how he grew his side hustle, and how he manages his double life as a business owner and college student.

• From stickers to car mirrors;

Siu started as a high school senior, working for a valet company. He wanted extra cash to buy accessories for his own car, a Nissan Rogue SUV, and stickers were popular among his peers.

He spent $300 of savings from a previous side hustle on a $300 vinyl printer, selling stickers for $3 to $5 apiece to his friends on Snapchat.

Jayson Siu still customizes all of the stickers and mirrors himself.

Eventually, Siu’s goal shifted to something more expensive: new parts for his car. That meant he needed to sell a more lucrative product. While researching, he found an LED-backlit rearview mirror on Instagram.

“I could be the one selling this,” he recalls thinking.

He ordered a $20 mirror from a factory in China, popped out the glass and placed LED lights on the inside — along with his most popular sticker, which says “drive safe.” The backlighting made the sticker visible when he replaced the glass.

 A friend told him that he could drive sales through TikTok, so he started posting videos “as often as possible,” he says. As purchases trickled in, Siu recalls thinking to himself: “Yo, maybe this could be a real business.”

Soon after his first brush with online virality, which came months later, Siu left his valet job.

• A social media-fueled hit;

Once the attention dried up, so did Siu’s profits. Searching for more consistent sales, he turned to social media ads — and struggled.

“I was wasting, like, thousands of dollars,” Siu says. “I was barely breaking even, even losing money some months. It was super unmotivating.”

Ads on Snapchat, YouTube and Twitter, now known as X, didn’t seem to help his sales — so he reallocated his marketing budget to TikTok, Google, Facebook and Instagram. The quality and reach of his campaigns improved, he says.

Siu added new product lines, like cupholders, visors and license plates — buying them wholesale, customizing them and reselling them for profits. His two most in-demand products remained stickers and LED mirrors, so he combined them to create the light-up stickers, which are customizable and can change colors when controlled with a small remote.

Siu doesn’t recommend leaving them on while driving.

He attributes the viral video about the stickers — which, again, came just months after creating the product — to both his social media ads and his commitment to posting TikTok videos regularly.

• The work-life balance struggle;

The viral days can be highly lucrative. The social media ads help keep Invalid.jp’s cash flow a little more consistent the rest of the year, Siu says.

Siu schedules his most of his college classes before noon, so he can spend the second half of the day working.

His warehouse costs $1,500 per month, and he financed a Toyota 4Runner SUV — larger than the Scion coupe he was driving — to make fewer shipping trips to the post office, he says.

His mom and girlfriend help him manage and pack orders, he says. Recently, he hired a couple contractors to help him film and edit TikTok videos.

There aren’t enough hours in a day to run a highly lucrative business and act like a traditional college student, says Siu — and right now, the business is winning.

Long term, he hopes to hire enough people so that he can spend less time in the warehouse and more time with his family and friends at the beach.

He isn’t exactly sure how long that’ll take, and says he’s started exploring other side hustle ideas with friends he’s met online.

“I’m trying to figure that part out,” he says.

Today, the very same side hustle, called Invalid.jp, brings in more than $500,000 per year. It still sells stickers, along with flashy car accessories ranging from LED-lined rearview mirrors to cupholders, visors and license plates.

Siu, now a 21-year-old college junior at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, buys most of those items wholesale, customizes them with light panels or homemade designs, and resells them for a profit. A few months ago, he rented a warehouse to serve as the business’ center of operations, he says.

One of Siu’s most popular products, a customizable LED-lined rearview mirror, was the subject of a viral TikTok video in October 2021.

He’s pocketed about $400,000 from his business since it started, he estimates. Some of it comes from TikTok virality.

A popular video of Invalid.jp’s light-up stickers, posted in 2022, led to $38,000 in sales in a single day, Siu says.

He credits his relentless posting strategy, honed over the course of multiple years.

“A lot of times, people I talk to trying to start businesses only try for four or five months and [quit when] it doesn’t work,” Siu tells CNBC Make It. “Everyone’s trying to go viral for their business, but if you post one to two videos every day for a month, that’s 30 to 60 videos. One of them is bound to go viral.”

Siu doesn’t bring in tens of thousands of dollars every day, so over the past couple years, he’s also learned how to make his business more consistently profitable — often leaning on social media ads to help raise his revenue floor.

Here, Siu discusses how he turned his side hustle into a six-figure-a-year business, what it takes to launch your own version and the No. 1 piece of advice he wishes he knew upon starting.

Question; Do you think your side hustle is replicable?

Siu: Yes. It’s all about consistency.

In the early days, I was pushing out more content and products — quantity over quality. We’d post so many videos that were between five and eight seconds long.

It was definitely effective in the short run. Once I had one video go viral, I saw the potential and felt like I could replicate the result as long as I kept posting. But then I had a problem: Some months I’d only bring in a couple hundred dollars.

Now it’s more [about] quality. I’ll vlog or post longer videos about how you use a product, or [what it’s like] to unbox it. I’ve invested more into [social media ads] and hired a couple contractors to help me film content.

• How much cash do you need to start this side hustle?

I wouldn’t say [more than] $100. When I first started, I ordered product for like $20 and filmed videos every day. When it works, you buy more inventory and ship it out.

You can figure out what’s trending by looking on Amazon or TikTok, or you can film and post videos and see if it goes viral. But you have to know that what you buy has the potential to sell. It’s a risk to buy a bunch of inventory before knowing people like the product.

What’s the most important trait you need to succeed with this kind of side hustle? What do you wish you’d known at the beginning?

I’d say persistence. I used to work [for a valet car service] from 9 to 5. I thought starting my own business would help me work less.

When you’re doing a side hustle, you’re going to be working 24/7. You’re going to work more than you ever have.

When I first launched the LED mirrors, other people were making similar products and doing pretty well — but they couldn’t keep up with demand. Once, when I was packing all day, I [realized], “Not many other people would do this.” I filled up my [parents’] whole living room with boxes and packaging.

There’s no hack. It’s really about finding the right product and your creatives, your videos.

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