17-year-old Bella Lin is a college student who has achieved a huge feat at such a young age. She won $10,000 at a competition, put that money into her startup business, and has since made thousands of dollars from it.
Now, she earns $71,000 every month from her brilliant business, GuineaLoft!
Bella Lin’s Innovative Background
Bella Lin might be 17 years old, but she has the mind of an entrepreneurial genius. Since she was seven years old, she has been trying out different means to earn small amounts of money, showing that she has the spirit of an entrepreneur.
Therefore, she started selling things like hand-knit scarves and built a lemonade stand to help her make some cash. Her family was not lacking but she just had a drive to make her own money from a young age.
What Is GuineaLoft All About?
GuineaLoft is a small pet accessory business that can be found on Amazon. Lin is the founder and CEO of this business, which she launched back in November 2022. The company makes cages with a disposable wax-coated paper bottom and acrylic walls, making them easy for people to clean.
According to the business documents, GuineaLoft has averaged a monthly revenue of $71,000 this year. Last year, the company was averaging $34,000 monthly and almost $8,400 in profit.
How Bella Lin Won the Prize Money
Lin was able to double her monthly profit from 2023, thanks to something great that happened towards the end of the year. According to the young serial entrepreneur, she won $10,000 from a pitching competition at BizWorld in October 2023.
Thanks to the project-based entrepreneurship program, she was able to use the funds to buy an extra acrylic laser cutter, which helped her reduce production time and save manual power, too.
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Growing GuineaLoft
When she had the idea to start the business, it took about a year before it became a reality. This is because she spent a lot of time perfecting the brand’s signature cages and listed only 100 pieces at its launch.
Due to its good quality and effectiveness, the first batch sold out in just two weeks! Since then, the brand has increased its manufacturing, marketing, and pet product line. GuineaLoft now sells products for rabbits, birds, and hamsters.
The Inspiration Behind GuineaLoft
If you’re wondering why Lin chose to start making her own guinea pig cages, the answer is quite simple. When she was 12 years old, she had two guinea pig cages. However, she spent at least a full hour every week washing, scraping, and scrubbing the cages before they got clean.
Therefore, she got disgusted by this repeated process and decided to start making her own cages. Her father helped connect her to a factory in Hangzhou, China, where she gets most of its parts manufactured and shipped.
Training Her Innovative Ideas
Bella Lin’s dad is a computer programmer who has worked with start-ups and has always encouraged Lin’s entrepreneurial side since she was a little girl. She said, “I think with a lot of parents, when kids are younger and they express an interest in start-ups with something trivial like yarn or slime, it’s easy to shut that down.”
However, things were different with her dad as he treated her as an “adult,” even when she was just a little girl.
Growing Her Passion
Therefore, it was easy for Lin to grow her passion for starting up businesses. When she was about 13 years old, she was inspired to make her own leggings brand on her way to her water polo practice.
She saw some Lululemon leggings and was shocked to see how high they cost. Lin and her dad looked up the cost of producing leggings of a similar fabric and realized that they cost just $20.
Lin’s Leggings Business
When Lin and her dad saw how cheap it was to produce leggings, she decided to start her own leggings-making brand. With help from her father, she was able to start producing her own brand of affordable leggings.
She called it TLeggings, and it is another one of her side hustles to date. At its peak in 2020, the business brought in a huge $300,000 for the young entrepreneur.
Ups and Downs
While this is an inspiring story, it is not without some downtime, either. According to Lin, she is a “veteran guinea pig owner,” but she still had to learn a lot with GuineaLoft.
When it started, some of its cages got bad reviews, as customers complained that their small pets were escaping their cages. Therefore, the company went through “at least five iterations” before it got its currently effective design.
The “Guinea Pig Girl”
According to the young CEO of GuineaLoft, she is the only entrepreneur in her friend group outside BizWorld. She said, “To them, I’m kind of just the guinea pig girl.” However, that doesn’t bother her as she also said, “I like occupying a niche.”
GuineaLoft has become a successful business because it filled a gap in the market and was also built on her ideas.
What Does She Do Now?
Now, Lin works 30 hours a week on her Amazon side hustle and has recently graduated high school. She enrolled in two college courses and is moving to the University of Chicago in the fall, where she will study economics.
She also has six full-time workers who help to build and test the brand’s products, giving her time to focus on her studies. In the future, she wants to open an in-person store and be globally recognized as a small pet brand.
What’s the Best-Paying Side Hustle?
If you are looking for a semi-passive side hustle, there are many options to choose from. However, it is difficult to highlight one particular side hustle as the best-paying gig when there are so many factors involved.
Therefore, to find the best-paying side hustle, you have to consider the demand for your item in your area, how to market it, and how much you have to invest in the business. For those who would rather do an active job, signing up to be a delivery agent, a tour guide, or a coach can also earn you a good amount of money.
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